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have no objection to the latter. I find the sport quite stimulating.”
    She stared at him for a heartbeat or two, her eyes unreadable behind the lenses of her eyeglasses. Then she burst into laughter. Not the light titter of ballroom giggles or the low, seductive laugh of a woman of the world. Just genuine, feminine laughter. She had to set down her cup and dab at her eyes with her napkin.
    “Very good, Mr. Jones,” she managed finally. “You are as unusual as I had been led to believe.” She crumpled the napkin and pulled herself together. “You’re right. It is time for the business at hand. As I said, Inspector Spellar called me in to view Lord Fairburn’s body.”
    “And you concluded Fairburn had been poisoned.”
    “Yes. I told Spellar as much. I also gave him to understand that the basis of the poison was the castor bean plant. But there were some unusual aspects to the case. The first is that whoever concocted the lethal brew must have been very learned in botanical and chemical matters.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because he knew how to make an extremely refined, powerful and quick-acting version of the poison. Lord Fairburn was dead before he had time to become ill. That is extremely uncommon in the case of botanical poisons. The victim is usually stricken first with a number of obvious physical symptoms. I’m sure I need not go into detail.”
    “Convulsions. Vomiting. Diarrhea.” He shrugged. “I believe we have already established that I prefer not to mince words.”
    She blinked again in a way that he was coming to recognize as an indication that she had been caught off guard. It was a small sign, but a telling one.
    “Indeed,” she said.
    “You say that the speed with which the poison acted led you to believe that it was concocted by a scientist or chemist?” he said.
    “Yes, I think so. As I’m sure you’re aware, there are any number of potentially poisonous substances available in the apothecary shops. One can buy arsenic and cyanide without any difficulty whatsoever. And who knows what is in some of those appalling patent medicines that are so popular? But the poison that was employed to kill Lord Fairburn was not one that could be purchased so easily. Nor would it have been simple to prepare.”
    His talent quickened. “You are saying that it was produced in a laboratory, not in an apothecary’s back room.”
    “I am saying more than that, Mr. Jones. I believe I know who concocted the poison that killed Lord Fairburn.”
    He did not move, did not take his eyes off her. Interesting was not the half of it, he thought. Even fascinating failed to describe Lucinda Bromley.
    “How do you know this, Miss Bromley?” he asked.
    She took a deep breath. “In addition to the traces of the castor bean plant, I recognized another ingredient in the poison that killed Fairburn. It was derived from an extremely rare fern that once grew in my conservatory. I believe the poisoner called upon me last month in order to steal it.”
    With that he suddenly comprehended the true nature of the case.
    “Damnation,” he said very softly. “You did not inform Spellar about your visitor or the theft, did you?”
    “No. I dared not tell him about the traces of the Ameliopteris amazonensis that I detected in the poison that Lord Fairburn drank. He would have been forced to come to the obvious conclusion.”
    “That you were the one who brewed the poison,” Caleb said.
4
    There was a disturbing tension in his aura. She had sensed it the moment he walked into the conservatory. In a weaker man such an imbalance of energies would have resulted in serious illness of a psychical nature. She suspected that Caleb Jones was unconsciously controlling the disharmony through the sheer power of his will. She doubted that he was even aware of the strange, unwholesome currents that pulsed around him.
    The state of his psychical health was not her problem, she reminded herself, not unless it prevented him from