To Archived portion of Manuscript
The Death of My Husband
Throughout the day, the rain intensified and the wind gained strength. As the storm worsened, my confidence grew, for who would expect a young wife, herself indisposed, to travel out in such weather to fetch a doctor, when her husband's symptoms were at first so unalarming?
I entered the kitchen and sprinkled a generous portion of powder, made from the ground leaves of the mildest of my hothouse plants, over the food, then seated myself with my husband at the dinner table. We consumed the meal together, sent the remains to the servants' hall, and parted for the afternoon. Within hours, the meal produced the desired symptoms: fever, biliousness and headache. I mustered the energy to climb to the servants' quarters beneath the eaves, and found the staff taken to their beds in various stages of distress.
I returned to my room, gathered my medical kit, and went in search of my husband, who lay moaning and feverish in his bed. I summoned his manservant, and ordered him to fetch a doctor, but the man looked so pale and weak that I told him I would go myself. At this, Mr. Blake roused himself, for even in his illness he could see that I was little better, and he did not wish to risk my health, and that of his third child, beginning to stir in my womb, for the sake of his own.
He begged me to leave him in peace and return to my room. I left him for an hour, and then returned, offering to blister him to relieve the symptoms. To this he consented, and I withdrew from my kit a jar of cantharides, sprinkling them liberally across his back. They soon had the desired effect, and great welts arose whereever the beetles had touched his skin. I popped the boils, sprinkled them carefully with a dusting of more potent powder, concocted from my most toxic exotic, and bade him to lie still. He was dead before I'd left the room.
Upon returning to my chamber, the effects of the milder poison to which I had subjected myself took full effect, and in an agony of feverish pain, the nascent life within me was extinguished and expelled. Those who were able among the staff rushed to my assistance, and it was many hours before another soul realized that Mr. Blake was dead.