Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton Page A

milk.’
    *
    Cousin Sarah spent Thursday and Friday night away with friends in Edgbaston. A woman she had known since childhood was dying of typhoid fever. She returned early the following afternoon, and Agnes took her a cup of tea and some biscuits, but after less than an hour she called them into the dining room again.
    The glass confectionery jar was standing on the table in front of her, but this time it was empty. She had counted out all of the pennies and halfpennies into shilling piles and stacked up ten sixpences to make a crown.
    ‘Are you mocking me?’ she asked them. None of them answered.
    ‘Are you deliberately trying to provoke me into having you dragged in front of a court and imprisoned?’
    ‘I’m sure I have no idea what you mean, ma’am,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Mocking? How?’
    ‘Can’t you guess , Elizabeth, or are you a noodle? The sheer barefaced impertinence of it! There is yet more money missing from my jar! Three shillings and sevenpence-halfpenny, to be exact! I insist on your telling me now which one of you has stolen it!’
    Agnes started to sob. ‘I don’t know who took it, Mrs Minchin, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’
    Jenks did nothing but blink and look confused.
    ‘I am at a loss!’ said cousin Sarah. ‘I have never known such barefaced dishonesty, not in all of my life!’
    ‘Your fingers, cousin Sarah,’ said Beatrice. ‘Look at your fingers.’
    ‘ What ?’
    ‘Look at your fingers. You see those stains?’
    Cousin Sarah slowly raised her hands. Her right thumb and fingertips were speckled with purplish-brown blotches, and in the palm of her left hand there was a much larger blotch. She wiped her hands against her apron but the blotches wouldn’t come off. She wiped them again, much harder. If anything, though, they looked as if they were growing darker by the second.
    ‘ What ?’ she repeated. ‘Where did these come from? What have you done to me?
    She wiped them even more furiously, again and again. ‘Beatrice! What is this? Did you do this? What have you done to me? Beatrice !’
    Beatrice went up to her and took hold of her hands. ‘It’s lunar caustic, cousin Sarah. It stains your skin for a while, but it doesn’t harm you. The surgeons use it in the hospitals for healing wounds and papa used to sell it to people who wanted to get rid of warts.’
    ‘But, how ? What? How did it get on my hands? How will I remove it?’
    ‘It comes from the coins. While you were away, I took them out of the jar and I soaked them all in lunar caustic, and then dried them, so that they were all covered in silver salts. I thought that anybody who tried to take them would get black stains on their fingers, like yours. I’m sorry. I was going to tell you what I’d done, I promise. I thought you’d think it was clever. I didn’t know that you would be counting them out so soon.’
    Cousin Sarah looked down at her hands again. The blotches on her fingertips had darkened even more until they were almost black. ‘I suppose you went down to the cellar,’ she said. She was so angry that she kept twitching, as if she were about to have an epileptic fit. ‘I should have thrown all of your father’s bottles away, shouldn’t I? All of those potions and all of those powders and all of that – hocus-pocus.’
    ‘Ma’am?’ said Elizabeth, and then, ‘ Ma’am ?’ even more emphatically. She raised both of her hands, palms outwards, so that cousin Sarah could see that she had no black stains on her fingers. She nudged Agnes with her elbow and Agnes did the same.
    ‘Go on, Jenks,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Show Mrs Chimney your hands.’
    ‘Very well,’ snapped cousin Sarah. ‘It appears that I might have misjudged you. You can go now. Get back to your work.’
    ‘You won’t be taking threepence a week, then, ma’am?’
    ‘No, of course I won’t, since you appear not to be responsible. Beatrice – how can I remove these dreadful stains? It’s our parish sewing class