by Sarah Penner
“Did your mistress tell you that, too?”
“Yes’m.”
“Well, she was not mistaken. Only girls come here.” With the exception of one long ago, no man had ever stepped foot in my shop of poisons. I only aided women.
My mother had held tight to this principle, instilling in me from an early age the importance of providing a safe haven—a place of healing—for women. London grants little to women in need of tender care; instead, it crawls with gentlemen’s doctors, each as unprincipled and corrupt as the next. My mother committed to giving women a place of refuge, a place where they might be vulnerable and forthcoming about their ailments without the lascivious appraisal of a man.
The ideals of gentlemen’s medicine did not align with my mother’s, either. She believed in the proven remedies of the sweet, fertile earth, not the schemes diagrammed in books and studied by bespectacled gentlemen with brandy on their tongues.
The young girl in my shop looked around, the light of the flame in her eyes. “How clever. I like this place, though it is a bit dark. How do you know when it is morning? There are no windows.”
I pointed at the clock on the wall. “There is more than one way to tell the time,” I said, “and a window would do me no service at all.”
“You must grow tired of the dark, then.”
Some days, I could not distinguish night from day, as I had lost the intuitive sense of wakefulness long ago. My body seemed always in a state of fatigue. “I am accustomed to it,” I said.
How strange it was, sitting across from this child. The last child to sit in this very room was me, decades ago, observing my own mother as she worked. But I was not this girl’s mother, and her presence began to pull at me in an uncomfortable way. Though her naivety was endearing, she was very young. No matter what she thought of my shop, she could not need anything else I dispensed—the fertility aids, the cramp barks. She was here only for poison, so I aimed to bring us back to the subject at hand. “You have not touched your hot brew.”
She looked at it skeptically. “I do not mean to be rude, but Mrs. Amwell told me to be very careful—”
I held up my hand to stop her. She was a smart girl. I took her mug into my own hands, drank deeply from it and set it back down in front of her.
At once, she grabbed the mug and lifted it to her own lips, emptying the entire thing. “I was parched,” she said. “Oh, thank you, how delicious! May I have more?”
I maneuvered myself out of the chair, taking two small steps to the hearth. I tried not to wince as I lifted the heavy pot to refill her mug.
“What is the matter with your hand?” she asked from behind me.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been holding it funny this whole time, as though it hurts. Did you injure it?”
“No,” I said, “and it is rude to pry.” But I regretted my tone with her instantly. She was merely inquisitive, just as I was once. “How old are you?” I asked her in a softer tone.
“Twelve.”
I nodded, having expected something thereabouts. “Quite young.”
She hesitated and, by the rhythmic movement of her skirts, I presumed she was tapping her foot on the floor. “I have never—” She paused. “I have never killed anyone.”
I nearly laughed. “You’re only a child. I wouldn’t expect you to have killed many people in your short life.” My eyes fell on a shelf behind her where there rested a small porcelain dish the color of milk. Inside the dish lay four brown hen’s eggs, poison disguised within. “And what is your name?”
“Eliza. Eliza Fanning.”
“Eliza Fanning,” I repeated, “aged twelve.”
“Yes, miss.”
“And your mistress sent you here today, is that right?” The arrangement told me that Eliza’s mistress must trust her greatly.
But the child paused and furrowed her brow, and what she said next surprised me. “It was her idea initially, yes, but I was the one to suggest the breakfast table. My master fancies the chophouses for supper with his friends, and sometimes is gone for a full night or two. I thought breakfast might be the best idea.”
I looked to Eliza’s letter on the table and ran my thumb across one edge. Given her youth, I felt it necessary to remind her of something. “And you understand that this will not just harm him? This will not just make him ill, but—” I slowed my words. “This will kill him, as surely as it would kill an animal? That is what you and your mistress intend?”
Little Eliza looked up at me, her eyes sharp. She folded her hands neatly in front of her. “Yes, miss.” As she said it, she did not so much as flinch.
4
Caroline
Present day, Monday
“Couldn’t resist the old call of the river, eh?” said a familiar voice. Just ahead, the guide split off from the tour group and stepped toward me, wearing oversize, knee-high galoshes and blue cleaning gloves.
“I guess not.” Truth be told, I still didn’t even know what we were doing in the riverbed, but that was part of the appeal of it. I couldn’t help but grin at him. “Do I need some of those?” I nodded at his boots.
He shook his head. “Your sneakers will be fine, but take a pair of these.” From a backpack, he withdrew a pair of used, mud-stained rubber gloves, not unlike his own. “Wouldn’t want to cut yourself. Come on, we’re down here.” He started off, then turned back to me. “Oh, I’m Alfred, by the way. But they all call me ‘Bachelor Alf.’ Funny, too, seeing as how I’ve been married going on forty years. Nah, the old nickname’s on account of the fact that I’ve found so many of them bent-up rings.”
Seeing the confused look on my face as I tugged on my gloves, he went on. “Hundreds of years ago, men would bend metal rings to display their strength before asking a lady for her hand. But if the lady didn’t want to marry the man, you see, she threw the ring off the bridge and told him off. I’ve found hundreds of the rings. Seems plenty of gentlemen walked away from this river as bachelors, if you gather what I’m saying. Strange tradition anyhow.”
I looked down at my hands. My own ring was now hidden beneath a filthy rubber glove. Tradition hadn’t done much good for me, either. A few weeks ago, before my life came to a shuddering halt, I bought James a vintage box for his new business cards. The box was made of tin, the traditional gift on a tenth anniversary, meant to signify durability in a marriage. I’d had it engraved with James’s initials, and it arrived in the mail the evening before our planned trip to London—right on time.
But not much else had gone right since then.
As soon as the box had arrived, I took it upstairs to hide in my suitcase. As I rummaged about in the closet, I grabbed a few additional items I hadn’t yet packed: an assortment of lingerie, a strappy pair of heels, a few essential oils. I sorted and set aside the lavender, absolute rose and sweet orange, among others. James particularly liked the sweet orange.
Sitting cross-legged on the walk-in closet floor, I held up a piece of lingerie I was undecided on, a mess of bright red string that, somehow, fit around one’s butt and between one’s legs. Shrugging, I tossed it into my suitcase next to a drugstore pregnancy test which, at the time, I desperately hoped to use in London if my period didn’t show. Which reminded me—the prenatal vitamins. At my doctor’s recommendation, I’d begun taking them as soon as we started trying to conceive.
As I walked to the bathroom to grab the vitamins, a buzzing sound—James’s cell phone on the dresser—caught my attention. I gave it a disinterested, passing glance, but it buzzed a second time and two letters caught my eye: XO.
Trembling, I leaned forward to read the messages. They’d been sent by someone listed in James’s contacts as B.
I’m going to miss you so much, read the first one. Then:
Don’t drink so much bubbly that you forget about last Friday. XO.
The second mes
sage, to my horror, included a picture of black panties inside a desk drawer. Beneath the panties, I recognized a colorful pamphlet with the logo of James’s employer. The picture must have been taken at his workplace.
I stared at the phone, stunned. Last Friday, I’d spent the night at the hospital with Rose and her husband while Rose was in labor. James had been at the office, working. Or not working, I now suspected.
No, no, it must be some mistake. My palms grew clammy. Downstairs, I heard James moving about the kitchen. I took several steadying breaths and grabbed the phone, my fingers clutching it like a weapon.
I rushed down the steps. “Who’s B?” I demanded, holding up the phone to show James.
The look in his eyes said it all.
“Caroline,” he said steadily, as though I was a client and he meant to present me with a root cause analysis. “It isn’t what you think.”
With a shaky hand, I navigated to the first message. “‘I’m going to miss you so much’?” I read aloud.
James placed his hands on the counter, leaning forward. “It’s just a coworker. She’s had a thing for me for a few months. We joke about it at the office. Seriously, Caroline, it’s nothing.”
A downright lie. I didn’t reveal—yet—the contents of the second text message. “Has anything ever happened between you two?” I asked, willing my voice to remain calm.
He exhaled slowly, running his hand through his hair. “We met at the promotion event a few months ago,” he finally said. His firm had hosted a dinner cruise in Chicago for new promotees; spouses were welcome to attend on their own dime, but we were saving diligently for London and I’d thought nothing of skipping out. “We kissed that night, just once, after too much to drink. I could barely see straight.” He stepped toward me, his eyes soft, pleading. “It was a terrible lapse in judgment. Nothing else has happened, and I haven’t seen her since—”
Another lie. I pushed the phone forward again, pointing to the pair of black panties in the desk drawer. “You sure? Because she just sent this picture, telling you not to forget about last Friday. Seems she keeps her underwear in your desk now?”
A sheen of sweat formed on his forehead as he scrambled for an explanation. “It’s just a prank, Car—”
“Bullshit,” I interrupted, tears spilling down my face. A nameless figure took form in my mind—the woman who owned those tiny black panties—and I understood, for the first time in my life, the incalculable fury that drives some people to murder. “You didn’t get much work done at the office on Friday, did you?”
James didn’t reply; his silence was as damning as an admission.
I knew then I couldn’t trust anything else he said. I suspected he’d not only seen the black panties with his own eyes, but he’d probably pulled them off her. James rarely found himself short for words; if nothing serious had happened between the two of them, he’d be adamantly defending himself now. Instead, he remained mute, guilt written all over his crestfallen face.
The secret—his actual infidelity—was bad enough. But in this exact moment, the raw, ugly questions about her, and the extent of their relationship, seemed less critical than his harboring of the secret for months. What if I hadn’t found the phone? How long would he have hidden this from me? Just last night, we’d made love. How dare he bring that woman’s ghost to our bed, the sacred place where we’d been trying to conceive a child.
My shoulders shook, my hands trembled. “All these nights trying for a baby. Were you thinking of her, instead of—” But I gasped over my own words, unable to say the word me. I couldn’t bear to attach this travesty to us, to my marriage.
Before he could answer, the nausea pressed upward, relentless, and I made a run for the toilet, slamming the bathroom door behind me and locking it. I heaved five, seven, ten times, until there remained nothing left inside of me.
* * *
The roar of a boat engine nearby on the river jolted me out of the memory. I looked up to find Bachelor Alf watching me, his hands spread open. “Are you ready?” he asked.
Embarrassed, I nodded and followed him to a group of five or six others. A few of them knelt among the rocks, sifting through pebbles. I stepped closer to my guide and spoke in a hushed voice. “I’m sorry, but I don’t entirely understand what mudlarking is. Are we searching for something?”
He looked at me and chuckled, his belly trembling. “I never did tell you, did I! Well, here’s all you need to know—the Thames runs straight through the city of London, and for a long way, at that. Little remnants of history, all the way back to the Roman era, can be found right here in the mud if you go searching long enough. Long ago, mudlarkers found old coins, rings, pottery, and they’d go on to sell it. That’s what the Victorians wrote about, them poor kids trying to buy bread. But here today, we’re just searching because we love it. You keep what you find, too, that’s our rule. Look, right there,” he said, pointing at my foot. “You’re about standing on a clay pipe.” He leaned over and picked it up. It looked like a narrow stone to me, but Bachelor Alf wore a mile-wide smile. “You’ll find a thousand of these in a day. No big deal, unless it’s your first time. This would have been stuffed with tobacco leaves. See, here, the ridges running up the barrel? I’d date this sometime between 1780 and 1820.” He paused, waiting for my reaction.
I raised my eyebrows and looked closer at the clay pipe, suddenly overcome with the thrill of holding in my hands an object last touched centuries ago. Earlier, Bachelor Alf had said the tide turns over new mysteries each time it advances and recedes. What other old artifacts might be within close reach? I checked my gloves to ensure they were pulled taut around my hands, then knelt down; perhaps I would find a few more clay pipes, or a coin or bent ring, as Bachelor Alf said. Or maybe I could remove my own ring, bend it in half and toss it into the water to join all the other emblems of failed love.
Slowly, I scanned my eyes over the rocks and ran my fingertips across the glistening, rust-colored pebbles. But after a minute of doing this, I frowned; it all looked very much the same. Even if a diamond ring were buried in the silt, I doubted that I would spot it.
“Do you have any tips,” I shouted to Bachelor Alf, “or a shovel, perhaps?” He stood a few meters away, inspecting an egg-shaped thing that one of the others had found.
He laughed. “The Port of London Authority prohibits shovels, unfortunately, or any digging at all. We’re only allowed to search the surface. So it’s a bit like fate if you find something, or at least I like to think so.”
Fate, or a colossal waste of time. But it was the riverbed or a cold, empty king-size bed at the hotel, so I took a few steps forward, closer to the waterline, and knelt down again, waving away a swarm of gnats that hovered at my feet. I scanned my eyes slowly over the pebbles and caught a glimmer of something shiny and reflective. I gasped, ready to call Bachelor Alf over to inspect my find. But as I stepped closer to pull the thin, shiny object toward me, I realized I’d merely grasped the pearlescent, rotting tail of a dead fish.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “Gross.”
Suddenly, there came an excited shriek behind me. I turned to see one of the others—a middle-aged woman bent down low, the tips of her hair almost touching a sandy puddle beneath her—holding up a whitish, sharp-edged rock. She scrubbed furiously at the front of it with her gloved hand and then held it up proudly.
“Ah, a bit of delftware!” Bachelor Alf exclaimed. “Be-auti-ful, too, I might add. Can’t find a blue like that anymore. Cerulean, discovered late eighteenth century. Nowadays, it’s a cheap dye. See there—” He pointed, tracing the pattern for the excited woman. “It appears to be the edge of a canoe, perhaps a dragon boat.”
The woman happily dropped the fragment into a bag and everyone resumed their search.
“Listen here, folks,” Bachelor Alf explained. “The hint is to let your subconscious find the anomaly. Our brains are meant to identify brea
ks in a pattern. We evolved that way, many millions of years ago. You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”
Well, there were a number of things absent for me at the moment, not the least of which was any security or surety about what the rest of my life might entail. Following James’s news, after I’d locked myself in the bathroom, he’d tried to break his way inside where I lay curled up on the bath mat. I begged him to leave me alone; each time I asked, he responded with some plea, a variation of Let me make this up to you or I will spend my life fixing this. All I’d wanted was for him to go away.
I’d called Rose, too, and shared the entire, miserable thing with her. Aghast and with a crying infant in the background, she’d patiently listened as I told her I couldn’t imagine going to London with him the next day to celebrate our anniversary.
“Then don’t go with him,” she said. “Go alone.” Our lives might have looked vastly different at that moment, but in my moment of despair, Rose could clearly see what I could not: I needed to be far, far away from James. I couldn’t bear to be so near his hands, his lips; they stirred my imagination, made my stomach churn yet again. In this way, my impending flight to London had been a life vest thrown overboard. I reached for it eagerly, desperately.
A few hours before the flight, when James saw me packing the last of my clothes into my suitcase, he looked at me and shook his head in silence, visibly broken, while fury ran hot through my sob-wracked, sleep-deprived body.
But while I needed time and distance, I had been reminded of James’s absence at every turn. The airport check-in attendant looked strangely at me, clicking her bright orange nails against the desk while asking the whereabouts of Mr. Parcewell, the second individual on the reservation. The lady at the hotel desk frowned when I stated that only one room key would be necessary. And now, of course, I found myself in a place I never expected: a muddy riverbed, searching for artifacts and, as Alf had said, inconsistencies.