Free The Fatal Fashione by Karen Harper Page B

I saw her floating hand, I think, but when Jenks, Ned, and I came back.”
    “Then it was spilled when he—surely it was a man—lifted her out to hide her on the shelf,” the queen pronounced. “Why didn’t he just leave her in the vat? His garments must have become sodden with that starch. Perhaps that is what we are looking for—a man with dried starch slopped upon his doublet or cape. But what would that look like?”
    “And he could easily change or destroy that garb. But I just remembered something,” Meg added. “Jenks noted sticky footsteps on the stairs, but they had mostly dried when I saw them.”
    “Which would mean,” Rosie whispered, “the murderer left by the stairs and not the window.”
    “We shall examine all possibilities,” the queen declared, “and any person we even slightly suspect.”
    She turned back to the corpse again. “Rosie and Meg, stand firm, for we are almost finished here. Before we summon the authorities of this ward, we must see if she has marks on her backside. I’ve seen dead bodies where the blood settles and so reveals what position they were in when they died—and this poor, strangled woman …”
    But as they rolled her on her side, white starch water gushed from her nose and dribbled from her mouth.
    “’S blood, or was she drowned?” Elizabeth cried as her skirts took the stream of what Hosea Cantwell had called the devil’s liquor. “If she were dead when she was put in the vat, would she have that stuff inside of her?”
    “I guess some could seep in, but that much?” Rosie cried, dabbing at the queen’s skirts with a corner of the blanket.
    “No, don’t,” Elizabeth insisted. “Leave it be so we can see what we might be looking for on the murderer’s garments. But I warrant, then, she was still breathing when she went into the vat and took several gasps of that stuff as she died.”
    She braced her hands on the edge of the worktable and shuddered at the image that brought to mind. She prayed poor Hannah had not been ravished, too, but she could not bear to examine her private parts for bruising. That would somehow be the final insult, especially with the men in the room, and whether Hannah had been raped or not, she was still dead. Elizabeth meant to find the murderer, and then he would confess all the how and why, she swore it.
    Besides, the body had gone as solid as the wooden vat itself, not only in the starch but in what doctors called rigor mortis. Elizabeth had noted that even Hannah’s face was stiff, so she must have swallowed much starch for it to seep out through clenched jaw muscles, teeth, and lips.
    “Meg, you said that the cuckoo-pint herb is poison,” the queen said. “But mixed with water for starch, it would be diluted from being fatal, wouldn’t it? I mean, if she somehow toppled in, hit her head to knock herself out, then imbibed a huge draft of the starch by mistake—”
    “I think so much water mixed in would weaken the power of the herb. I warrant it does not poison instantly. Yet it’s strong enough to chafe skin and turn it red, like a laundresses’s hands.”
    “Yet Hannah’s hands and skin look as smooth and white as carved ivory under that glaze of starch,” Rosie observed. “Maybe it’s because she was already dead when put in there, and dead skin won’t chap.”
    “I don’t know for certain how fast it even works on a living person’s skin,” Meg admitted. “I can ask a laundress or a whitster about that. This area teems with them, and I’m sure I could find you one who—”
    They all jolted at the muted yet shrill sound of a woman’s voice. The queen’s stomach cartwheeled. For one wild moment, she thought the corpse could be exhaling one last breath to produce the sound.
    “Sounds like much ado downstairs,” Meg muttered as they laid Hannah on her back again. “Jenks’s voice, too.” Ned and Clifford rushed toward the steps, but the queen motioned them back. Below, at the bottom of the dark