by Sarah Penner
The satellite view of Google Maps indicated the Bear Alley area in London was built up with massive concrete buildings, and the businesses listed on the map consisted mostly of investment banks and accounting firms. Which meant that even if this were the right Bear Alley, I wouldn’t find much beyond crowds of men moving about in suits. Crowds of men like James.
I glanced over at my suitcase, inside of which I’d placed the vial. Gaynor had agreed the image etched on its side was a bear. Could the vial be tied to Bear Alley? The idea of it—unlikely, though not impossible—was like bait on a hook. I couldn’t resist the pull of the mystery—the what if, the unknown.
I checked the time; it was nearly 4:00 a.m. As soon as the sun came up, I’d grab a coffee and venture over to Bear Alley.
Before setting my phone aside, I jumped over to the unread email waiting in my inbox and gasped: the email was from James. My jaw clenched as I began to read.
Tried calling from MSP. I can hardly breathe, Caroline. The other half of my heart is in London. Must see you. I’m about to board for Heathrow. I land at 9 am, your time. Will take a bit to get thru customs. Meet me at the hotel, 11ish?
In stunned silence, I read the email a second time. James was on his way to London. He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to see him, nor was he allowing me the solitude and distance I so badly needed. The unknown call a few minutes ago must have been from James at the airport, perhaps from a payphone—he likely knew I wouldn’t pick up if I had seen his caller ID.
My hands began to shake; it felt like I’d just learned about his affair all over again. I hovered my finger over Reply, prepared to tell James, No, don’t you dare come here. But I’d known him long enough; tell him he couldn’t have something, and he would work twice as hard to get it. Besides, he knew the name of the hotel, and even if I refused to meet with him, I had no doubt he would wait in the lobby for as long as it took. And I couldn’t stay holed up in my room forever.
Sleep would now be impossible. If James meant to arrive at eleven o’clock, there were just a few hours left without the burden of his presence, his excuses. A few hours left to avoid dealing with our damaged marriage. A few hours left to venture over to Bear Alley.
I stood from the bed and began to pace by the window, checking the sky every few minutes, searching desperately for the first early rays of light.
The sun could not rise soon enough.
9
Eliza
February 5, 1791
As a minute passed, then another, with no change in Mr. Amwell’s demeanor at the breakfast table, my bravery began to wane. I wished badly for another warm cup of Nella’s valerian hot brew, which had left me so relaxed at her little shop with the secret room.
The deed itself had not been so bad—the cracking of the eggs, dropping them into the sizzling pan. I did not even fear the angry words Mr. Amwell might spout at me as the poisoned eggs churned in his belly, nor the rigid, bent form that his body might take, which Nella warned might cause a lifetime of nightmares.
But while I was brave about some things, I was not brave about all things. What I feared was his ghost, his unharnessed spirit after death. The unseen movement of it through walls, through skin.
My fear of spirits was recent, beginning a few months ago when Sally pulled me into the cold, dark cellar and told me a story about a girl named Johanna.
I was not so brave after that day, knowing that magick could sour and go bad.
According to Sally, Johanna worked at the Amwell estate just a short time before I arrived. Only a year or two older than me, Johanna had fallen ill—so ill that she could not leave her room. And during her isolation, whispers flew through the corridors: rumors that she was not ill at all, but carrying a little baby and soon to give birth.
Sally said that on a cold morning in November, one of the upstairs maids sat with Johanna while she strained a whole day with the baby. Pushing and pushing, all of that effort but never a cry. The baby never did come out, and Johanna fell into a sleep from which she never woke.
The attic room where I slept—with its cobwebbed, drafty corners—was next to the one where Johanna and her baby had died. And after Sally told me this story, I began to hear Johanna cry out through the walls, late at night. It sounded like she was crying for me, crying my name. On occasion, I heard what sounded like rushing water, and a thumping, like the baby inside her belly was trying to break his way out with his little balled-up fists.
“Who was the father?” I had asked Sally in the cellar.
She looked hard at me, like I should already know.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to reveal to Mrs. Amwell some of what Sally had told me of Johanna, but my mistress insisted no girl was pregnant in the house, and certainly no girl had died. She tried to tell me that Sally was envious of my place in the house, and the thumping was my own terrified heart—little more than bad dreams.
I did not argue with Mrs. Amwell. But I knew what I heard late at night. How can one mistake the cry of their own name?
Now, as I waited in the dining room with my back to the wall, watching Mr. Amwell chew away at his eggs, it was this set of events that left me unsteady—so much so that I had to place my palms against the wall to balance myself. I did not regret what I’d done; I only hoped the poisonous eggs would kill Mr. Amwell quickly, and in daylight, for I could not bear the idea of another voice calling my name through the walls. I prayed Mr. Amwell’s wretched spirit would not release in this very room, or if it did, that it would not dwell long.
I didn’t understand this kind of magick. I didn’t understand why Johanna’s spirit was still stuck or why she haunted me as she did, and I feared Mr. Amwell’s spirit might soon accompany her in the hallways.
I was brave about some things, yes, and poisons didn’t scare me. But unchained, angry spirits could bring me to my knees.
* * *
He clutched his throat halfway through the second egg. “My God,” he cried. “What is in the gravy? I’ve a furious thirst.” He downed half the pitcher of water while I remained at the edge of the dining room, waiting to remove the plates.
The mistress’s eyes grew wide. She touched the pale yellow ribbing of her bodice; did I imagine the tremble in her wrist? “Dear, are you quite all right?” she asked him.
“Do I look it?” Mr. Amwell snapped. He tugged at his bottom lip, which had begun to swell and redden. “My mouth is so hot, did you use a pepper?” He dabbed at a bead of gravy stuck to his chin, and his napkin fell to the floor as if he had lost his grip on it. I could see it, then, so clearly: his fury curdling into something like fear.
“No, sir,” I said. “I made it just the same as I always have. The milk was to go bad soon.”
“I believe it’s bloody gone bad already.” He began to cough and clutched his throat again.
The mistress picked at her own gravy and eggs, then took a cautious bite.
“Damn this!” He pushed the plate away and stood, his chair tumbling to the floor behind him, rustling the pristine, daisy-print curtains. “I’m to be sick, girl! Take this away!”
I rushed forward and grabbed the plate, pleased to find that he had, indeed, finished the entire first egg and much of the second. Nella had promised one would do, if it must.
Mr. Amwell ascended the staircase, his footsteps echoing through the dining room. The mistress and I looked at one another in silence, and I must admit a part of me was surprised the plan had worked at all. I made my way to the kitchen, quickly wiping the plate, which I then thrust into murky old water.
In the dining room, my mistress still picked at her food. She seemed perfectly well, thank God, but Mr. Amwell’s retching from the floor above was so loud, I wondered if the effort of it would kill him before the poison itself. I had never heard such vomiting, such groaning. How long might it take? Nella did not tell me that, and I had not thought to ask.
* * *
Two hours passed. It would have been suspicious if Mrs. Amwell continued to hide at her writing desk downstairs, the two of us working on letters that didn’t need writing, acting as though nothing was awry.
Everyone knew that Mr. Amwell was fond of the drink and had suffered many a period of days and nights with his head shoved deep into the chamber pot. But the truth was that he had never moaned in agony like this; this was something different, and I thought a few others of the household must realize it. The mistress and I went to see him together and, when she realized her husband had lost his ability to speak, she directed one of the staff to fetch the physician.
Immediately, the physician declared Mr. Amwell’s condition to be dire, noting that his patient’s abdomen swelled and convulsed in a way he had never before seen. The doctor attempted to explain this to my mistress in strange medical words I did not understand, but anyone could see the convulsions, like an animal writhed inside of Mr. Amwell’s belly. His eyes were bloodshot, and he could not even keep his gaze on the candlelight.
As the physician and my mistress stood together in hushed conversation, Mr. Amwell turned his head and those hollow black holes looked right at me, right into my soul, and I swear in that moment he knew. Biting back a scream, I rushed out of the room just as the physician palpated his patient’s groin, drawing from him a howl so deep and primal that I feared Mr. Amwell’s spirit had just released.
Only his raspy, stuttering breaths—audible from the corridor, where I stood trembling—told me it had not.
“His bladder is near rupture,” the physician told Mrs. Amwell as I left the room. “This type of episode has happened before, you say?”
“Many times,” my mistress said. It was not a lie, and yet she was lying. I leaned against the wall of the hallway, just outside the door in the cool, inky darkness, listening closely to the words of my mistress and the haggard breaths of her dying husband. “The drink is his vice.”
“The swelling in his abdomen is unusual, though...” The doctor trailed off, and I imagined him considering the strange case before him and whether to call for the bailiff. The dying man, his pretty wife. Had the physician seen the empty bourbon bottles we scattered about downstairs in an effort to fool him?
I took a step forward, unable to restrain my curiosity, and peeked around the open door. The doctor crossed his arms, drummed his finger and stifled a yawn. I wondered if he had his own pretty wife waiting for him at home with supper nearly ready. The doctor hesitated, then said, “You ought to send for a pastor, Mrs. Amwell. Straightaway. He will not survive the night.”
My mistress covered her mouth with her hand. “Heavens,” she breathed, true surprise in her voice.
At my mistress’s command, I showed the doctor the exit. Afterward, as I shut the door at the front of the house and turned around, she stood waiting for me.
“Let’s sit by the fire together,” she whispered, and we went to the place we had always gone. She wrapped a blanket around our legs, withdrew a notebook and began to dictate a letter to her mother, in Norwich. “Mother,” she began, “my husband has fallen terribly ill...”
I wrote each word exactly as she said, even though I knew they were not all true. And even when the letter was finished—for I wrote six pages, and then eight, and it was all a repetition of things she had already said—she continued speaking, and I continued writing. Neither of us wanted to move; neither of us wanted to go upstairs. The clock showed nearly midnight. Daylight had left long ago.
But we did not go on forever, for all at once, I felt something strange: something sticky and wet between my legs. At the same time, a servant descended the stairs, taking them two by two, his eyes wide and damp. “Mrs. Amwell,” he cried, “I am s-sorry to say it, but he has stopped breathing.”
Mrs. Amwell threw the blanket off her lap and stood, and I took her lead and did the same. But to my great horror, the warm and concave spot upon which I’d been sitting was now streaked with a band of crimson, bright as a fresh-picked apple. My mouth dropped open; was death about to find me, too? I sucked in each breath of air, willing it not to leave me.
Mrs. Amwell began to make her way to the staircase, but I cried out. “Wait—” I pleaded, “p-please don’t leave me here, alone.”
There could be no doubt about it: some terrible magick had found me again. Mr. Amwell’s spirit may have exited his body upstairs, but like that of Johanna’s, it had not gone entirely. What else could draw blood from my body at his moment of death?
I crumbled to the floor on my knees, fat tears falling down my face. “Don’t leave me,” I begged her again.
My mistress looked strangely at me, for she had left me alone in the room a thousand times before, but I could feel the wet warmth leaking from me even at that moment. From my place on the floor, I pointed to the sofa where we’d been seated together. My eyes settled on the blood-stained cushion upon which we’d been sitting, and all around us, the shadows of the candlelight danced closer, taunting me, Mr. Amwell hiding in every one of them.
10
Nella
February 7, 1791
On the seventh day of February, yet another note was left in the barrel of pearl barley.
Before I read it, I lifted the fine parchment—thin as the skin on my tired hands—and inhaled the scent of perfume. Cherries, with undertones of lavender and rose water.
Like Eliza’s letter, I knew immediately, by the steady curls and even loops of the ink, that the author was well mannered, literate. I drew to mind a woman of my own age: the mistress of her own household, the wife of a merchant. I imagined a warm and loyal friend, but not a socialite, one who fancied pleasure gardens and the theaters, but not in the way of a courtesan. I imagined a full bosom, broad hips. A mother.
But as I set aside my own imagination and proceeded to read the words carefully penned onto the paper, my tongue grew dry. The note was very curious. As though the author were hesitant to state what she wanted and preferred instead subtle intimation. I let the note fall onto the table. I lifted the candle above the parchment and read it yet again:
The footman found them together, in the gatehouse.
We’ve a gathering in two days, and she will be in attendance. Perchance you’ve something to incite lust? I will come to your shop, tomorrow at ten.
Oh, to die in the arms of a lover as I lie alone, waiting, the corridors silent.
I dissected each verse like the entrails of a rat, looking for some clue buried deep within. The woman’s household entailed a footman and a gatehouse, so I presumed her well-off. This concerned me, for I had no interest in meddling in the motives of the wealthy, who I had found over the years to be unpredictable and unstable. And the woman wanted something to incite lust, so that he—presumably her husband—might die in the arms of his lover—presumably his mistress. The arrangement struck me as a bit perverted, and the letter did not sit well with me.
And the preparation must be ready in two days. It was hardly enough time.
But Eliza’s letter had not settled well with me, either, and all had turned out perfectly well. I felt sure that my unease about this letter, too, could be explained by my ailing body and my weary spirit. Perhaps every letter, from this point forward, would raise alarm. I might as well grow used to it, just as I’d grown used to the absence of light inside my shop.
Besides, this woman’s letter implied betrayal, and betrayal was why I began to dispense poisons in the first place—why I began to carry the secrets of these women, to record them in my register, to protect and aid them. The best apothecary was one who knows intimately the despair felt by her patient, whether in body or heart. And though I could not relate to this woman’s place in society—for there were no gatehouses or footmen to be seen in Back Alley—I knew, firsthand, her inner turmoil. Heartache is shared by all, and favors no rank.
So, in spite of m
yself, I readied my things to leave for the day. I threw on my heaviest coat and packed an extra pair of socks. Although the fields where I meant to go were damp and uninviting, it was the place I would find the blister beetles—the remedy most suited to this woman’s peculiar request.
* * *
I made my way quickly, expertly, through the winding alleys of my city, avoiding the sedan chairs and horse dung, pushing against the oppressive mass of bodies moving in and out of shops and homes on my way to the fields near Walworth, in Southwark, where I would find the beetles. I paid visits to the river often and could walk to Blackfriars Bridge with my eyes closed, but on this day the loose stones underfoot posed a hazard. I watched my step, avoiding such nuisances as a mongrel gnawing on something dead, and a half-wrapped parcel of smelly, fly-covered fish.
As I rushed down Water Street, the open river just ahead, women on either side of me brushed the debris and filth from their doorsteps, forming a cloud of ash and dust. I let out a little cough and was seized, all at once, with a hacking fit. I doubled over, placing my hands on my knees.
No one paid me any attention, thank God; the last thing I needed were questions of my destination, my name. No, everyone else was too busy minding their own chores, merchandise and children.
My lungs continued to suck in air until at last I felt the heat in my throat subsiding. I wiped the moisture from my lips, horrified by the plug of greenish mucus that came away on my palm, like I had just plunged my hand into the river and come away with a slither of algae attached to my skin. I flung the mucus onto the ground, stomped it into nothingness with my shoe and straightened my shoulders, moving ahead to the river.
Coming to the steps at the base of Blackfriars Bridge, I noticed a man and woman approaching from across the road. His eyes were narrow and determined as he looked in my direction, and I prayed that he had recognized someone directly behind me. The woman next to him struggled under the weight of an infant slung to her bosom, and from my distance I could just make out the baby’s soft, egg-shaped head. A beautiful, cream-colored blanket was tucked neatly around the child.