As recorded by Dr. Thorn
It was a fog-thickened morning in late October when I received a telegram from my companion, the inimitable Aldous Finch. I had not seen him in several weeks, as he had taken a sabbatical to his family estate in Sussex. The message was brief and, as ever, cryptic:
Dr. Thorne – Come at once to Ashchurch. Matters of a most delicate nature. Bring your medical bag. – Finch.
Intrigued and unburdened by pressing duties, I took the next train from London. Ashchurch was a quaint, melancholic village nestled among ancient oaks and ivy-strangled ruins. As I stepped off the platform, I found Finch waiting, clad in his long grey coat, eyes glinting with urgency.
“No time for pleasantries, Thorne,” he said briskly. “There’s been a death. And I suspect murder.”
He explained as we strode through muddy lanes toward a manor house that loomed like a forgotten mausoleum. Lady Evangeline Blackmoor, the young and newly widowed wife of the late Lord Cedric Blackmoor, had been found unconscious beside her husband's body. The doctor of the village claimed it was poison, but the constabulary, ever deferential to the aristocracy, had already ruled it a tragic accident—a man of poor health simply passing in his sleep.
“But Lord Blackmoor was a vigorous man of forty-five,” Finch said, his voice low and hard. “And Lady Evangeline… well, I suspect she is no helpless widow.”
When we arrived at Blackmoor Manor, I examined the corpse, which had been kept—rather grotesquely—in the stone-floored wine cellar. A sickly-sweet odour lingered about the man’s lips. A quick test with reagents from my bag confirmed the presence of atropine.
“Belladonna,” I muttered. “A slow killer. And a subtle one.”
Lady Evangeline, meanwhile, lay in her bed upstairs, pale but very much alive. She claimed to have drunk the same wine as her husband, yet showed no signs of poisoning. Finch sat beside her, quiet, watchful. Then, without warning, he lifted the small glass vial from her nightstand and held it up to the light.
“Lavender tincture?” he asked.
“A sleeping draught,” she said. “Prescribed by Dr. Willoughby.”
But I knew better. That wasn’t lavender. That was belladonna extract—though in such a low dose, it would merely sedate rather than kill. She had built immunity.
Later, in Finch’s temporary lodgings—a dusty parlour above the village post office—we pieced it together. Lady Evangeline had been slowly poisoning her husband over weeks, masking the symptoms with plausible ailments. The final dose had been placed in his wine the night before. But to avoid suspicion, she drank from the same bottle, counting on her tolerance to protect her.
“She underestimated how trace poisons linger,” Finch said grimly. “And overestimated the credulity of the living.”
The next day, Finch presented our findings to the local inspector, who had no choice but to reopen the case. Lady Evangeline was arrested and stood trial the following spring.
It was only some months later, back in London, that Finch confessed his final suspicion.
“She was not acting alone,” he said over his pipe. “There was a letter, hastily burned in the fireplace. A name I only partially glimpsed.”
“Who?” I asked.
He looked out the window into the mist. “Someone we shall likely meet again.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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