Page 37 of A Momentary Marriage

“Don’t wear black for me,” he told her.

“James, really, must you bring this up?”

“Glad to see I can still annoy you.” He smiled, but the sight of it on his wasted face sent a chill through Laura.

“If that is all it takes to please you, you should be a happy man indeed.” It was hard to maintain her crisp, cool front. But James would hate her growing “maudlin,” as he would term it.

“And, please, I beg you, do not let Mother have a daguerreotype made of all of you artistically posed and weeping into your kerchiefs.”

Laura couldn’t help but chuckle, having seen one or two such mourning mementos. “I promise I will dissuade her.”

He fell silent, his thumb tracing a circle on her palm. “I’m sorry.”

She glanced at him in surprise, but he kept his gaze on her hand, so that she could see nothing in his eyes. “For what?”

“For . . .” He shrugged. “Ruining your life eleven years ago, I suppose.”

“I think you acquired more of your mother’s love of drama than you’ll admit.” He looked at her then, startled, and she went on. “You didn’t ruin my life. You may have noticed I didn’t wither and die because I didn’t marry Graeme. In any case, you couldn’t have forced me to give up Graeme. I chose to do so. You were simply . . . the bearer of bad tidings.”

He made a breathy noise that she thought was meant to be a laugh. “Now there’s an apt description of me. But I was harsh.”

“You aren’t prone to softening blows. But maybe that makes it easier in the end, after . . .”

“After the weeping?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“Sometimes it’s better to be quick and sure than to be kind. I can tell you that if I had a splinter in my finger, I would go to you to pull it out.”

“And I’d be happy to do it.” There was a twinkle in his eyes, quickly gone.

After that he was quiet, and Laura took her seat in the chair again. The night wore on. Laura slept now and then, waking to check on him.

Other than changing into a dress the next morning, there was little to distinguish the day from the night. James continued to grow worse. Laura acquired a headache. She was achingly tired. She wished she had someone to whom she could talk. But the truth was, at Grace Hill her closest friend was James’s dog.

Late that night, James began a fit of coughing, and guiltily Laura realized she had overlooked his breathing treatment this evening. She was tired, but Owen had just taken Demosthenes out for his bedtime ramble, so it was up to her to help James with the vapor therapy.

Taking out the brown bottle of medicine from the cabinet, she turned to carry it back to the bed. Her foot slipped on the edge of the rug, and she lurched into the dresser, hitting her elbow. The bottle shot from her grasp and crashed to the floor, spilling its contents over the wood floor.

Laura let out a cry of horror and sank to her knees beside the mess. Tears spilled from her eyes. Silly to cry, of course; Walter would get more from the apothecary in the morning. But in her tired state, bombarded by her jumbled emotions, spilling his tonic seemed the last straw.

The wink of something silvery caught her eye. The bottle was brown, as was the liquid inside. What could be silver—she leaned forward to peer at the pool of tonic. Bright amidst the brown medicine lay a silver blob.

Quicksilver.

chapter 15

Laura had seen it before. The less dramatic-sounding name was liquid mercury. And it was poisonous. Carefully picking up two pieces of the glass, she scooped up the blob and wrapped a small towel around it. She felt strangely removed from herself, her movements slow, as if she walked through water. Her mind, on the other hand, flashed about, dancing around the horror at the center of it.

Poison. There was poison in James’s medicine.

Laura closed the bedroom door and locked it, as if that could keep them safe from danger. She felt icy at the core. Turning the light brighter, she examined her find again. There was no mistaking that it was mercury. Her father had used it in some of his experiments.

Many years before, he had studied a case involving hatters suffering from mercury poisoning. Mercuric nitrate was used as a smoothing agent to treat the fur of small animals in order to make felt. The material, saturated with the chemical, continually released mercury vapor into the air as the workers made hats out of the felt. After years of breathing the toxic air, the hat makers often died. That was where the expression “mad as a hatter” came from; they acted strangely, said mad things. She thought of James telling her that her hair was on fire, the bizarre things she had heard him mumbling. He had said he’d seen his dead father beside his bed and another time a long-dead pet. His sudden and baffling inability to do common math sums.

There were some medicines that contained mercury, but she had never heard of it being used for lung inflammations. Frauds sold “cure-alls” that promised to take care of various illnesses and that had not only ineffective ingredients but even harmful ones. But James hardly seemed the sort to go to quacks or believe in fantastical remedies. Still, when one was dying, she supposed that even a cynic might fall prey to such things.

Perhaps that was it. Otherwise . . . it meant someone was trying to murder James. No, someone was murdering him by slow degrees. She began to pace, all weariness having fled.

James had started taking this medicine because he was already sick with headaches and coughing. The mercury in the steam he breathed couldn’t have given him the illness, only worsened it. Either he had suffered from an entirely different ailment, which the medicine had exacerbated, or he had already been exposed to mercury some other way, and the tonic had been used to continue or increase the exposure.