by Sarah Penner
The second possibility, of course, was that the cupboard wall might not protect me. As safe as I’d felt behind it in years past, my shop’s address had never been exposed in such a blatant way. The disguise was not infallible; the authorities might arrive with hounds at their heels, and the dogs would surely smell my scent of fear through the wall. If the authorities broke their way through and arrested me, what legacy was left to preserve from prison? The lingering trace of my mother was delicate enough; memories of her came easily as I moved about my shop, but these precious recollections would not follow me to Newgate.
That wasn’t to say I would find myself alone; I expected the constables would soon bring in the countless other women whose names were in my register. Women I intended to aid, to comfort, would then be alongside me behind the iron bars, and we would be accompanied only by the unwanted groping of the prison guards.
No, I refused it. I refused both possibilities, because there was one more alternative.
This third and final choice was to lock up the shop, leave the register safely behind the false wall, and hasten my own death: to dive into the icy depths of the River Thames, to make myself one with the shadows of Blackfriars Bridge. I had thought of it many times, most recently while crossing the river with baby Beatrice in my arms, as I’d gazed at the waves lapping against the creamy white stone pillars and felt the film of mist on my nose.
Had all of my life led me to this destiny, that fateful moment when the cold water would braid around me and pull me under?
But the child. Eliza was at the shop, just where I left her, and I could not leave her alone to suffer the inquisition of a bailiff that might find his way to 3 Back Alley. What if Eliza heard a commotion, peeked out of the door and unwittingly exposed what lay behind the false wall? She’d made one grave mistake already; if she made another and found herself facing an angry constable, I could not ask the poor child to defend all that I’d done.
It had hardly been fifteen minutes since I left her. Stuffing the newspaper back into my bag, I stepped out of the alley to return to my shop of poisons. I could not choose a certain death. Not yet, anyhow.
I had to go back for her. I had to go back for little Eliza.
* * *
I heard her before I saw her, and fury rose inside of me. Her careless noisemaking could have ruined us, if the drawing in the newspaper didn’t do it first.
“Eliza,” I hissed, closing the cupboard door behind me. “I can hear your clatter from halfway across the city. Have you no—”
But my breath caught at the scene before me: at the table in the center of the room, Eliza sat before numerous jars, bottles and crushed leaves of all colors, sorted into separate bowls. There must have been two dozen vessels in all.
She looked up at me, pestle in hand, a look of concentration frozen into her brow. Her cheek was smeared with reddish pigment—merely beet powder, I prayed—and the strands of hair above her forehead jutted out in all directions, as though she’d been boiling water over the fire. For a moment, I was returned to this same scene thirty years ago, but it was me at the table and my mother stood over me, her eyes patient if not a bit vexed.
The memory lasted only an instant. “What is all of this?” I asked, fearing that the crushed leaves that littered my table, floor and instruments might be deadly. If so, the cleanup of such a virulent mess would be dreadful.
“I—I’m working on some hot brews,” she stammered. “Remember the first time I visited? You gave me—ah, it was called valerian, I think. Here, I found some.” She pulled a dark reddish jar toward her. Instinctively, I glanced to the third shelf from the bottom of the back wall; the spot where the valerian should be was indeed empty. “And here, too—rosewater and peppermint.” She thrust the vials forward.
Where to begin with this ignorant child? Had she no sense? “Eliza, don’t touch another thing. How on earth do you know that none of these may kill you?” I rushed to the table, my eyes scanning each jar. “You’re to tell me that you began pulling things from my shelves without any knowledge of what they may do to you? Oh, heavens, which ones have you tasted?”
Panic rose inside of me as I began to consider antidotes to my most lethal poisons, cures that could be quickly blended and administered.
“I have been listening very closely in recent days,” she said. I frowned, not believing I’d had any recent need for things such as rosewater and venom and fern root, the last of which was clearly marked on the wooden box balancing precariously at the edge of the table. “And I also referenced a couple of your books over there.” She pointed at the books, but they appeared untouched, meaning that Eliza was either lying about this, or she had the sleight of a well-practiced thief. “I’ve prepared a couple of the teas here, for us to try.” She bravely pushed two cups toward me, one of them brimming with liquid of a deep indigo color and the other, a pale brown resembling the inside of a chamber pot. “Before I leave for good,” she added, her voice trembling.
I had no interest in her hot brews and I had a mind to tell her as such, but I reminded myself that Eliza hadn’t read the news article that left me with such taut nerves. Now, more than ever, I needed to remain diligent and discreet—and it would be prudent to resume tidying the shop once and for all. Though I had no aim to return, I could not bear to leave it disheveled.
“Listen very closely to me, girl.” I set down the market bag, empty except for the newspaper. “You must leave. Right now, without a moment to waste.”
Her hand fell into a pile of crushed leaves on the table. Defeated and heartbroken, she seemed in that moment more a child than I’d ever known her to be. She glanced at the cupboard where the canister stood, the one that Lady Clarence had returned to us. How confused Eliza must have been by my forcefulness and the sudden necessity to make haste.
Still, I would not tell her my reasoning—I would not tell her what I knew. I meant, even then, to protect her.
I tilted my head, pitying the both of us. I wished I could send her to Lady Clarence’s, but knowing that the authorities were there, asking questions, it was much too close for my comfort. “Please go back to the Amwell house, child. I know you fear it so, but you must go. It will be safe, I promise.”
Surrounded by crushed leaves and colorful spills, Eliza gazed over the jars and bottles in front of her as she considered my request. At last, she nodded and said, “I will go.” Then she wrapped her fingers around something I could not see and stuffed it into her dress. I did not care enough to question her about it; let the child take what she wants. Greater concerns awaited me.
After all, our very lives were at stake.
24
Caroline
Present day, Wednesday
At the back of the coffee shop, Gaynor and I leaned close together, the two articles about the apothecary spread on the table in front of us. They’d been published in a paper called The Thursday Bulletin, which, Gaynor explained, was not a widely circulated periodical and ran only between 1778 and 1792. According to her brief research that morning, the paper eventually shut down due to lack of funding, and the library’s archive carried only a fraction of the published issues, none of which had been digitized.
“Then how did you find these?” I asked her, taking a sip from my coffee.
Gaynor grinned. “Our dates were all wrong. If the hospital note was indeed a deathbed confession, the author was probably referencing something that had happened earlier in her life. So, I searched the manuscripts and expanded my search to the late 1700s. I also added the keyword poison, which seemed logical for an apothecary who helped kill people. The search returned this article, and of course I spotted the image of the bear immediately.”
Gaynor lifted the earlier bulletin, dated February 10, 1791. The headline read “Bailiff Searching for Lord Clarence’s Murderer.”
Since Gaynor had already read it, she went to the counter to order a latte whi
le I picked up the article and skimmed it quickly. By the time she returned, I’d moved to the edge of my seat, mouth agape. “This is scandalous!” I told her. “Lord Clarence, Lady Clarence, a maid serving the dessert liqueur at a dinner party... Are you sure this is real?”
“More than sure,” Gaynor said. “I checked the parish records on Lord Clarence. Sure enough, his date of death is recorded as February 9, 1791.”
I pointed to the image in the article again. “So the maid made a wax impression of the bear on the jar, and...” I ran my fingers over the printed image. “And it’s the same as the bear on my vial.”
“One and the same,” Gaynor confirmed. “It makes sense, the more I think about it. If the apothecary really did dispense poisons to multiple women, maybe the bear was her logo, her mark that she put on all her vials. In which case, your finding one in the river is still incredible, but not as coincidental as we originally thought.”
Gaynor lifted the article and reread a portion of it. “And here’s where things get a bit unfortunate for our dear apothecary. The wax impression didn’t just have the image of the bear. It had a few letters, too.” She pointed to the section indicating that the police were looking to decipher the letters B ley.
“Police suspected this was part of an address. Obviously, we know from the hospital note that this meant Bear Alley. But at the time of this printing, police didn’t know it.” Gaynor lifted the lid from her cup to let her latte cool, and I held my breath, envisioning the door I’d gone through last night. I suspected B ley didn’t mean Bear Alley at all. It probably meant Back Alley, the walkway leading to the apothecary’s concealed room.
“It seems wild that she would put her address on any of her vials, doesn’t it?” Gaynor shrugged. “Who knows what she was thinking. Maybe a careless mistake.” She reached for the second article. “Anyway, I also brought the other bulletin with me, and it’s this one that identifies the woman as an apothecary. And more than that, an apothecary killer. I suspect that soon after the first article was printed...” Gaynor trailed off. “Well, let’s just say it was the beginning of the end for her.”
I frowned. “The beginning of the end?”
Gaynor flipped to the second article, dated February 12, 1791. But I didn’t have the chance to read it because my phone, sitting on the table in case James called, began to ring. I checked the screen, my heart lurching when I saw that it was him. “Hi—are you okay?”
I heard his haggard breathing first, a slow intake of a breath followed by a shaky, wheezy exhale. “Caroline,” he said, his voice so quiet that I could hardly hear him. “I need to go to the hospital.” I pressed my hand to my mouth, sure that my heart had stopped. “I tried dialing 911, but it’s not going through.”
I closed my eyes, vaguely recalling a pamphlet at the hotel check-in desk with the emergency number for the United Kingdom. But in my moment of disoriented terror, I couldn’t remember the number.
The sensation of vertigo hit as panic rose inside of me; the coffee shop, buzzing with chatter and the hiss of an espresso machine, shifted on its axis. “I’ll be right there,” I choked out, sliding out of the chair and grabbing my things.
“I have to go,” I told Gaynor, my hands shaking fiercely. “I’m sorry, it’s my husband, he’s sick—” At once, my eyes welled with tears. Despite what I’d felt toward James in recent days, I was now so terrified that my mouth had gone dry; I couldn’t even swallow. On the phone, James had sounded like he was struggling to breathe.
Gaynor looked at me, confusion and concern on her face. “Your husband? Oh, God, yes, okay, go. But—” She picked up the two articles and handed them to me. “Take these. The copies are for you.”
I thanked her, folded the pages in half and shoved them into my bag. Then, offering her a final apology, I rushed out the door and started running to the hotel, hot tears finally breaking through and rolling down my cheeks for the first time since I’d arrived in London.
* * *
When I entered the hotel room, the stench hit me first: the sweet, acidic odor that I had smelled on him earlier. Vomit.
I tossed my bag onto the floor, ignoring the water bottle and notebook that fell out, and rushed into the bathroom. I found James on his side in a fetal position, knees tucked up against his chest, white as a sheet and trembling terribly. He must have removed his shirt at some point because it lay rumpled near the door, soaked through with sweat. This morning I couldn’t bear the sight of him without a shirt, but now I dropped to my knees alongside him and placed my hand on his bare stomach.
He looked at me with sunken eyes, and a scream rose into my throat. There was blood on his mouth.
“James,” I cried. “Oh, God—”
It was then that I looked inside the toilet. More than just vomit, it looked as though someone had splashed it with crimson watercolor paint. Unsteady on my feet, I ran to the hotel phone and asked for the front desk’s help calling an ambulance. I hung up and rushed back into the bathroom. This wasn’t food poisoning from Italian food, that much was clear. But I had zero medical knowledge of any kind; how was it that James had only a mild cough this morning, and now he was vomiting blood to within an inch of his life? Something didn’t make sense.
“Did you eat anything after you went out this morning?” I asked him.
From where he lay on the floor, he shook his head weakly. “I’ve had nothing. I haven’t eaten anything.”
“No water, no nothing?” Perhaps he drank something he shouldn’t have, or—
“Just the oil you gave me, which I’m sure came up a long time ago.”
I frowned. “There’s nothing to come up. You just rub it on your throat, like you’ve done before.”
James shook his head again. “I asked if you had DayQuil and you said no, you had yucca oil or something.”
The color drained from my face. “Eucalyptus?”
“Yeah, that one,” he groaned, wiping his mouth with his hand. “I took it like I would take DayQuil.”
The bottle sat next to the sink, and the label affixed to it was clear: the toxic oil was meant for topical application only. Not to be ingested. And if the danger wasn’t obvious enough, the label also stated that ingestion may cause seizures or death in kids.
“You drank this?” I asked incredulously, and James nodded. “How much?” But before he could answer, I lifted the vial up to the light. Thank God, it wasn’t empty—not even half empty. But still, he drank a mouthful of it? “James, this is fucking toxic!”
He responded by hugging his knees closer into his chest. “I didn’t know,” he mumbled in a soft voice. It was so pathetic, I wanted to crawl on the floor next to him and apologize, even though I’d done nothing wrong.
There came an abrupt knock at the door and a shout from the other side. “Medics,” said a deep male voice.
The next few minutes passed in a blur as I was told to stand aside while the paramedics evaluated James. Including a pair of hotel managers who’d just appeared, there must have been ten people in the room, a merry-go-round of spinning, concerned faces.
A young woman in a well-kept, navy blue uniform stood near me—La Grande was embroidered on her shirt—and she offered me tea, a biscuit, even a sandwich tray. I declined them all, instead trying to listen to the thick British accents flying around as everyone made an effort to treat my husband. They asked him question after question, only some of which I could understand.
The medics pulled equipment from a heavy canvas bag: an oxygen mask, blood pressure cuff and stethoscope. The hotel bathroom soon resembled a trauma room, and the sight of the equipment was like a slap in the face as I wondered, for the very first time, if this might be a matter of life and death for James. No, I shook my head, don’t even go there. It won’t happen. They won’t let it happen.
When I left for London without James on our “anniversary” trip, I expected emotional turm
oil, but not of this kind. Now, with my own wounds still so raw, I found myself hoping desperately that James didn’t die on the bathroom floor in front of me, even if I’d had such fleeting, dark notions about killing someone in the hours after learning of his affair.
Soon, James told the medics about the eucalyptus oil, and one of them lifted the bottle to look at it, just as I’d done. “The bottle is forty mil, but it’s still half-full,” the medic said in an authoritative voice. “How much of this did you have?”
“Just a swallow,” James muttered as someone shone a small light into his eyes.
One of the paramedics repeated this into the cell phone he held at his ear. “Hypotension, yes. Significant vomiting. Blood, yes. No alcohol, other medicines.” They all paused a moment, and I assumed that someone on the other end of the line was plugging things into a database, perhaps to determine urgent treatment methods.
“How long ago was it ingested?” the paramedic asked James, holding an oxygen mask to his face. He shrugged, but I saw in his eyes that he was terrified, confused and struggling even now to breathe.
“Two and a half, three hours ago,” I offered.
Everyone turned to look at me, like it was the first time they’d noticed my presence.
“Were you with him when he drank it?”
I nodded.
“And does the oil belong to you?”
Again, I nodded.
“Right, then.” The paramedic turned back to James. “You’ll be coming with us.”
“T-to the hospital?” James muttered, lifting his head slightly from the floor. Knowing James, he wanted to fight this, to magically make himself well, to insist that he’d be fine if only they’d give him a few minutes.