‘The Shepherdess: Merveilles’ by JM Landels

“Why?” I asked myself, as I frantically rubbed Madame’s wrist. Why would anyone poison the Countess — if the poison was intended for her at all? And who? Claude? Her face was as grief-stricken as Mathilde’s. And would she have the wherewithal to insert a poisoned needle into that withered orange, even if she wanted to? Michel de la Foix? The pomander had come from him — but if he knew it was poisoned, why give it to a girl he’d just met? And why carry about the lethal object anyway?

Henri returned with the surgeon — a slim man with a hooked nose and skin as dark as Henri’s. He spoke with a strange fluid accent.

“Allez!” he said, shooing Mathilde away by flapping his hands. “What has happened here?”

I straightened from my crouch. “Poison,” I said, and held Madame’s limp palm for him to see. “I think,” I added modestly.

He glanced at her hand and sniffed the air like a questing hound. He bent over, smelled her breath, if any of it there was, and tore at the neck of her chemise to expose her breast bone. He put an ear to her chest, then unfolded himself and looked me in the face. “You are not wrong, I think, but what makes you say so?”

I picked up the pomander by its ribband. He reached for it.

“Careful!” I said, and held it out of reach till it stopped spinning. I pointed to the miniscule needle tip. “Where there is one, there may be more.”

He took the ribband from me with one hand and pulled an eyeglass out of his pocket with the other. “Agreed.” He brought his nose an inch from the pomander. “The cloves and orange mask the scent entirely. It is a clever hiding place.” He put the eyeglass away. Then he took a bowl of dusty dried rose petals from Madame’s side table, emptied the contents onto the floor, and placed the pomander in the bowl.

“I will examine that later. For now, this patient clings to life with but the faintest grip.”

“Will you purge her?” asked Mathilde.

“That is what your Frankish doctors would do first,” he said. “Which would be worse than useless, since the poison was not ingested.” He rummaged in his bag. “Phlebotomy would be their next recourse — perhaps more germane since the poison is in the blood —”

“Stop talking and just save her!” cried Claude. Her face was streaming with panicked tears. Guilt, perhaps, over having given the pomander, shock that it might have been her near death instead, along with the same fear that gripped we three women at the thought of losing our protectress.