Fortune favoured her. The dreaded Narcissus, the most formidable obstacle to her murderous plans, was seized with an attack of the gout. Agrippina managed that his physician should recommend him the waters of Sinuessa in Campania by way of cure. He was thus got out of the way, and she proceeded at once to her work of blood. Entrusting the secret to Halotus, the Emperor's _praegustator_--the slave whose office it was to protect him from poison by tasting every dish before him--and to his physician, Xenophon of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of the period of this classical King James, as to the poison best suited to her purpose. Locusta was mistress of her art, in which long practice had given her a consummate skill. The poison must not be too rapid, lest it should cause suspicion; nor too slow, lest it should give the Emperor time to consult for the interests of his son Britannicus; but it was to be one which should disturb his intellect without causing immediate death. Claudius was a glutton, and the poison was given him with all the more ease because it was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was extravagantly fond. Agrippina herself handed him the choicest mushroom in the dish, and the poison at once reduced him to silence. As was too frequently the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and was carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened. A violent colic ensued, and it was feared that this, with a quantity of wine which he had drunk, would render the poison innocuous. But Agrippina had gone too far for retreat, and Xenophon, who knew that great crimes if frustrated are perilous, if successful are rewarded, came to her assistance. Under pretence of causing him to vomit, he tickled the throat of the Emperor with a feather smeared with a swift and deadly poison. It did its work, and before morning the Caesar was a corpse.[34]