The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [215]
None of this, though, gave us any better idea of what we were going to do with with our new ally. We didn’t particularly need anybody followed or rendered unconscious, at the moment, and he was bound to cause comment wherever he went in Ballston Spa—especially after I gave him the evening clothes I’d promised, which he put on right away. Strutting around like a peacock (he’d been right in supposing that the clothes would fit him), he looked ready to take on the world; but we all wondered if the world would be similarly prepared for him. Thinking for the moment of practicalities, a confused Mrs. Hastings put EI Niño to work washing up the dinner dishes, a job what he took to with great good spirits.
As for the information Miss Howard and I brought back from Stillwater, it was duly posted on the chalkboard in Mr. Picton’s living room. Then we moved out onto the back porch to talk over the importance of the tale. It was no surprise to anybody that Mrs. Muhlenberg hadn’t known the full details of the Hatch case, being as she lived in a different township, which meant a different sheriff’s department—and small-town sheriffs were generally even less cooperative and communicative with each other than New York City police precincts. As for the poor woman’s refusal to testify, Mr. Picton informed us that such was no great loss, being as Saratoga County’s resident Solomon, Judge Charles H. Brown, was a stickler for trying every case on its own merits, and almost certainly wouldn’t have allowed any unproven allegations about something what’d happened ten years ago to reach a jury’s ear. The same held true for all the work we’d done in New York, which, our host firmly reminded us, hadn’t even resulted in an official police investigation. The case of Libby Hatch’s murdered children would have to be confined to just that; the only purpose Mrs. Muhlenberg’s story could serve would be to help us better understand the character of the woman we were dealing with.
What it offered us along these lines was further proof (not that we needed any) of just how clever our opponent was. The Doctor told us that Mrs. Muhlenberg’s little theory of how Libby’d killed her son, Michael, a tale what some might’ve written off as the ramblings of a woman driven half mad by grief, was very likely the truth: such substances as poison, taken by a nursing woman, can in fact pass on through her milk into whatever baby she’s feeding. As for the packet of black powder Mrs. Muhlenberg had found in Libby’s room along with the arsenic, the Doctor suspected that it’d been, to use his term, carbo animalis purificatus, Latin for “purified animal charcoal.” The rest of the world knows the stuff as “bone black,” and it’s commonly used as an antidote for many poisons—including arsenic. Libby’d probably kept it handy just in case she got impatient with her plan and took too high a dose of the arsenic herself. As for why she’d done what she’d done, we ail knew the answer to that one by now: little Michael Muhlenberg had committed the lethal mistake of making it obvious that Libby didn’t have much in the way of maternal talents, and instead of just admitting as much and trying to find something else to do with her life, the murderess had concocted a situation in which she came off looking like a hero for her efforts to save a kid she was actually killing. It was the same pattern we’d identified in the cases of Libby’s “adopted” children, along with the babies at the Lying-in Hospital: the woman had been at her grim work far longer than any of us—except, of course, the Doctor—had