“I daresay you couldn’t,” said the coroner, while the room tittered.
Mrs. Pepperfly’s slip of the tongue took her aback.
“I mean’t to say as ‘twouldn’t have filled a thimble, gentry, I did indeed, for that was the fact; but no wonder my wits is scared out of me, a-standing up here afore you all. Just as I was a swallowing of the wee drain, the ring came to the door, so that I had, as you may say, the gin actually in my mouth when I took the medicine up-stairs; and that’s the reason I hadn’t got no smell for anything else.”
“Who took possession of the draught? You, or Mr. Carlton, or the sick lady?”
“I did, your honours. I put it by the side of the rest of the bottles on the cheffonier in the sitting-room, and———"
“Was there any other bottle there that could have been mistaken for this?” interrupted the coroner.
“Not one in all the lot,” responded the witness. “They were most of them empty bottles, and bigger than the one the draught was in; and they are there still.”
“Had any person an opportunity of touching that bottle in the intermediate time between your placing it there, and your administering it to the patient?”
“There wasn’t nobody in the house to touch it,” returned the witness. “I was nearly all the time afterwards in the room, and there was nobody else. When I went to get it to give it to the lady, Mrs. Gould lighted me, and I’m sure it hadn’t been touched, for the shelf of that cheffonier’s a tilting, narrow sort of place, and I had put the draught bottle right in the corner, resting again’ the back, and there I found it.”
“Mr. Carlton was gone then?”
“Mr. Carlton? Oh, he went directly almost after the draught came. He didn’t stay long, your reverences.”
“Witness, I am going to ask you a question; be particular in answering it. There has been a rumour gaining credit, that Mr. Carlton warned you not to administer that draught; is it correct?”
“I declare, to the goodness gracious, that Mr. Carlton never said nothing of the sort,” returned the witness, putting herself into a flurry. “My lord—your worship—gentlemen of the honourable corporation all round” (turning herself about between the coroner and jury), “if it was the last blessed word I had to speak, I’d stand to it that Mr. Carlton never said a word to me about not giving the draught. He snifted at it, as if he’d like to snift out what it was made of, and he put a drop on his finger and tasted it, and he said it smelt of oil of almonds; but, as to saying he told me not to give it, it’s a barefaced falsehood, my lord judge. He says he ordered Mrs. Crane not to take it, but I declare that he never said anything about it to me; and she didn’t neither.”
The coroner had allowed her to spend her wrath, “You administered the draught yourself to Mrs. Crane?”
“Yes, I did, as it were my place to do, and Mrs. Gould stood by, a-lighting of me. I put it out into a wine-glass, sir, and then, my mouth being all right again, I smelt it strong enough, and so did Mrs. Gould.”
“The lady did not object to take it?”
“No, poor thing, she never objected to nothing as we give her, and she was quite gay over it. As I held it to her she gave a snift, as Mr. Carlton had done, and she smiled. ‘It smells like cherry pie, nurse,’ said she, and swallowed it down; and a'most before we could look round, she was gone. Ah, poor young lady! I should like to have the handling of them that put it in.”
Mrs. Pepperfly, in her sympathy with the dead, or rage against the destroyer, raised her hands before her and shook them. The rings of the pattens clanked together, and the umbrella was ejecting its refreshing drops, when an officer of the court seized her arms from behind, and poured an anathema into her ear.
“A coroner’s court was not a place to wring wet umbrellas in, and if she didn’t mind, she’d get committed.”
“Were you conscious that she was dead?” inquired the coroner.
“Not at first, my lord judge, not right off at the moment. I thought she was fainting, or took ill in some way. ‘What have upset her now?’ I says to Mrs Gould, and, with that, I took off her nightcap, and rose her head up. Not for long, though,” concluded the witness, shaking her head. “I soon see she was gone.”
“You know nothing whatever, then, nor have you any suspicion, how the poison could have got into the draught?”
The coroner put this question at the request of one of the jury.
“I!” returned Mrs. Pepperfly, amazed at its being asked her. “No; I wish I did. I wish I could trace it home to some such a young villain as that Dick who brought the bottle down; I’d secure a good place to go and see him hung, if I had to stand on my legs twelve hours for it—and they swell frightful in standing, do my legs, my lord.”
“The boy had not meddled with the medicine in bringing it?” cried the coroner.
