The packet had outlived the fire. That discreet intervention, performed in a kitchen where the first thought had been merely to nourish an invalid, was destined to weigh heavily in the assize court where the life of the daughter of the house would be decided. Across the paper snatched from the embers, an inscription declared that the powder was intended for the cleaning of stones. Yet the maidservants had discovered it in a preparation meant for Francis Blandy, their master. Between the stones of Scotland and the supper of an attorney at Henley, someone would be called upon to account for a most singular removal.
Let us picture the cook holding that remnant of paper well clear of the hearth. She had to wait for Mary’s departure, rake out the coals, and refrain from scattering the little that remained. But a few moments before, the master’s strange indisposition might still have been numbered among those distempers of which physicians speak with confidence without ever curing them. Now, an object compelled every soul in the house to take a side. To cast it away would have restored the household to its uncertainty; to preserve it was to accuse.
A Place at Table
Francis Blandy practiced as an attorney-at-law and held the office of Town Clerk of Henley-on-Thames. He had an only daughter, Mary, a young woman of education, well able to bear her part in conversation, whose expectations of fortune added no small luster to her father’s hospitality. A young gentlewoman might possess every virtue; an inheritance believed to be considerable had the additional merit of ensuring those virtues were observed. In the 1740s, Captain William Henry Cranstoun entered this dwelling, where his name, allied to the Scottish peerage, produced a most favorable impression.
He possessed fewer resources than connections, a circumstance that poses no bar to a handsome figure in the world when one is versed in its usages. Francis welcomed the visitor; Mary gave him her affections. One might already have called this attachment by the name of a future, until intelligence out of Scotland compelled them to seek another: Cranstoun was a married man.
The obstacle was sufficiently crude that an ordinary suitor would have abandoned the field. The captain undertook to render it subtle. A woman claimed him, he protested; the validity of the nuptials was in dispute, no decree was final, one must only wait. Mary thus found herself invited to prove her constancy by enduring an embarrassment not of her own making. That manner of patience offers immense advantages to him who exacts it: the longer it lasts, the more agonizing it becomes to confess that it has been squandered in vain.
The Scottish decrees, however, confirmed the union with Anne Murray. Francis came at last to misdoubt the officer, whilst his daughter continued to receive his assurances. One may well imagine the meals grown uneasy, a name sedulously avoided, a letter slipped away before it could be opened. What the archival record leaves us is more disquieting than any open quarrel: a young woman still waiting, and an absent man retaining credit enough to dispatch her a powder.
The Taste of Trust
According to Mary, this powder was intended to incline her father favorably toward Cranstoun. The virtue she ascribed to it belonged to the realm of a love-philter; the writing upon the packet spoke of an ingredient to clean the pebbles the captain had sent her. Two uses, innocent in all appearance, thus cloaked a substance whose analysis was soon to disclose its true nature: white arsenic.
In the early days of August 1751, Francis was seized with violent gripings and vomiting. For him was prepared that thin, watery broth known to the English as gruel. Sickness called for mild nourishment; that very mildness delivered the bane. Mary acknowledged later that she had stirred the powder into the vessel. She maintained to the very end that she had harbored no design to kill.
In the kitchen, however, the mischief began to overleap the boundaries assigned to it. Ann Emmet, a charwoman employed about the house, ate of the leavings and fell grievously ill. Susan Gunnell, a maidservant, likewise tasted of the mess and felt its cruel effects. There was no longer merely a single delicate stomach within a bedchamber, but several persons stricken after partaking of the selfsame food. The servants examined the bottom of the pan. A whitish, gritty sediment arrested their gaze.
One can follow the motion of their hands without imputing to them a learning they did not possess: lifting, tilting, observing what bore no likeness to the rest, then resolving to wash nothing. Common crockery was transformed into evidence to be preserved. The vessel was set in safety; Susan carried it to a neighbor’s hearth, and Norton the apothecary was summoned. This cautious passage, from one kitchen to another house, was to place into the hands of the physicians what no family assurances could ever supply.
Francis was apprised of the suspicions. The master, who had lived encompassed by his daughter’s ministrations, was henceforth obliged to scrutinize whatever she offered him. In the depositions, a cup of tea, its suspicious savor, and Mary’s visible perturbation occupy a dreadful place: the daily gestures of yesterday were repeated, but their meaning was utterly transformed. There are houses where accusation enters on tiptoe; it takes its seat at the board and waits to be served.
Shortly thereafter, Mary attempted to burn her papers and what remained of the powder. The servants recovered the packet. That action would weigh with terrible force against her: had she believed the powder to be harmless, wherefore destroy it? She might have discovered too late what she had administered; she might have sought to conceal what she already knew. The ashes offered no means of choosing between those two accounts. They merely rendered it impossible to ignore either.
What a Father May Forgive
Dr. Anthony Addington was called, and subsequently his colleague Dr. William Lewis. They examined the sufferer, the residues, and the powder rescued from destruction. The poison received a name, and Francis’s condition assumed a gravity that no physic could assuage. As the diagnosis hardened into certainty, Mary ceased to be one who might freely enter the chamber.
A final interview is reported by those who stood by. The daughter sued for pardon; the father granted it. She confessed to the powder and protested her innocence of intent. Francis directed his wrath against Cranstoun, that man whom he had harbored and who, in his eyes, was destroying his own life and his child’s together. Yet a father’s forgiveness is governed by laws far different from those of a verdict.
Francis Blandy expired on the 14th of August, 1751. Mary was committed to Oxford gaol. The captain, for his part, remained beyond the reach of these proceedings. His absence provided all with a convenient figure: for some, the arch-seducer who had contrived the whole catastrophe; for others, the accomplice upon whom one might cast whatever could no longer be defended. Above all, it deprived justice of the interrogatories that ought to have been put to him in person.
On the 3rd of March, 1752, Mary appeared at the Oxford Assizes. The physicians set forth their findings. The domestics recounted the actions they had witnessed, but also words spoken long before—wishes to be gone, expressions of malice toward her father. The entire household seemed to have harbored a memory that it now poured out before the bench. A phrase uttered in passion does not, of itself, prove a murder; conjoined with the powder, the repeated doses, and the burned papers, it took on an altered weight.
Mary challenged this piecing-together of her life. Her moments of temper had been hoarded up, she urged, and marshaled solely to serve the prosecution. Witnesses testified to her filial affection; the alleged malice of a servant was debated. At the core of these depositions lay an inquiry narrower than the scandal: had she knowingly administered a poison? She admitted the physical act, but disclaimed the murderous intent. Her defense of a love-powder appeared incredible to her accusers. Yet Mary maintained it steadfastly, even before those who held her life in their hands.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty. On the 6th of April, 1752, she was hanged at Oxford, protesting to the last that she had never willed her father’s death. The judicial judgment is matter of record; the inward path that guided her hand toward the powder is beyond our reach.
There remain of this affair two things that would be wrongly confounded: the forgiveness bestowed within a quiet chamber, and the sentence pronounced in a court of assize. Between the two, servants had set aside a pan and plucked a packet from the fire. They had known nothing of the thoughts of their mistress, nor of the calculations of the captain. They had seen human beings fall sick, and had refused to scour the brass too quickly. In that house where each had imagined he understood the other, prudence had come from those who had begun by doubting.