by Sarah Penner
“Oh, yes,” I told her. “I wish to live near the sea. I have seen paintings of Brighton, of castles in the sand. I would like to live there, I think.” I pulled my hand away and ran my fingers over my chin; a small, itchy boil had formed there, hardly larger than the tip of a needle. Out of other ideas, I exhaled, resigned to telling Nella the rest of the story. “Mr. Amwell’s spirit haunts me. I fear that if I remain at the house without Mrs. Amwell, he will harm me more than he has already.”
“Nonsense, child.” Nella vehemently shook her head back and forth.
“I swear it! The house has another spirit, too, of a young girl who was there before me, named Johanna. She died in the room next to mine, and I hear her crying at night.”
Nella’s palms splayed open as though she could not believe my words, like I was mad.
But I went on, resolute. “I very much want to remain in the service of Mrs. Amwell. And I promise, I will return to my post as soon as she has come back to London. I do not mean to inconvenience you. I only thought perhaps you could teach me how to brew something that will remove the spirits from the house, so I mustn’t listen to Johanna’s incessant crying anymore, and so that Mr. Amwell will leave me alone, once and for all. I could learn other things besides, and perhaps help you some while I am here.”
Nella looked me hard in the eye. “You listen here, Eliza. No potion has the power to remove spirits from the empty air we breathe. If one did exist, and if I had been the one to brew and bottle such a tincture, I would be a rich woman, living in a manor somewhere.” She traced a fingernail over a scratch on the table where we sat. “Bravery you have in telling me the truth. But I’m sorry, child. I cannot help you and you cannot stay here.”
Discouragement coursed through me; no matter my pleas, Nella had not offered to help me in any way, not even by offering a place to stay until Mrs. Amwell returned. And yet, I clung to the tremor in her voice. “Do you believe in spirits? Mrs. Amwell does not believe me, not even a bit.”
“I do not believe in ghosts, if that is what you’re asking of me. Little clouds of evil that children, like you, fear in the night. Think of it—if we become a ghost when we die, and if we haunt the places we once lived, would not all of London be in a perpetual fog?” She paused as the fire crackled loudly behind her. “But I do believe that sometimes, we feel remnants of those who lived before. These are not spirits, but rather creations of our own desperate imaginations.”
“So Johanna, who cries in the room next to mine...you think I am imagining her?” It was impossible; I’d never even met the girl.
Nella shrugged. “I cannot say, child. I have not known you long, but you are young, and therefore prone to wild ideas.”
“I am twelve,” I snapped back, my patience finally gone. “I am not so young.”
Meeting my eyes, Nella stood at last, grimacing, and made her way to the large cupboard at the back of the room. She ran her finger along the spines of several books, clicking her tongue against her teeth. Not finding what she wanted, she opened one of the cupboard doors and searched another stack of books, this one more disorderly than the last. Toward the bottom of the pile, she tugged on the spine of a small book and withdrew it.
It was very thin, more a pamphlet than a book, and the soft cover was torn at one corner. “This belonged to my mother,” she said, handing the book to me. “Though I never saw her open it, and I have seen no need myself.”
Peeling open the faded burgundy cover, I gasped at the frontispiece; it was an image of a woman giving birth to a bounty of fresh harvest, turnips and strawberries and mushrooms. Scattered around her bare breasts were several fish and a newborn pig. “What is this?” I asked Nella, my cheeks flushing.
“Someone gave it to my mother long ago, only a year or so before she died. It’s a book claiming to be filled with magick, intended for use by midwives and healers.”
“But she did not believe in magick, either,” I guessed.
Nella shook her head, then walked to her register and turned the pages backward, furrowing her brow as she searched the dates. Skimming her finger along the entries, she nodded. “Ah, yes. Take a look here.” She spun the register around to face me, then pointed at the entry:
6 Apr 1764, Ms Breyley, aus. wild honey, 1/2x pound, topical.
“A half pound of wild honey,” Nella read aloud.
I widened my eyes. “To eat?”
She pointed at the word topical. “No, to spread onto the skin.” She cleared her throat as she explained, “Ms. Breyley was hardly older than me. Hardly older than you. She came to my mother’s shop after midnight. Her cries woke us from sleep. An infant lay in her arms... She said that a few days prior, the little boy had been badly scalded by a kettle of hot water. My mother did not ask how. It did not matter so much as the poor boy’s condition. The wound had begun to fester and pus. Worse still, a rash was forming on other parts of his body, as though the wound had begun to crawl its way through the rest of him.
“My mother took the boy in her arms, felt the heat of him against her breast, then laid him onto this table and stripped off his clothes. She opened the jar of wild honey and slathered it onto his body. The infant began to cry and my mother, too. She knew how much it must have pained his new, delicate skin. It is the most distressing thing, Eliza, to issue pain to someone, even when you know it is for the best.”
Nella dabbed at her eye. “My mother would not let the young woman and her child leave, not for three days. They stayed with us, in the shop, so the honey could be applied every two hours. My mother did not miss a single treatment—she was not so much as a minute late in brushing the honey onto the baby’s skin for three entire days. She treated the boy as though he were her own.” She closed the register. “The pus dried. The spreading rash disappeared. The festering wound healed, with almost no scar.” She motioned to the book of magick she’d just given me. “That is why my mother never opened the book in your hands. Because saving lives with the gifts of the earth, Eliza, is as good as magick.”
I thought of the honey-covered baby that had once lain on the table where I now sat, and suddenly I felt ashamed of having mentioned magick at all.
“But I understand your curiosity about ghosts,” Nella went on, “and this is not about saving lives, anyhow. Inside the back cover is the name of a bookstore, and the street on which it’s located. I forget it now—something like Basing Lane. They have all sorts of books on magick, or so I’ve heard. The shop may not even exist anymore, but seeing as how you’d like a potion to remove spirits from the house, I think it as good a place to start as any.” She closed the cupboard door. “Better than here, anyway.”
I held the book in my hands, feeling the cool heft of it against my damp palms. A book of magick, I thought contentedly, with the address of a shop that sold more. Perhaps my visit to her today had not been as fruitless as I’d feared a moment ago. Anticipation beat inside my chest. I would go at once to this bookshop.
Suddenly, there was a light rapping, four soft clips, on the door. Nella looked again at the clock and groaned. I stood from my chair, ready to leave. But as Nella moved to the door, she placed a light hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back into my seat.
My heart surged, and Nella lowered her voice to a whisper. “My hand is not steady, and I could not bottle up the powder that I am to sell to the woman who has just arrived. I could use your help, this once, if you would not mind.”
I nodded eagerly—the magick bookshop could wait. Then, her knuckles still swollen and red, Nella opened the door.
12
Caroline
Present day, Tuesday
Just after six o’clock, with a coffee in hand and enough early sunlight to see by, I left the hotel and made my way toward Bear Alley. I sucked in deep, cleansing breaths and considered how best to handle James’s impending arrival. I could ask him to book a room at a different hotel, preferabl
y in another city, or print out our vows and tell me what, exactly, he didn’t understand about the words I will remain faithful. Whatever I asked him to do, one thing remained very clear: when I finally saw him, he wouldn’t much like what I had to say.
Distracted by my thoughts, I missed the crosswalk light and a taxi nearly ran me over as I crossed Farringdon Street. I waved my hand to the driver in a futile apology and silently cursed James for almost getting me killed.
On either side of Farringdon Street, imposing concrete-and-glass buildings rose high into the sky; as I’d feared, most of the area around Bear Alley looked to be taken up by mega corporations, and it seemed unlikely that anything existing two hundred years ago would remain today. With my destination only half a block ahead, I resigned myself to the fact that Bear Alley might be little more than a driveway.
At last, I came upon a small white-and-black placard marking an alleyway hidden between high-rise buildings: Bear Alley, EC4. The alley did indeed appear to be a service route for delivery trucks. Overfilled garbage cans cluttered one side of the alley while a mess of cigarette butts and fast-food containers littered the blackened pavement. Disappointment settled heavy on my chest; though I didn’t expect a sign reading Apothecary Killer Was Here, I’d hoped there would be a bit more intrigue than this.
As I walked deeper into the alley, the street noise fading quickly behind me, I realized that behind the street-front concrete-and-steel buildings were older brick structures. Ahead of me, the alley stretched on for a couple hundred meters. I scanned the area to see a man leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and checking his phone—but other than him, the lane was empty. Despite this, I felt no fear; my adrenaline was high in anticipation of James’s arrival.
I walked slowly between the brick buildings, searching for anything interesting as I made my way to the end of the alley, but I only found more trash. I asked myself what I was searching for. It wasn’t as though I needed proof that the vial, or the unnamed apothecary, had a connection to this alley. After all, I wasn’t even convinced she existed; the hospital note could have been written by a deranged, hallucinating woman in the hours before her death.
But the possibility of the apothecary’s existence, the mystery of it, drew me deeper. The youthful, adventurous Caroline had begun to come alive again. I thought of my unused history degree, my diploma shoved away in a desk drawer. As a student, I’d been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, those whose names weren’t acknowledged and recorded in textbooks. And now, I’d stumbled on the mystery of one of those nameless, forgotten people—and a woman, no less.
If I was honest with myself, this adventure drew me in for another reason: I sought distraction from the message sitting in my inbox. Like the final day of a vacation, I longed for something, anything, to delay the inevitable confrontation to come. Placing my hand over my belly, I sighed. I also sought a distraction from the fact that my period still hadn’t shown.
Disheartened, I approached the end of the alleyway. But then to my right, I spotted a steel gate, about six feet high and four feet wide, cracked and warped with age. Beyond the gate was a small square clearing, roughly half the length of a basketball court, unpaved and overgrown with shrubs. Discarded equipment littered the clearing: rusted pipes, metal sheeting and other trash that looked well suited for a colony of stray cats. The clearing was surrounded by the timeworn walls of the brick buildings around it, and I found it strange that a lot in obvious disuse was situated in such a popular commercial area. I was no real estate developer, but it seemed like a waste of perfectly good space.
I leaned into the gate, held in place by two stone pillars, and pushed my face up against the bars to better see the clearing. Though two hundred years had passed since the apothecary might have lived, my imagination grasped at the possibility that the tucked-away, abandoned clearing in front of me had remained unchanged. Perhaps she had walked this very ground. I wished badly the area wasn’t so crowded with shrubs and weeds, because the walls surrounding it looked ancient, too. How long had these buildings even existed?
“Looking for a lost cat?” came a husky voice from behind me. I jerked my head away from the gate and turned around. About fifteen feet away, a man in blue canvas pants and a matching shirt stood watching me, an amused look on his face. A construction worker, possibly. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he offered.
“Th-that’s all right,” I stammered, feeling ridiculous. What good reason could I possibly give for peeking through a locked gate in an inconspicuous alley? “My husband is just around the corner,” I lied. “He was going to take a picture of me in front of this old gate.” Inside, I cringed at my own words.
He glanced behind him as though checking for my invisible husband. “Well, don’t let me stop you, then. Creepy place for a picture, though, if you ask me.” He snickered, taking a pull from his cigarette.
I appreciated that he kept a safe distance away, and I glanced up at some of the windows around me. Surely I was safe; as secluded as the alley felt, it was within sight of plenty of people in the buildings.
Feeling slightly more at ease, I decided to use this stranger’s arrival to my advantage. Perhaps I could glean some information from him. “Yeah, I guess it is creepy,” I said. “Any idea why this clearing even exists?”
He stamped out his cigarette with his foot and crossed his arms. “No idea. A few years back, a biergarten tried to set up shop. Would’ve been perfect, but heard they couldn’t get permits. It’s hard to see from here, but there’s actually a service door over there—” He pointed at the left end of the clearing, where a few bushes stood taller than me. “Probably just leads to a subcellar or something. Guess the folks who own the building want to keep this area clear in case they ever need to get in there.” A buzzing noise suddenly came from his pocket, and he withdrew a small walkie-talkie. “That’s me,” he said. “Always a pipe to install or fix.”
So he was a plumber. “Well, thanks for the info,” I said.
“No worries.” He waved while walking away, and I listened closely to the steady sound of his footsteps as they faded out of earshot.
I turned back to the gate. Using a dislodged stone on one of the pillars, I pulled myself up a few inches to get a better look over it. I directed my gaze to the left side of the clearing, where the plumber had pointed. From this higher vantage point, I squinted, trying to see past the branches.
Behind one shrub, I could make out what appeared to be a large piece of wood set into the aged brick building; the base of the wood piece was partially hidden amid tall, thick weeds. A rustle of breeze moved the branches ever so slightly, and then I caught the crumbling, reddish protrusion of something halfway down the wood. A rusty door handle.
I gasped, nearly losing my footing on the stone pillar. It was most definitely a door. And by the looks of it, it had not been opened in a very, very long time.
13
Nella
February 8, 1791
As I opened the door for the woman whose arrival I’d been dreading, shadows threw her figure into silhouette, and her features were masked behind a sheer veil. I could make out only the width of her skirts and the delicate lace trimming around her collar. Then she took a hesitant step forward into the shop, a breeze of lavender floating behind her, and candlelight illuminated her form.
I covered a gasp; for the second time in a week, before me stood a customer unlike any that had been in my shop. First it had been a child, but now it was a grown woman who, by mere appearances, seemed more suited to the airy parlors of Kensington than my lowly, concealed shop. Her gown, a deep green edged with golden embroidered lilies, seized nearly a quarter of the space, and I feared a single turn may send half my vials to the floor.
The woman removed her veil and gloves, setting them on the table. Eliza seemed unsurprised by the visitor, taking the gloves immediately to the fi
re to dry them. The gesture was so obvious, and yet one that had not crossed my mind as I stood, stunned, observing the lady poised before me. If there was any doubt about her wealth, her status, it was gone now.
“It’s so dark in here,” she said, her cochineal-painted lips turned downward.
“I will add more wood to the fire,” chirped Eliza. It was only her second time in my shop, and yet in some ways, she had begun to outwit me.
“Sit, my lady, please,” I said, motioning to the second chair.
She lowered herself delicately into it and let out a long, shaky breath. She removed a small hairpin from the back of her head, adjusted a dangle of curls and re-pinned them into place.
Eliza stepped forward with a mug in her hand, setting it carefully on the table before the woman. “Warm peppermint water, miss,” she said, curtsying.
I looked to Eliza, perplexed, wondering where she’d even found the spare mug, much less the crushed peppermint leaves. There was no chair for her, but I expected her to drop onto the floor or busy herself with the magick book I had given her.
“Thank you for the information in your letter,” I said to the woman.
She raised her brow. “I didn’t know how much to say. I took great lengths to protect myself in the event it was seized.”
Yet another reason I didn’t meddle with the rich: people always wanted what they have, their secrets most of all. “You said just enough, and I believe you will be pleased with the preparation.”
A loud screeching sound interrupted us, and I turned to see Eliza dragging a wooden box across the floor. She pushed the box up to the table, between the woman and myself, and folded her hands in her lap. “I’m Eliza,” she said to the woman. “We are so pleased to have you here.”