Mission:
Sire, I have devised a plan to catch the fiend who has been trying to poison you. When I first learned that there was an attempt at your life, I had been sitting in one of the taverns, *mutters out of the corner of her mouth* well, technically not sittin’ sir, we were having a grog fight…but anyways, I was in the tavern like I said and a messenger rat came in and told us someone had tried to poison your dinner… Well naturally we all stopped and listened…well…that was after he started shouting…but we eventually stopped and he told us that if one of us figured out a way to stop the “villain”…heh heh, I love that word…er… anyways, if one of us could find a way to stop the poisoner we would be rewarded…. I got the feeling he was exaggerating how much, but he said we would get a whole lot of money, so I decided to see if I could catch him, because at the moment I was little tipsy and money was something I was lacking in at the time. *Deep breath*

First thing I did was to go see the cooks, but they seemed innocent and all pledged their loyalty to you after I chased them all around with a big copper ladle for a while. When they could finally breathe again, I asked them to tell me what they had been serving you at the time, and then asked the order in which the tester tested. They replied that the order started with the drink usually, and at that night you had chosen to drink a glass of the finest elderberry wine…an excellent choice if you ask me…anyhow your tester who had died was the first one, the one that always tried your wine or whatever else you chose to drink (I think it’s an awfully clever system, having different testers for different parts of your meal…) I asked the cooks what had happened to the tester before he died, and they told me that he had had the fiercest stomach cramps they had ever seen, and that he was in a terrible amount of pain and shouted the worst things they had ever heard. I asked to see the wine, and they brought it to me, because they had luckily not thrown it away. It appeared to be of normal coloring, but when I smelled it, it smelled vaguely of something…. something I honestly couldn’t put my fingers on. There was a great deal of the liquid missing, so I asked if the bottle had been opened before the tester had tried it… no, said the cook, except for the one taste he had tried, and that that had been the night before when he was choosing the wines. After he tasted it, he said, he had laid it on the counter so that he would remember which bottle it was, and gone to sleep. He was perfectly fine he said, and he wasn’t showing any signs of being poisoned, so I knew that it had been poisoned between the time the head cook went to bed and when it had been brought to your table. I asked how large of a glass he had used when he had tested it, and to answer, he produced a tiny shot glass. I asked what the poison tester had used, and he replied by bringing in slightly larger wine glass. By looking at the two glasses, I figured out how much wine should have been gone from the bottle, and found that there was quite a difference in how much should have been there and how much was. I asked the cook how much had been in the bottle when he had tested it, and he said it was full up to the cork. I knew (since by then I was totally sober) that someone had drunk out of that bottle other than the cook and the test taster, and I questioned the other cooks to see if any of them had drunk any. All of their answers were negative. I assumed that since the wine was not drunk by any of the cooks, and since only cooks are allowed in the royal kitchens, the poisoner must have been the one to drink the wine before it was poisoned. So far I had learned that the wine you were to drink had been poisoned, that the taste tester had died of terrible cramps, that the wine was poisoned at night, that the wine smelled like something other than wine, and that the poisoner had drunk some of the wine before he/she had poisoned it. By now it was nearly your dinner again, and the cooks were busy bustling around, so I couldn’t ask them any questions or anything. Being totally stumped, I had just taken a silver rod and tested the wine for arsenic (negative) when one of the cooks ran screaming to the stove… they had forgotten the almonds that they were cooking for your *snicker* green beans in butter sauce with almonds, and had let them burn on accident. Smelling the almonds brought to mind another smell… the smell of the wine! Because my mother had taught me a little about poisons, I knew that cyanide smells of burnt almonds, and… I remembered this a few moments later, causes cramps and later death! I now knew that the poisoner had been using cyanide to poison your wine, and before poisoning the wine that they drank some…. by now an idea had positively smacked me upside the head. So here is my idea, it’s rather simple but it actually might work…tonight, when the cook tests the wine, he should add these belladonna crystals to the wine. When the Poisoner comes to do their thing, they will drink it, and almost immediately fall asleep. We can set up guards hiding to see when they come in, and when they are asleep, we can simply take him at our leisure, and you can do whatever you wish with them. I suggest beheading, sir.