by Sarah Penner
I gasped, pointing at the word sister.
“I remember that one well,” Nella said as I darkened the letters. “Ms. Bechem’s brother was a greedy man. She discovered a letter—he meant to kill their father in a week’s time, to inherit a great estate.”
“She killed her brother, so he would not kill their father?”
“Precisely. You understand, Eliza, that no good comes of greed. Certainly, no good came of this... Ms. Bechem felt someone would end up dead. The question, then, was who.”
I traced Ms. Bechem’s first name, Allie, making long downward strokes. The quill moved easily over the rough parchment, as though the pen itself knew the importance of this effort, the importance of preserving Ms. Allie Bechem’s name and what she’d done.
Then my eye caught her name again. Just several days later, on December 11, she’d returned to the shop.
“This time, I sold Ms. Bechem nerve-root for her mother,” Nella explained. “The poor woman had just lost her son, and quite unexpectedly at that. Nerve-root is entirely benign, not harmful in any way. It is meant for hysteria.”
“Poor lady. I do hope it worked.”
Nella motioned to the register, urging me to finish the page. “Nerve-root is quite effective,” she said, “though the truth about her son and his plot would have been the best remedy. Alas, I don’t know if her daughter revealed it. No matter, her secret is safe in here.” She ran her finger along the edge of the book, toying with the pages.
I understood, now, why Nella sold medicines in addition to her poisons. People like Ms. Bechem needed both.
Except I still did not know why Nella sold poisons at all. During my first visit to her shop, she’d said the hidden room didn’t exist when she’d worked at the shop as a child with her mother. Why did Nella build the secret room and begin to brew terrible things behind it? I resolved to find the courage to ask her, and soon.
After I finished the entry, Nella flipped the pages again, landing on 1789. The year stood out in my memory; it was the year my mother had left me in London to work for the Amwell family. Only, the entries on this page appeared in good condition. I could not see any that needed work.
“Why, this was just before I arrived in London,” I offered.
“I think you might like this page,” Nella replied. “There is a name on here you should recognize.”
At once, it became a game. I scanned my eyes over the entries, doing my best to ignore the dates and ingredients, searching instead for a name I knew. My own mother, perhaps?
Then I saw it: Mrs. Amwell.
“Oh!” I gasped. “My mistress!” Quickly, I read the rest of the entry. Had my mistress poisoned someone once before? “Indian hemp?” I asked Nella, pointing to the register.
“One of the most powerful drugs in my shop,” she said, “but like the nerve-root, there is nothing harmful about it. Indian hemp is especially useful in the case of tremors or spasms.” She looked at me, waiting. When I did not respond, she explained, “Eliza, your mistress came to my shop when the shaking in her hands first began. I’d forgotten about her visit, until you mentioned earlier today that you write her letters for her.” She ran her fingers over the entry, a faraway look in her eyes. “The gentlemen’s doctors could do nothing for her. She’d paid visits to a dozen of them. She came to me when she felt she had no options left.” She briefly set her hand over mine. “Your mistress had never been here before. She only knew of it from a friend.”
A sense of overwhelming sadness fell over me. I’d never considered that Mrs. Amwell had sought help from so many doctors. I’d never considered at all how she felt about her impediment.
“Did the Indian hemp help?” I asked, glancing again at the entry to ensure I repeated the words correctly.
Nella paused and looked down at her own hands as if ashamed. “Remember what I told you, Eliza,” she finally said. “This is not a shop of magick. The gifts of the earth, while valuable, are not infallible.” She lifted her head, shaking herself from her reverie. “But it’s all right. For if the Indian hemp had worked too well, then your mistress would not need your help writing letters. And you would not be sitting here now, helping me with my register. And you remember what I said about the importance of the register, right?”
Aiming to impress her, I recited what she’d said a few minutes ago. “The register is important because the names of these women might otherwise be forgotten. They are preserved here, in your pages, if nowhere else.”
“Very good,” Nella concluded. “Now, let’s do a few more. The sun is falling fast.”
How did she know? Without windows, and without glancing at the clock, I certainly could not tell the sun was falling fast. But I could not ask her, for Nella had already turned to another page, hovering her hand over an entry that needed attention.
I got back to work, eager to please my new tutor.
* * *
After sundown, I gathered my coat and pulled out my gloves, which had never sifted through shrubs or dirt or wherever it was that beetles made their home, and eagerly pulled them on.
My hands were sore already—the careful tracing had left them stiff—but I could hardly wait for the next adventure.
Seeing the spark in my eye, Nella raised her brows. “Don’t expect your gloves to be so clean when we’re done,” she said. “This is dirty work, child.”
We walked for more than an hour, eventually making our way to a broad, quiet field separated from the road by hedges that were taller than me. The air grew unbearably cold as darkness spread across the sky, and I could not help but think that if I were a beetle, I would have traveled south long ago to the warm, humid air of some seaside village. And yet, Nella assured me that the beetles liked the cold—that they preferred starchy root crops, like beets, where they could nestle in to dine on the sugar and then sleep.
There was only a sliver of moon to see by. Nella and I each held a linen sack, and I watched her closely in the dark as she got onto her hands and knees, located a bundle of green, veiny leaves, and brushed aside a thin layer of hay until she reached the shoulders of the beet bulb underneath.
“Here we have the fruit,” she said, continuing to dig. “They prefer to eat the leaves, but this time of night, they will be burrowed in the soil.” And then, out of nowhere, she withdrew a glossy little bug, no longer than her thumbnail. “Now this is very important,” she said, dropping the squirming beetle into the bag. “Do not press them or crush them.”
I wiggled my toes in my shoes, hardly able to feel them even though we had been in the field only a few minutes. “How can I get one from the ground without pressing it?” I asked, my interest in the whole activity suddenly waning. “When I find one, I will need to grab him before he runs off, and I cannot do that without pressing on him a bit.”
“Let’s do the next one together,” she urged, patting the ground beside her. It seemed her aches and discomforts had lessened; perhaps the cold had numbed her. “Reach into that same spot, where I just put my hand. I’m sure I felt another set of legs.”
I shuddered. I had expected we would use a tool—a net or spade—instead of our gloved hands. But I did as she asked, grateful that the dark sky prevented her from seeing the grimace on my face. I moved my hand around the hard, smooth bulb of beetroot, and then I felt it: something crawled against my fingers, something very much alive. Steeling myself, I twisted my hand in the dirt and cupped my fingers around it. I lifted a pile of soil to show Nella and, sure enough, a green striped beetle crawled out of the dirt as though to greet us.
“Very good,” she said. “Your first harvest. Drop him in the bag and close it up, else he will make quick work of escaping back to his little beetroot. I’ll start over there, on the next row. We need one hundred beetles. Keep count of yours.”
“One hundred?” I glanced down at my single beetle, writhing around in the bag. “Why, we’ll
be here all night.”
She cocked her head at me, her face serious. The moonlight reflected against her left eye, giving her a strange, two-faced appearance. “It’s curious to me, child, that you’d complain of the effort in catching a night’s worth of beetles—mere bugs—and yet you think nothing of killing a man.”
I shuddered, wishing she hadn’t reminded me of Mr. Amwell’s ghost, still pressing inside of me, making me trickle blood.
“It is hard work,” she said, “and harder for me, as of late. Go on, now, let’s get to it.”
* * *
The night passed, though how much of it, I could not in truth be sure. The moon moved a quarter of the way across the sky, but I was not wise enough to use it as my clock.
“Seventy-four,” I heard Nella say from behind me, her feet crunching on the hay beneath us. “And you?”
“Twenty-eight,” I replied. I had counted diligently, repeating the number in my head, lest I forget and be forced to reach in and count the crunchy bugs again.
“Ah! We’re finished then, and with two to spare.” She helped me to my feet, for my knees were sore and my hands raw.
We began to walk toward the road when I grasped her arm, distress warming me in an instant. “There will be no coaches running this late,” I gasped. “We do not have to walk all the way back, do we?” I could not do it, not for anything.
“You have two perfectly good legs, don’t you?” she replied, but at the sight of my miserable expression, she broke into a smile. “Oh, don’t despair. We will rest over there, in that shed. It’s quite warm, in fact, and perfectly quiet. We will take the first coach in the morning.”
Trespassing seemed a worse offense than harvesting deadly beetles, but I followed Nella willingly—excitedly, even, for I so desperately wanted to rest—as we went through an unlocked door into the wooden shed that was, as she had promised, warm, dark and quiet. It reminded me of the barn at home in the country, and I cringed at the thought of what my mother would say to me if she saw me now, awake in the middle of the night with a bag of deadly bugs in my hand.
It took my eyes several moments to adjust, but eventually I could make out a wheelbarrow at the far end of the structure and, closer toward us, an assortment of tools for tending a field. Along the wall to our right, several haystacks were pushed neatly against one another. It was here that Nella stepped forward, nestling herself against one of the stacks.
“It’s warmest here,” she urged, “and if you pile up a bit of hay on the ground, it makes a decent bed. Watch out for the mice, though. They like it here as much as we do.”
Looking back at the door, fearing that some angry grounds owner might come chasing after us, I reluctantly followed Nella and made my own spot. She sat across from me, our feet almost touching, then pulled a small bundle from underneath her coat and unwrapped a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese and a leather canteen of what I assumed to be water. The moment she handed it to me, I realized how desperately thirsty I was. As I drank, the beetles in the bag rustled next to me.
“Have as much as you want,” she said. “There’s a barrel behind this shed, full of rainwater.” I realized that not only had she used the shed previously for shelter, but she had, apparently, explored the grounds for other resources.
I finally pulled the canteen away and wiped water from my lips with a long edge of my skirt. “Do you often go onto other people’s farmland to get what you need?” I thought not only of this shed, which did not belong to us, but the field where we’d just spent almost an entire night.
She shook her head. “Almost never. The wild, uncultivated earth provides most of what I need, and she disguises well her poisons. You have seen a belladonna bloom, yes? It opens like a cocoon. It seduces, almost. It may seem rare and unusual, but the truth is that this sort of thing may be found everywhere. The earth knows the secret to disguise, and many would not believe that the low fields they tend, or the trellis vines under which they kiss, hold poison within their stems. One only need know where to look.”
I glanced at the hay bales against which we sat, wondering if Nella had some trick, possibly, to extract poison from something as innocent as dried grass. “Did you learn all this from books?” In her shop, I had seen the stacks of dozens of books, some appearing worn and well used, and I began now to feel foolish for broaching the idea of a short apprenticeship. It must have taken her years to learn everything she knew.
Nella took a bite of cheese, chewing slowly. “No. My mother.”
Her words were sharp and uninviting, but this only served to pique my curiosity. “Your mother who did not have the wall or poisons.”
“That’s right. As I’ve said, a woman does not need to hide behind a wall if she has no secrets and does no wrong.”
I thought of my mistress and myself, sitting in the drawing room behind a closed door, pretending to write letters, while Mr. Amwell suffered upstairs.
“My mother was a good woman,” Nella added, letting out a shaky breath. “She did not dispense a single poison in her lifetime. You may have noticed it while looking through the older entries in my book tonight. The older remedies are helpful, curative. All of them.”
I sat up straighter, wondering if Nella might finally share her story with me. Bravely, I ventured the question. “If she did not dispense poisons, how did she teach you about them?”
Nella looked hard at me. “Many good remedies are poisonous in great quantities or when prepared a certain way. She taught me these quantities and preparations for my own safety, and for the safety of our patrons. Besides, just because my mother did not use poisons against anyone does not mean she did not know how.” She nestled farther into the hay bale. “I suppose this made her even more admirable. Like a dog with a mouthful of sharp teeth who never once attacks, my mother’s knowledge was a weapon she never once used.”
“But you—” The words tumbled out of me, and I snapped my mouth shut before I finished. It was clear that Nella had decided to use her own knowledge as a weapon. Why?
“Yes, me.” She folded her hands in her lap and met my gaze directly. “Eliza, let me ask you something. When you set the plate in front of Mr. Amwell—the one with the larger eggs, which you knew would kill him that very day—what did you feel inside?”
I thought carefully, remembering that morning as though it had happened only moments ago: his hot gaze as I stepped into the dining room; my mistress’s soft eyes, in quiet alliance with me; and the sensation of oily fingers trailing up the back of my knee and along the skin of my thigh. I thought, too, of the day Mr. Amwell, my once-trusted master, gave me the brandy while my mistress was at the winter gardens—and what might have happened if the footman had not called for him to come downstairs.
“I felt like I was protecting myself,” I said. “Because he meant to do me harm.”
Nella nodded eagerly, as she might if she were leading me down a path in the forest, encouraging me to follow. “And what were you protecting yourself from?”
I swallowed, nervous to share the truth; I had never told Nella why Mrs. Amwell wanted to kill her husband, and why I helped her do it. But I was the first to ask the prying question, so I owed her my own story, too. “He had begun to touch me in ways that I did not like.”
Again, a slow nod. “Yes, but look deeper than that. His unwelcome touch, as much as it repulsed you... Why was it different than, say, a stranger on the street? I suspect you would not resort to murder if a stranger let his hand stray?”
“I do not trust most strangers on the street,” I said. “But I trusted Mr. Amwell. Until recently, he gave me no reason not to.” I paused, slowing my breath, and thought of Johanna. “I learned there are secrets in his house. Things he has destroyed, things he has kept hidden. I feared I was to be one of them.”
Satisfied, Nella leaned forward and patted my foot. “First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot ha
ve one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.” I nodded, and she leaned back again. “Eliza, what you have just described is the same heart-wrenching journey of every woman to whom I have sold a poison. And it is, indeed, the same path for me.”
She frowned as if thinking of a long-buried memory. “I did not set out to brew poisons. It is not as though I came from the womb a born killer. Something happened to me, long ago. I was in love once, you see. His name was Frederick.” She stopped suddenly, in spite of herself, and I thought she might cease her story. But she cleared her throat and went on. “I expected a proposal. He had promised it to me. Alas, he was a fantastic actor and liar, and I soon learned that I was not the only recipient of his affection.”
I gasped and placed my hand over my mouth. “How did you find out?” I asked, feeling privy to the scandal and secrets typically reserved for girls much older than myself.
“It is a sad story, Eliza,” she said. She nudged my foot with her own. “And you must listen very carefully to me. After we prepare the beetle powder together in the morning, I do not want to see you at my shop again. This is my work, my grief to bottle up and dispense.” Disappointment and enthrallment tugged equally at me, but I nodded so she would go on.
And so she began her story, and though each word seemed to rise painfully to the surface like a boil, I also sensed that her words were a form of release. I might have been only twelve, but sitting together amid the hay bales, I felt as if Nella considered me a friend.
“My mother died when I was a young woman,” she explained. “This was two decades ago, though the grief is still tender, like a bruise. Have you ever grieved?”
I shook my head. Other than Mr. Amwell, I’d never known someone who’d died.
Nella took a deep, steadying breath. “It is a terrible, exhausting, lonely thing. One day, at the very peak of my grief, a young man named Frederick arrived at the shop—which was not one of poisons, yet—and he begged for something to give to his sister, Rissa, to induce bleeding, for the cramping in her belly was unbearable and it had been half a year since her monthly course.”