There remained only one drawer, and that was locked.
I took my knife and edged it in the crack.
Something white showed, from inside the drawer.
I went back to the bedroom, took the bunch of keys from the bedside table, and tried the smallest.
It fitted.
The drawer opened.
I put in my hand and pulled out an envelope, but as I did so my tense excitement turned to disappointment, for it was not Rainaldi’s letter that I held in my hands.
It was just an envelope, containing pods, with seeds.
The seeds ran from the pods onto my hands, and spilled upon the floor.
They were very small, and green.
I stared at them, and remembered that I had seen pods and seeds like these before.
They were the same as those that Tamlyn had thrown over his shoulder in the plantation, and that had also covered the court in the villa Sangalletti, which the servant there had swept away.
They were laburnum seeds, poisonous to cattle, and to men.
26
I put the envelope back in the drawer.
I turned the key.
I took the bunch of keys and replaced it on the dressing table.
I did not look at her, as she lay sleeping in her bed.
I went to my room.
I think I was more calm than I had been for many weeks.
I went to my washing-stand, and standing there beside the jug and basin were the two bottles of medicine that the doctor had prescribed for me.
I emptied the contents from the window.
Then I went downstairs, with a lighted candle, and into the pantry.
The servants had all gone to their quarters long ago.
On the table near the washing-sink stood the tray with the two cups upon it from which we had drunk our tisana.
I knew that John was sometimes idle of an evening, and might leave the cups till morning to be washed, as indeed he had.
The dregs of the tisana lay in both the cups.
I examined both of them by candlelight.
They looked the same.
I put my little finger into the dregs, first hers, then mine, and tasted.
Was there a difference?
It was hard to tell.
It might be that the dregs from my cup were just a little thicker, but I could not swear to it.
I left the pantry, and went again upstairs to my room.
I undressed and went to bed.
As I lay there in the darkness I was not aware of anger, or of fear.
Only compassion.
I saw her as someone not responsible for what she did, besmirched by evil.
Compelled and driven by the man who had power over her, lacking, through fault of circumstance and birth, in some deep moral sense, she was capable by instinct and by impulse of this final act.
I wanted to save her from herself, and knew not how.
It seemed to me that Ambrose was beside me, and I lived again in him, or he in me.
The letter he had written, which I had torn in shreds, was now fulfilled.
I believed, in her strange way, that she had loved us both, but we had become dispensable.
Something other than blind emotion directed her actions after all.
Perhaps she was two persons, torn in two, first one having sway and then the other.
I did not know.
Louise would say that she had been the second always.
That from the very first every thought, every move, had some premeditation.
In Florence with her mother, after her father died, had it started then, or even before, the way of living?
Sangalletti, dying in a duel, who had never been to Ambrose or myself other than a shadow without substance, had he suffered too?