In The Beginning is now
posted on AO3, for the benefit of
castiron and, of course, all the Harriet/Philip shippers out there! I've cleaned it up a bit, mostly smoothing out some of the dialogue and historical references, and making sure it's as much in line with the book as possible (I'd forgotten that the Dyers lived above them, not below, and that Sylvia
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Re the other conversational thread -- the diciness of arsenical symptoms definitely means there's a really bare possibility of pinning it on Vaughan, but he'd be having to bet on at least six hours passing (the last time they ate together was at lunch, and dinner chez Urquhart didn't start until 8) which was a real statistical outlier even for someone who hadn't eaten. And I agree that Urquhart wasn't trying to pin anything on Harriet -- since Philip died just after Mrs. Wrayburn's latest relapse, Urquhart was clearly desperate to get him out of the way as soon as possible; the coffee-date with Harriet was probably a welcome cover but not necessary ("They won't discover this, but if they do it'll be impossible to prove which one of us did it.") I can't realistically imagine any scenario in which Urquhart knew that she had been buying arsenic. Even if Philip mentioned that her latest book was about arsenic, she didn't start her poison-hunting expeditions until a few months after their breakup. It's barely possible that he told Urquhart at some point that Harriet liked to be careful about verifying things for her novels and Urquhart drew his own conclusions, but it's such a stretch that I can't imagine he was counting on her having provably bought the stuff. He was probably quite surprised when she was arrested.
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