by Sarah Penner
But I frowned, reading the entry more closely. The first name in the entry, the person meant to ingest the poison, was Miss Berkwell. Lord Clarence, who actually ingested it, was mentioned only in reference to Miss Berkwell; she was his cousin. And the final name listed, the purchaser of the poison, was the Lady Clarence. His wife.
I reread the end of the first newspaper article and it did not even mention a Miss Berkwell. The article stated, very clearly, that Lord Clarence was dead, and doubt existed as to whether it was his wife or someone else who had slipped poison into his drink. Yet the apothecary’s register entry implied he wasn’t supposed to die at all. The intended victim was Miss Berkwell.
According to what lay in front of me, the wrong person had died. Did anyone, besides Lady Clarence and the apothecary—and now me—even know it? I might not have had an advanced degree in history, but pride swelled within me at the monumental discovery I’d made.
And as for the motive? Well, the entry made that clear, too; it identified Miss Berkwell as not only Lord Clarence’s cousin, but his mistress. It was no wonder Lady Clarence set out to kill her; Miss Berkwell was the other woman. I remembered well enough learning about James’s infidelity and the immediate urge within me to seek revenge on the other woman. In this way, I could not blame Lady Clarence, though I wondered how she felt when her plan went awry and her husband died instead. Things certainly did not happen as she intended.
Did not happen as she intended...
The hospital note. Hadn’t it said something similar? Hands shaking, I navigated back to the digitized image of the note from St. Thomas’ Hospital, dated October 22, 1816. I reread the line I’d remembered:
Only, it did not happen as I intend’d.
Could it have been that the author of the hospital note was Lady Clarence? I covered my mouth with my hands. “Impossible,” I whispered aloud to myself.
But the last sentence of the hospital note fit the possibility, too: I lay blame unto my husband, and his thirst for that which was not meant for him. Had this clue been both literal and figurative—referring to Lord Clarence’s thirst for a poisonous drink that was meant for Miss Berkwell, and his thirst for a woman who was not his wife?
Without giving it a moment’s thought, I texted Gaynor. At the coffee shop, she’d mentioned that she’d confirmed the date of Lord Clarence’s death in the parish records. Perhaps she could do the same for Lady Clarence, to validate whether the woman had indeed penned the hospital note. Hi again! I texted Gaynor. Could you check the death records one more time? Same surname Clarence, but a woman. Any death record around October 1816?
Until Gaynor replied, it would be useless to waste any more time on this idea. I took a long drink of water, tucked my legs against my body and zoomed into my phone to better read the final entry—the closing entry.
Before I even read it, bumps prickled on my skin. This entry was the last record the apothecary made before running from the police and jumping to her death.
I read the entry once, but I frowned; the handwriting of this final entry was less steady, as though the author had been trembling. Perhaps she’d been ill or cold or even hurried. Or perhaps—I shuddered as I considered it—someone else made this entry.
The heavy curtains of my window were open, and across the street in another building, someone flipped on a light. I suddenly felt on show, so I stood from the bed to close the curtains. Below, the streets of London churned with movement: friends heading to the pub, suited men leaving a late night at work, and a young couple pushing a baby stroller, walking slowly toward the River Thames.
I took my seat again on the bed. Something did not feel quite right, but I couldn’t place my finger on it. I reread the final entry, clicking my tongue against my teeth as I considered each word, and then I saw it.
The entry was dated 12 Feb 1791.
I picked up the second article—the one that described the apothecary jumping to her death—and it said the woman jumped from the bridge on the eleventh of February.
The phone tumbled from my hands. I sat back on the bed, an eerie sensation floating over me, as though a ghost had just settled herself in the room, watching, waiting, as exhilarated as I was that the truth had been unveiled: that no matter who jumped from the bridge on the eleventh of February, someone had returned to the shop, alive and well.
33
Nella
February 11, 1791
Before I lifted my own leg over the railing, I paused.
All that I’ve lost. It weighed on me now, a lifetime of misery, like the raw earth pressing into an open grave. And yet—this precise moment of breath, the light breeze at the back of my neck, the distant call of some hungry waterfowl on the river, the taste of salt on my tongue—these were all things I had not lost yet.
I stepped back from the railing and opened my eyes.
All that I’d lost, or all that I hadn’t?
Eliza jumped in my place. A final offering to me, her last breath an effort to fool the authorities and implicate herself as poisoner. How could I possibly throw her gift back into the water to sink alongside her?
As I stood on the bridge and looked east over the River Thames, another person came to mind: Mrs. Amwell, Eliza’s beloved mistress. She would return to her estate in coming days, only to find Eliza...gone. Disappeared. No matter the pretense and feigned grief Mrs. Amwell displayed now at the loss of her husband, once she discovered Eliza missing, the grief would no longer be a ruse. It might haunt her for a lifetime, this belief that the child had abandoned her.
I must tell Mrs. Amwell the truth. I must tell her that Eliza had died. And I must comfort this woman the only way I knew how: a tincture of scutellaria, or skullcap, which would ease the piercing ache of her heart when she learned that little Eliza would write her letters no more.
And so, I turned away from the railing of the bridge, willing the sob in my throat to delay until I was alone—until I was back in my shop of poisons, which I had meant never to see again.
* * *
Twenty-two hours had passed since the moment Eliza jumped—an entire night and day, during which I’d prepared and bottled the skullcap I meant to deliver to the Amwell estate—and yet still my hands felt the chill of the empty air as I reached for her. Still I heard the plunge of her body, the sucking of the water as it took her in.
After I left the bridge and returned to 3 Back Alley, I could smell traces of the constable in the storage room—the sweaty, filthy scent of a man snaking about the room, looking for something he would not find. He had not found, either, the new letter in the barley bin. It must have been left only recently, perhaps when I went to the market and Eliza busied herself with her tincture.
I held the letter now in my hands. No scent of lavender or rose wafted up from the paper. The hand was not particularly fine or neat. The woman gave little detail, identifying herself only as a housewife, betrayed by her husband.
This final request, hardly different than the first.
The preparation would be uncomplicated. Indeed, a glass bottle of prussic acid sat within my arm’s reach; I could dispense it with minimal effort in less than a minute’s time. And perhaps this final poison, this last one, would finally grant me the peace I’d sought since my baby fell from my belly at the hand of Frederick.
Healing by way of vengeance.
But no such thing existed; it never had. Hurting others had only injured me further. I took the letter, traced the words with my finger and stood from my chair. Bending forward, I stretched one weak leg in front of the other, my breath raspy, and approached the hearth. A low flame ate away at a single scrap of wood. Gently, I set the letter into the dancing peak of the light, watching as the paper ignited in an instant.
No, I would not grant this woman what she wanted.
No more death would go forth from this room.
And with that, my shop of pois
ons existed no longer. The single flame in the hearth sputtered out, the final letter crumbled to ash. No balms left to simmer, no tonics left to blend, no tinctures to agitate, no plants to uproot.
I leaned forward and began to cough, a clot of blood making its way out of my lungs and onto my tongue. I’d been coughing up blood since yesterday afternoon—since running from the bailiffs, falling over the back wall of the horse stable and watching my young friend fall to her death. I’d expended a year’s worth of effort in mere minutes; the bailiffs, by way of chase, drove me closer to death than I’d realized.
I spit the blood clot into the ash, without even a desire to take a drink and wash the sticky residue from my tongue. I felt no thirst, nor hunger, and I had not urinated in nearly a day. I knew this did not bode well; when the throat ceases to beg, when the bladder ceases to fill, it is nearly over. I knew this because I had experienced it—I had watched it happen—once before.
The day my mother died.
I knew I must go to the Amwell estate, and soon. I would leave the letter and tincture with a servant, for Eliza said the mistress may be gone some weeks, and I did not expect her to be in. Then I would go to the river, sit along its silent banks and wait for a certain death. I did not expect the wait to be a long one.
But before I left my shop for good, a single task remained.
I lifted my quill, pulled the open register toward me and diligently began to record my final entry. Though I did not dispense the potion and I knew not what ingredients it contained, I could not leave without confessing the life of her, the loss of her.
Eliza Fanning, London. Ingr. unknown. 12 Feb 1791.
As the nib scratched along the paper, my hand shook terribly, and the words were so sullied that the handwriting appeared not even my own.
Indeed, it was as though some unknown spirit refused to let me write the words—refused to let me record the death of little Eliza.
34
Caroline
Present day, Wednesday
I read the final entry again, my hand over my lips.
Eliza Fanning, London. Ingr. unknown. 12 Feb 1791.
The twelfth of February? It didn’t make sense. The apothecary jumped from the bridge on the eleventh of February, and the article said the river was “littered with ice.” Even if someone survived the fall, it seemed unlikely they would have lasted more than a minute or two in the frigid water.
It was curious, too, that just one name was listed: Eliza Fanning. The entry did not say she was “on account” of anyone else. She must have come to the shop by herself, then. Did she have any idea that she was the final customer? And did she play any role in the apothecary’s demise?
I pulled a blanket over my legs. Admittedly, this final entry left me a bit spooked. I considered the possibility that the discrepancy was an error; perhaps the apothecary simply got her dates mixed up. Could this something really be nothing?
And it was also strange that the entry said Ingr. unknown—ingredients unknown. It seemed impossible. How could the apothecary have dispensed something of which she had no knowledge?
Maybe it wasn’t the apothecary at all. Maybe someone else made the entry. But the shop was well hidden, and it seemed unreasonable that someone would have entered the shop the day after the apothecary jumped in order to write down such a cryptic, final message. It only made sense that it was the apothecary’s own entry.
But if she made the entry, then who jumped?
More questions than answers had presented themselves in the last few minutes, and my curiosity melted into frustration. Nothing matched up: the victim in the first article didn’t fit with the victim in the entry about Lord Clarence; the final entry was cryptically written, with its strange handwriting and the reference to unknown ingredients; and most significant, the date of the final entry was a day after the apothecary had supposedly died.
I spread out my hands, at a complete loss. How many secrets did the apothecary take to her grave?
I walked to the minifridge and pulled out the bottle of champagne that the hotel had stocked in the suite. I didn’t think to pour the chilled wine into a glass; instead, once I’d popped off the cork, I lifted the rim to my lips and took a deep drink directly from the bottle.
Instead of fortifying me, the champagne left me fatigued, almost dizzy. My curiosity about the apothecary had worn down for the day, and the idea of further research was not appealing.
Tomorrow, perhaps.
I resolved to write down my questions about everything I’d learned today, and I would revisit them in the morning, or once James left. I grabbed a pen and my notebook and flipped to a clean page. I had a dozen or more questions about what I’d read. I prepared to list them all.
But as I held the pen in my hand and considered what to write down first, I realized that there was one question I most wanted to know. It was the most intrusive, the most insistent of them all. I sensed the answer to this question might solve some others, like why the entry was made on the twelfth of February.
I pressed the tip of my pen to the page and wrote:
Who is Eliza Fanning?
* * *
The next morning, after James had been discharged from the hospital, we sat at the small table near the door of the hotel room. I wrapped my hands tightly around a cup of weak tea as he held his cell phone close, searching the airline’s website for flights home. Housekeeping hadn’t yet come to the room so a half-drunk bottle of champagne sat near the coffeepot, and I had the headache to show for it.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. “Found one that leaves Gatwick at four,” he said. “Gives me enough time to pack up and catch a train there. I’ll need to leave by one.”
The vase of baby blue hydrangeas sat between us; most had wilted and now tumbled over the edge of the glass. I slid the vase to the side and looked at him more closely. “You think you’ll be okay? No dizziness or anything?”
He put down his wallet. “None at all. I’m just ready to get home.”
A short while later, James stood near the window with his packed luggage beside him—as though we’d rewound the trip and he had only just arrived. I remained at the table, where I’d been half-heartedly perusing the photos of the apothecary’s book, keenly aware that the minutes were counting down. If I planned to reveal to James the truth about my own activities in recent days, I’d better do so quick.
“I think I’m good,” James said, patting his jeans to make sure his passport was in place. Between us was the unmade bed in which I’d slept—alone—for the past several nights. It was a force between us now, a white, billowy reminder of everything we were meant to share on this trip, yet hadn’t. Only days ago, I’d hoped desperately that our baby would be conceived in this bed. But now, I couldn’t fathom making love to the man standing across the room ever again.
What I imagined for this “anniversary” trip had been nowhere close to reality, but I felt this horror story had been a necessary lesson. After all, what if I hadn’t discovered James’s infidelity, and we’d gotten pregnant, and the truth had come out after the baby’s arrival? Or what if both of us developed a slow-burning resentment—for our jobs, our routine or each other—and the result was a cataclysmic end of our marriage and the ripping apart of our maybe-family-of-three? Because this wasn’t just about James. I’d been just as dissatisfied with life as he was, and I’d buried those feelings deep inside of myself. What if I had been the one to snap? What if I had been the one to make an irreversible mistake?
I checked the time; it was five till one. “Wait,” I said, setting down my phone and standing from my chair. James frowned, his fingers clutching the handle of his luggage. I leaned over my own suitcase, shoving aside the sneakers I wore while mudlarking, and reached for something that had been hidden at the bottom. It was so small, it fit easily in the palm of my hand as I lifted it out.
I wrapped my fingers around the cool, hard object: the vintage box meant for James’s business cards. It was my ten-year anniversary gift to him, which I’d kept tucked away since that fateful afternoon in the bedroom closet.
I crossed the room. “This isn’t forgiveness,” I said softly, “or even a path forward. But it belongs to you, and it’s more fitting now than I could have dreamed when I originally purchased it.” Then I gave him the box, which he accepted with a trembling hand. “It’s made of tin,” I explained. “It’s the traditional gift for ten-year anniversaries because it represents strength and—” I took a deep breath, wishing I could see into the future. In five or ten years, what would our lives look like? “Strength, and the ability to withstand a fair amount of damage. I bought it to symbolize durability in our relationship together, but that’s not the important thing anymore. What’s important is strength on our own. We both have a lot of hard work ahead of us.”
James wrapped me in a tight hug; we stood that way so long, I felt sure the clock ticked past one, and then some. When he finally released me, his voice shook. “I’ll see you soon,” he whispered, his fingers still clutching my gift.
“See you soon,” I said in return, and an unexpected quiver made its way into my own words. I walked James to the door and we glanced at each other a final time, then he left and shut the door behind him.
Alone, again. And yet the freedom was so penetrating and real that I stood motionless, almost stunned, for a moment. I gazed at the floor, waiting with dread for the inevitable wave of loneliness to wash over me. I waited for James to run back, asking for another chance to stay. I waited for my phone to ring, the hospital or police calling with news, bad news, more bad news.