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person she knew in the vicinity was the milliner, Mrs Stone, three doors down from his own shop. Christiana fetched Mrs Stone, gave Garrett her own name as Mrs Wood, Hillside, Kingstown. He filled out the details in his book, which was duly signed by both women. The court’s clerk read out the transaction from. Garrett’s ‘Sale of Poisons, Registry Book’: ‘March 28,1871. – Mrs. Wood, Hillside, Kingstown; strychnia, 10 grains; destroying cats’.
    Masquerading as Mrs Wood, the prisoner had come to his shop several more times over the next two months, Garrett further testifies. She talked of her garden and brought him asparagus from it and complained that the strychnia had had no effect on the destructive cats, and she needed more. Garrett was persuaded, and on 15 April supplied her with ten more grains, following the same procedure as before. After several more visits on which she began to mention that she and her husband were moving to the country, on 11 May she asked Garrett for more strychnine, this time to kill an old and diseased dog whom they couldn’t take with them. He finally granted her wish. He never saw the prisoner again until her appearance in court. The pages that had been torn out of his register under the ploy of the coroner having sent for it corresponded to the dates on which Christiana had purchased poison as Mrs Wood
    Milliner Mrs Stone, the witnessing signatory in the poison register, corroborates Garrett’s evidence. She testifies that the prisoner, heavily veiled, had been to her shop to purchase another veil, giving as her reason for the need of a second that she ‘suffered from neuralgia’.She had then returned to ask her the favour of signing Garrett’s poison register. Mrs Stone went reluctantly. Mrs Wood came back a second time saying she had lost her veil: she bought another and asked for the same favour again. She needed the poison, she had said, to stuff some birds.
    After Inspector Gibbs’s narrative about visiting a reclining and supposedly unwell Christiana on Sunday 13 August, there comes a clinching statement from one of those ‘downstairs’ witnesses who haunt the sinners of ‘upstairs’ Victorian life. Adelaide Ann Friend, housemaid to a woman who let rooms in her Margate house, testified that a room had been rented for half-a-crown to the prisoner on 8 August. She had stayed for two nights. In Christiana’s room the maid had seen several deal boxes, like the ones deposed. Opening them, she had found two peaches inside one – peaches had been sent to Mr Garrett. In another there were crystallized fruit. Another was empty. But after the lady left on the eight o’clock morning train to London the next day, the maid had found a small round cake, like that in the exhibits. She had eaten it and was none the worse for it.
    Another servant, this time from Christiana’s Brighton address, testifies that Miss Edmunds and her mother at seven o’clock on the morning of 8 August had left to get the train for Margate. Only Christiana had a case with her. She was going to visit her sister’s grave and to look over a house. Her mother returned half an hour later, Christiana the next evening at six-thirty. The servant further tells the court that on the Friday before, 4 August, Miss Edmunds had asked her to throw away some powder packets, which were partly undone. She had kept one, thinking it might be myrrh, and had given that to Inspector Gibbs.
    In response to the prosecutor’s query, the servant says that, no, the house was not bothered by cats. However, another resident’s perfectly healthy dog did suddenly die, twisting about and suffocating on 27 May, having an hour before spent a little time being patted by Miss Edmunds.
    It is more or less on this morbid note that the hearing, havinglasted for nearly six hours, is adjourned until the following week. When it is reconvened amidst even greater