{"product_id":"the-black-widow","title":"The Black Widow","description":"\u003cp\u003eIsabelle \"Black Widow\" Lafleur, French Tutor\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMary Trout was seventeen when she fled Devon with nothing but the clothes on her back and a determination never to speak of what drove her from home. For five years she worked below stairs in a London townhouse, hands perpetually raw from scrubbing. It was there that she befriended Marguerite, a French governess of remarkable elegance and discretion. Marguerite taught her not just the language — which Mary absorbed with impressive fluency — but also the architecture of refinement. By age twenty-two, Mary had been thoroughly buried. In her place stood Isabelle Lafleur, respectable widow of a husband who had \"died in France,\" seeking work as a French tutor in a university town where no one asked questions about a woman's past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCambridge welcomed her. She took elegant rooms, began teaching the sons of wealthy merchants and minor gentry, and within three years had married a prosperous college official some fifteen years her senior. When he died in 1830 after a short, wasting illness, she mourned decorously and waited barely a year before accepting a second proposal from a younger man—a wool merchant with more money than sense and a regrettable tendency toward mysterious gastric complaints. He lasted only three years, dying in the summer of 1834. They began calling her the Black Widow in the tea shops and drawing rooms, not knowing how precisely the name captured her method: invisible, patient, and utterly undetectable. Arsenic was so easily obtained, so tasteless in a strong drink or rich gravy, and in those years before chemical detection became common knowledge in provincial towns, there was no way to prove anything at all. Two husbands in nine years, both dead before anyone thought to ask the right questions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe ghost's black glaze with lurid yellow streaks captures the duality that consumed Isabelle Lafleur: the cultivated exterior of Continental refinement and mourning propriety masking the vengeful heart of Mary Trout. Those who keep her ghost report hearing occasionally hearing faint music  - the stirring strains of La Marseillaise,  or snatches of an old Devon sea shanty. She died in 1840, age forty, and was buried under the name Isabelle Lafleur. Whether anyone ever connected her to the Mary Trout who had vanished from Devon two decades earlier remains unknown, lost to the very silence she guarded so fiercely.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEvery ghost is hand-made and unique - yours will be similar to the image shown but will vary in intensity and amount of streaking or other markings making it just as beautiful, but different.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Cambridge Ghost Company","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54562676965699,"sku":null,"price":23.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0930\/7190\/0995\/files\/Screenshot2026-06-17163246.png?v=1781710744","url":"https:\/\/cambridgeghost.co.uk\/products\/the-black-widow","provider":"The Cambridge Ghost Company","version":"1.0","type":"link"}