Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [78]
IT WAS A messy and quite difficult job. The room was cluttered with all manner of rubbish, as Mrs. Newsome had said, and in the early-evening heat Gracie could hear the irritating buzzing of flies. She hated the big, lazy things circling round anything dirty or sticky, settling and laying eggs on the surfaces. She gave a little shudder of distaste, and went to fetch a bucket of water and some baking soda to help it get back a decent smell.
It took her half an hour of cleaning and scrubbing and washing down and repiling up again before she came to the bottles where the flies were. They were old wine bottles, by the look of them, and expensive too. The labels were ornate and in soft colors, like old parchment. She picked one up and looked at it. A fly buzzed out of the neck and zoomed away.
“Ugh!” she said disgustedly. “Must be very sweet.” She looked at the label. She could not read all of it, but she recognized the word port. That would be for the gentlemen to drink after dinner. She had heard about that. Could be terribly expensive. She put it to her nose experimentally and sniffed a little. It was sweet, like sugar and salt, and a bit like iron. Certainly not anything she would want to drink. It was revolting! Wonder if that one was bad. Could wine go bad?
She picked up another, and tried it very gingerly. That smelled entirely different, and very nice indeed, like real wine she had tasted before. She went back to the first one and tried again. It was just as horrible. There were eight empty bottles and she tried all of them. Five were lovely, three disgusting, all the same, with the sickly sweet, ironlike smell.
She tipped one up and poured out a few drops onto the back of her hand, then smeared it gently over her skin. A fly returned and settled on her. She shook it off violently. She put her finger to the red stain and spread it a little farther across her hand. Then she knew what it was—blood.
She tipped up the others that smelled the same, and got a little trickle of blood out of each one, mixed with the lees of the wine. Why would anyone put blood into a wine bottle? What kind of blood—animal or human?
She stood up so quickly she nearly overbalanced and had to reach out and grasp onto a broom handle to hold herself up. She was a little dizzy, but there was no question in her mind what she must do: hide the three bottles that had held the blood, and then go and tell Pitt. No one else must know. She would feel ridiculous if it were something to do with a special recipe of the cook’s, but far more so if it had something to do with that poor dead woman someone had butchered, and she did nothing about it. Nobody deserved to end up that way, no matter who they were.
She went back to Mr. Tyndale and told him she had to speak to Pitt straightaway. Ten minutes later she was standing in front of Pitt.
He looked tired and worried. His hair was even more unruly than usual and his shirt collar was crumpled. It seemed no one was looking after him. She noticed it all, and it brought a stab of both sorrow and guilt to her, but it was not important compared with the bottles in the still room.
“Are you all right, Gracie?” he asked as soon as she had closed the door. “Tyndale said the other servants are making things difficult for you.”
“In’t nothing as matters, sir,” she said, surprised that Tyndale should have told Pitt. “I came about summink I found wot could be…I dunno. Mebbe I’m bein’ a bit daft meself, but it don’t seem right, or make no sense.”
A flicker of hope lit his eyes. “What is it?”
“I were scrubbin’ out the still room an’ I found eight empty bottles wot ’ad ’ad port wine in ’em,” she replied. “Five of ’em smelled like wine, real nice, an’ three of ’em ’ad flies all around, an’ smelled different. I tipped ’em out, an’ they ’ad blood in ’em.”
“Blood!” He was stunned. “Gracie, are you sure?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “Could the cook ’ave mixed blood an’ wine ter make summink? A sauce, or summink like that?”
“Three bottles of port! I don’t think so.” He shook