I remember him now. Grinning at me as he went off saying,
'Don't worry, Merry. Everything's going to pan out all right!'"
"The incurable optimist, murmured Poirot.
"He was the kind of man who didn't take women seriously," Meredith Blake said.
"I could have told him that Caroline was desperate."
"Did she tell you so?"
"Not in so many words. But I shall always see her face as it was that afternoon - white and strained with a kind of desperate gaiety. She talked and laughed a lot. But her eyes - there was a kind of anguished grief in them that was the most moving thing I have ever known. Such a gentle creature, too."
Hercule Poirot looked at him for a minute or two without speaking.
Clearly the man in front of him felt no incongruity in speaking thus of a woman who, on the day after, had deliberately killed her husband. Meredith Blake went on.
He had by now quite overcome his first suspicious hostility.
Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening.
To men such as Meredith Blake the reliving of the past has a definite attraction.
He spoke now almost more to himself than to his famous guest.
"I ought to have suspected something, I suppose.
It was Caroline who turned the conversation to - to my little hobby.
It was, I must confess, an enthusiasm of mine.
The old English herbalists, you know, are a very interesting study.
There are so many plants that were formerly used in medicine and which have now disappeared from the official pharmacopoeia.
And it's astonishing, really, how a simple decoction of something or other will really work wonders.
No need for doctors half the time.
The French understand these things - some of their tisanes are first-rate."
He was well away now on his hobby.
"Dandelion tea, for instance, marvelous stuff.
And a decoction of hips - I saw the other day somewhere that that's coming into fashion with the medical profession again. Oh, yes, I must confess, I got a lot of pleasure out of my brews.
Gathering the plants at the right time, drying them, macerating them - all the rest of it. I've even dropped to superstition sometimes and gathered my roots at the full of the moon or whatever it was the ancients advised.
On that day I gave my guests, I remember, a special disquisition on the spotted hemlock.
It flowers biennially.
You gather the fruits when they're ripening, just before they turn yellow.
Coniine, you know, is a drug that's dropped right out - I don't believe there's any official preparation of it in the last pharmacopoeia - but I've proved the usefulness of it in whooping cough, and in asthma, too, for that matter -"
"You talked of all this in your laboratory?"
"Yes, I showed them around, explained the various drugs to them - valerian and the way it attracts cats - one sniff at that was enough for them! Then they asked about deadly nightshade, and I told them about belladonna and atropine.
They were very much interested."
"They? What is comprised in that word?"
Meredith Blake looked faintly surprised as though he had forgotten that his listener had no firsthand knowledge of the scene.
"Oh, the whole party.
Let me see - Phillip was there, and Amyas, and Caroline, of course. Angela.
And Elsa Greer."
"That was all?"
"Yes! I think so.
Yes, I am sure of it." Blake looked at him curiously. "Who else should there be?"
"I thought perhaps the governess -"
"Oh, I see. No, she wasn't there that afternoon.
I believe I've forgotten her name now.
Nice woman. Took her duties very seriously.
Angela worried her a good deal, I think."
"Why was that?"
"Well, she was a nice kid, but she was inclined to run wild.
Always up to something or other.
Put a slug or something down Amyas's back one day when he was hard at work painting.
He went up in smoke. Cursed her up and down dale.