together?”
“Miss Jones has already read my fortune, several days ago.” Alarm passed through Elizabeth at the news that Miss Bates had drunk the tea. She assessed Miss Bates for indications that the tea had been tainted. Unfortunately, Elizabeth realized that she had not the faintest idea what she ought to be looking for. To her untrained eye, Miss Bates appeared her usual self, if perhaps a little flushed from the excitement of visitors and fortune-telling.
Miss Bates reached for the pot. “What about you, Mrs. Knightley? Would you care for tea?”
“I think it has gone cold,” Miss Jones said. She moved the pot to the other side of the table and reached for one of the teacups. “Let us read your fortune, Miss Bates, before your impression fades from the leaves. Afterwards, we can make a fresh pot if anybody cares for a cup. Where is your maid? The remaining tea from this pot should be dumped so that nothing interferes with the signs.”
Elizabeth did not recall such interference having been a concern when Miss Jones told her fortune at the Crown; the would-be
“Oh! Well! We certainly do not want anything to fade or interfere. Patty, come take away this pot for us. — She will be but a moment, I am sure. Can we begin? What must I do?”
“Simply take a seat and keep still, so I may concentrate.”
“Ah, I can do that.” She sat down at the table, across from Miss Jones. “Right here — as I was before?”
“Yes, just so. Now, tell me the question you held in your mind as you drank the tea.”
Miss Bates closed her eyes and rested one hand on the table. “When will poor Mr. Deal return to his friends in Highbury?”
“Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”
“You may open your eyes, Miss Bates. Let us see what the leaves say.” Miss Jones rotated the teacup. “Look — there is a D — and a trail of leaves — that means a journey.” She looked up at her client. “I said you may open your eyes, Miss Bates.”
The spinster blinked several times and brought her other hand to her head. “Forgive me — I feel a bit dizzy. It must be the excitement. Though it is exceedingly warm in here.”
Elizabeth and Mrs. Knightley exchanged glances and went to her directly. Mrs. Knightley put a hand to the spinster’s forehead. “She does feel quite warm.”
“Maybe someone should open a window,” Miss Jones suggested.
While Mrs. Knightley attended Miss Bates, Elizabeth approached not the window, but the teapot. Perhaps she could determine by smell whether the tea had been adulterated. Before she could reach it, however, Miss Jones seized the pot.
“Good idea,” said Miss Jones. “We should get these things out of the way.” She picked up Miss Bates’s teacup with her other hand.
Elizabeth reached again toward the pot. “I was not—”
Miss Jones rose and spun away from her chair to take the tea things into the next room.
A folded sheet of paper fell from her skirts.
They both watched it slide to the floor. And then both scrambled to retrieve it. Though Miss Jones was closer, her hands were full, and Elizabeth snatched it up first.
It was Mr. Deal’s note. He thanked Miss Bates for the tea he had enjoyed with the ladies on Sunday, and in return humbly offered a special China black he reserved for his best customers. He further urged her to try it before he next saw her, so that she might tell him whether she liked it.
Miss Jones disciplined her anxious expression into one of false brightness. “Look at that! It must have fallen aside after Miss Bates showed it to me. Thank heaven we found it. — Good news, Miss Bates — Mrs. Darcy has found your letter.”
Miss Bates blinked. “The letter from Mr. Deal?” She rubbed her eyes and blinked again. “I am having trouble seeing it. Patty,” she called out, “can you bring my spectacles? Everything is a blur.”
Elizabeth fixed Miss Jones with her own gaze. She could see quite clearly.
Miss Jones had taken the letter. Just as she had seized the teapot. Or — more to the point — seized the tea inside it. The tea that had arrived with the letter. The tea that she did not want anybody else examining too closely.
Elizabeth no longer needed to whiff the tea to guess whether it had been poisoned. Or to guess how Edgar Churchill and Nellie had been poisoned. Like Miss Bates, both of them had drunk tea with Miss Jones shortly before falling ill. Elizabeth could not account for Frank Churchill’s poisoning — yet — but the other three could not be coincidence.
Much as Elizabeth doubted, it remained possible that someone else had poisoned the tea — Mr. Deal or Rawnie Zsofia — but it was beyond doubt that Miss Jones had knowingly administered it.
Elizabeth looked again at the note. She would have to study it more thoroughly later, but the handwriting bore similarities to that of the anagram she and Mrs. Knightley had solved.
The maid entered with the spectacles. “I am sorry to be so long. I could not immediately find them.”
Miss Jones thrust the teapot and cup toward the maid. “Patty, kindly take these and wash them. We will not need them any more tonight.”
“No, Patty — do not wash them.” Elizabeth looked at Miss Jones. “Mr. Knightley will want them.”
Loretta’s gaze darted from Elizabeth to the door and back. Then she let go of the china and sent it smashing to the hard oak floor.
As Darcy reached the top of the stairs, a loud crash within the apartment propelled him through the door without pausing to knock. He knew Elizabeth was inside — Hartfield’s coachman, waiting in his own vehicle in front of the house, had told Mr. Knightley that their wives were on a social call. As social calls did not generally involve shattered porcelain, Mr. Knightley and Mr. Deal followed hard upon.
The spectacle that greeted them required a few moments to absorb. Elizabeth stood near Miss Jones and a maid, shards of china and clumps of brown matter scattered at their feet, dark liquid spattered on their hems and spreading across the wood floor to soak into the worn Oriental rug on the other side of the room. Mrs. Knightley and Miss Bates were nearby; Miss Bates was seated at a table, gripping it with one hand as she peered toward the sodden mess on the floor. A bewildered Mrs. Bates looked as if she had just risen from her chair beside the fire. The crash was probably the first sound she had heard in a decade.
Whether all were startled more by the crash or by the abrupt entrance of the gentlemen, Darcy could not tell. He crossed to Elizabeth and satisfied himself that she appeared unharmed.
Miss Bates, however, looked ill.
“We need Mr. Perry at once,” Elizabeth said. “I believe Miss Bates has been poisoned — by the tea Mr. Deal enclosed with his letter.”
Mr. Knightley was halfway to the stairs in an instant. “I will send James for Perry.”
“Mr. Deal did not write the letter,” Darcy told Elizabeth. “We are unsure who did.”
At that news, Elizabeth looked hard at Miss Jones. “Perhaps the person who served the tea.”
“What is happening? Oh! What is happening? Mrs. Darcy, what did you say about poison?” Miss Bates squinted toward the door. “What was that crash? Who is here?” She tried to rise but sank back into the chair and
