The Dolocher

by Caroline Barry

  Janey Mack held her arm out straight, pointing the pistol into thin air.

  ‘Poor little Jo-Jo,’ she said, lowering her hand and taking a long sip of milk. ‘Olocher’s to swing this morning.’

  ‘I see.’ Merriment stirred the row of brass pots cooking on the iron stand. ‘Well, that sounds a fit ending for the man.’

  Janey Mack nodded, pressing her index finger into a wedge of butter and spreading it towards the crust.

  ‘I was going to watch him dancing on the gallows. But . . . I’m afraid of his eyes.’

  ‘You’re . . .’ Merriment shook her head. ‘Why?’

  ‘I seen him once, miss. He was being led into the dock and he turned his head and I was deep in the crowd, way back, but somehow his eyes found me and he fixed me with a stare. It was like I was the only one there, with no one between me and him and his eyes rooted me to the spot, like he could cut me down by just looking at me. I thought I saw a trail of smoke.’

  ‘From Olocher?’

  ‘Out of his eyes, miss. A dark little shred of mist, coming out of his stare. Following me. I couldn’t sleep for a week after that. Hoppy John said I was ravin’.’

  Merriment smiled. ‘I don’t think anything came from his eyes and nothing has followed you. Now, have more bread and milk and give me back the Answerer. I’m going to give you something to take the heat out of your imagination. Meanwhile, we’ll have a sup of camomile tea. I just need to get these out of the way first.’

  She stuffed the pistol into its neat leather holder beneath her waistcoat and had turned to finish making her prescriptions when Janey Mack tugged on her breeches and stopped her in her tracks.

  ‘I think I’ve misled you, miss.’

  Merriment realised the orders were going to take longer than usual to fill out. She sighed, resigning herself to the situation and sat down on the edge of the table, her unfinished work behind her. She folded her arms and nodded seriously, waiting for Janey Mack to explain herself.

  ‘There’s been a terrible assumption.’

  ‘Has there?’ Merriment was entertained. She kept her face keen and sombre. Janey Mack stood upright, her huge blue eyes bursting with a desperate sense of urgency. She had to clear things up.

  ‘On account of I said I worked for the Aldermen, miss.’

  ‘You don’t work for the Aldermen?’

  ‘No, I do, miss. It’s just that, you’re under the misapprehension that I have coin in my pocket to pay for your services and ointments and I’m skint to me back teeth. I earn three pennies a day for me apprenticeship and have to cook Hoppy John’s supper and wash his clothes and blankets and polish his boots and give him back the three pennies I earned to purchase my pease pudding and herring. I have nothing to pay you with.’

  Merriment pinched her lips together compressing a smile. She looked down at the floor.

  ‘I see,’ she said slowly, showing the little girl that she was considering the dilemma.

  ‘I’m very sorry, miss. Should’ve said earlier.’

  Merriment kept nodding, pretending to be ruminating over the problem.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if I could come to some arrangement with Hoppy John.’

  Janey Mack’s face lit up.

  ‘You could sow his leg back on.’

  Merriment snorted, swallowing back a huge laugh.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said. ‘But not that good. Perhaps Hoppy John might consider a purchase.’

  ‘Him!’ Janey Mack howled. ‘Buy my medicine. He’d sooner knock me over the head than shell out for maggot bandages and camomile tea. The cannonball made him very sour, miss.’

  ‘Did it? Right.’ Merriment paced up and down not only to hide her desire to laugh but to let Janey Mack think that she was pondering over the matter, giving it its due weight.

  ‘How do you think?’ The idea flashed into Merriment’s head and for the first time in almost twenty years she couldn’t stop herself. She was filled with a bursting compulsion, an un-thought-out, underdeveloped idea. Her usual measured response sank beneath a weight of churning emotions. Suddenly she was hot, her whole body washed over by the conviction that she had no choice. The idea had magnetised her and all her logic, all her practicality drowned beneath a simple proposal that she would normally never have entertained.

  ‘Do you think you could work here, Janey?’ Merriment asked, breathless from the sudden rush of excitement.

  Janey Mack looked quizzically into Merriment’s face.

  ‘In an apothecary shop, selling potions and powders? I wouldn’t know where to start, miss. What if I poisoned someone?’

  ‘You won’t poison anyone. I won’t let you. You’d be my apprentice. You’d start off by watching me and when you learn more you can mix, but that’s a while away. First you watch and clean and maybe cook a little and run errands.’

  Merriment could feel her hands shaking, her heart racing. What was she doing? Janey Mack’s eyebrows zigzagged towards each other.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘With you? And I wouldn’t have to be outside rootin’ and sortin’ and shovellin’ muck? And I wouldn’t have to . . .’

  Janey Mack’s whole body swayed and jittered, only her limp arm lying wrapped on the table held her down, like a soft anchor, preventing her from flying away. The little girl was luminous at the prospect of such an exotic possibility. But just as quickly as her thoughts flamed up, her face suddenly clouded, pitched grey by the bleak reality that there was no way she could work in an apothecary shop.

  ‘Hoppy John won’t have it,’ she said flatly. ‘He’s very contrary. He won’t want the annoyance of having to train another up. He’ll froth at the mouth, he hates inconvenience, boils his blood, so it does.’

  Merriment leaned forward.

  ‘I’ll pay him to terminate your apprenticeship.’

  Janey Mack clacked her tongue. ‘Are ye soft in the head? Part with money for me? Are you a bit innocent, miss?’

  The matter-of-fact tone wrong-footed Merriment, the question echoed in her own conscience. Are ye soft in the head? She could hear her inner voice bawling, Yes, yes, she is soft in the head. But she answered differently.

  ‘No, I’m not innocent, as you so eloquently put it.’ She looked about the cluttered room, the dark interior necessarily poorly lit to keep her potions from being contaminated by natural light. She gazed at the stock of herbs and spices she had invested in and lied through her teeth at the little girl staring up at her, because suddenly and very unexpectedly her laboratory no longer seemed enough.

  ‘I could do with an extra pair of hands and if I rent the room upstairs I’ll need someone to set the fire and fix a chop for supper for the lodger. Everyone seems to want supper with the room. I think I lost a few prospective boarders when I told them I didn’t cook. You can sleep here. I could get a settle bed.’

  ‘Live here, with you? In this fine establishment?’ Janey Mack leaned back against the table, overcome at the very idea of living in a house. ‘Have I fallen out of me skeleton into heaven? Really truly, miss? No messing?’

  Merriment’s heart melted.

  ‘Really truly, no messing.’

  ‘But why, miss?’

  But why? Merriment’s conscience wanted to know too. And while her inner wisdom dished out the one certain, unassailable truth – This arrangement changes everything – Merriment didn’t falter. She’d dug herself into a hole and now she’d have to stay there. A little girl with huge pleading eyes was hanging onto her every word for dear life. So Merriment did what she always did best: she committed to the situation and decided there and then that no matter how foolish an old maid she was, she was going to turn this child’s life around even if it meant her cherished solitude was circumscribed.

  ‘I can see you’re a hard worker,’ she said. ‘And I think you’ve got potential.’

  ‘Well, I’m gobsmacked, so I am. Gobsmacked.’

  Janey Mack couldn’t take it in. She liked the i
dea, but she had enough street smarts to know that liking something and wishing it were always so didn’t make it always so. The fact was she didn’t trust that good things could happen. She glanced at her dwindling glass of milk and her half-eaten bread and for a few minutes she let herself make-believe that she had a fairy godmother.

  ‘Good.’ Merriment snapped up straight and tried to quash all the niggling eventualities that suddenly flooded her mind. What if Hoppy John won’t release her? What if the business doesn’t pick up? No one takes the room? Then there’s no jumping on a ship to earn a wage. Now she would have a little girl in her charge and financial ruin would affect the both of them. I could bring her to sea with me, Merriment thought, but her stomach tightened.

  ‘We have an agreement,’ she said brightly, reaching for the camomile leaves. ‘Excellent. I’ll make us some tea.’

  The tea was more for her own nerves than for the little girl’s. Was she really this lonely?

  She sipped on her cup. Janey Mack imitated her and took a sip on her cup, then winced, pulling a disgusted face.

  ‘I have to work,’ Merriment said, sifting through her prescriptions, keeping her thoughts in check by weighing out pounds and ounces. The first flurry of excitement had back flipped into a stiff retreat and in its place was a shaky nervousness. You’re going to hell if this doesn’t transpire, she told herself. That child is uncertain and half-feral and you’ve poisoned her with hope. She expects you to put up a fight for her. You told her you would.

  Merriment’s conscience scalded her, bitterly duelling with the one resolute dimension to her character: her sense of commitment.

  Nothing you can do now, she told herself. You can’t unring the bell.

  She was so absorbed with this inner dialogue that she was oblivious to Janey Mack opening a narrow drawer and pulling out a tiny oval frame.

  ‘Who’s this lad?’ Janey Mack asked, holding up a small pencil portrait.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘In the drawer here.’ Janey Mack shook her head. ‘Oh God, miss, sorry. I’m so used to rootin’ and pokin’ about. Y’er offended. I can tell by the shade of yer skin yer not one bit pleased and now y’er regrettin’ yer offer and I’m going to have to go back to scavengin’.’

  ‘Are you always this previous?’ Merriment asked, pouring tinctures into a row of small amber bottles using specially crafted small funnels to do the trick.

  ‘I think so, miss,’ Janey Mack said forlornly. ‘I’ve no idea what ye mean, but I’m sure yer right. And I have to say now that I’ve offended ye and y’er going to sack me anyway, that the tea is awful, I wouldn’t give it to a dog, sure a dog would turn his nose up at it.’

  The little girl pushed the cup away.

  ‘Firstly . . .’ Merriment put down the brass bowl she was pouring from. ‘I’m not going to sack you.’

  ‘Even though I’ve insulted yer horrible tea?’

  ‘Even though you’ve insulted my tea. Now, calm down, sip up and put the portrait back in the drawer where you found it.’

  Janey Mack opened the drawer and pulled out a curl of golden hair tied with a slender silk ribbon.

  ‘There’s a lock of hair in here too,’ she said, still holding onto the portrait. ‘Does it belong to this fella? Is this the lad you went away to sea to find?’

  Merriment didn’t answer. She counted out ten dried pips and crushed them in a mortar.

  Undaunted, Janey Mack kept talking.

  ‘I can tell by the way yer lip quivered there, it’s him all right. Handsome lad. Nose is a bit big. What do these ciphers here say?’

  She pointed to four figures inscribed into the small frame and gilded with gold.

  ‘Seventeen thirty-six.’

  Janey Mack stared at the picture.

  ‘That’s long ago, miss. What’s the calculation on that, miss, between then and now?’

  ‘Twenty years.’

  Janey Mack’s tiny mouth hung open, twenty years seemed like a biblical span of ages to her.

  ‘Twenty long years, miss. Ye’ve loved this lad fair and true, forsook yer skirt and stays to follow him over the billowing waves and still yer heart pines.’

  Merriment began corking up the tiny bottles and slipping seeds and herbs into envelopes, marking each one with a brief description and piling the lot onto a tray.

  ‘I’m not pining,’ she said. ‘Put him back in the drawer.’

  Janey Mack didn’t move.

  ‘Ye can’t bear to look at him for the longing and the loss he rises in yer spirit.’

  ‘The loss.’ A dart shot across Merriment’s face. She scratched the bridge of her nose and swept her hair back, brushing away an old memory.

  ‘It was long ago,’ she said. ‘Nothing to me today. I’d forgotten . . .’ The sentence trailed away momentarily conjuring up a stormy day buried deep in the past.

  ‘I’ll stick him up here so.’ Janey Mack moved around the table, careful with her bandaged hand, and stepping onto her tippy-toes placed the portrait on the lowest shelf.

  ‘There now, handsome fellow, she doesn’t give a rat’s arse what y’er up to now. She has a shop and an assistant and the Answerer and a fine establishment on Fishamble Street and you’re nothing but a picture in a frame to her now.’

  Merriment watched the little girl talk to the portrait, the back of her head bobbing as she spoke, her lank brown hair falling in unkempt tendrils over her tiny shoulders, and Merriment’s heart compressed under the sudden painful pressure of regret. The little girl could stir up her emotions with a few choice words. Merriment wanted to rush forward, pick the child up and hug her tight and close and never let her go. Instead she turned her back, reached for the roots in a jar labelled Actea racemosa, black bugbane, convinced that her unstable emotional condition was a prelude to the waning of her periods. She quickly chewed on the bitter rhizome while Janey Mack kept talking.

  ‘If you don’t draw out the poison it festers, doesn’t it, miss?’

  Merriment spat out a clump of fibrous root and took a quick sip of cordial to wash away the taste.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Like your hand.’

  ‘Like yer lad hidden in a drawer turning yer heart yellow with puss.’

  Merriment bit her lower lip, a smile pinching the edges of her mouth.

  ‘Your similes are very graphic,’ she said.

  ‘Are they, miss?’ Janey Mack looked forlornly at her maggot bandage. ‘Is that bad for me hand?’

  Merriment laughed. ‘No. Drink your tea. I’m going to turn the sign.’

  Merriment picked up her full tray and carried it into the shop. She undid the latch to the door, quickly scanning the shelves, proud of all she had achieved, terrified that she had sunk all her money into a business venture that so far was slow to pick up. Beresford was doing his best sending clients her way, but most of the gentlemen he had advised to visit her turned about and walked away the minute they spotted that she was a woman. Others viewed her suspiciously and stayed for one visit, not returning for the repeat prescription. She had enough coin to pay one month’s rent and if she kept her diet to a minimum she could feed herself for three weeks at least. She glanced up at the ceiling, wishing the woman she had interviewed yesterday would come back and take the room upstairs. What had happened, Merriment wondered. She had hit middle age and suddenly upended her life, left all she had known and taken Beresford’s advice to settle on dry land.

  Merriment remembered sitting in Beresford’s cabin onboard the Redoubtable. She was weary, staring into the brandy glass clasped on her lap and thinking that maybe it would be nice to own a shop and have steady feet. She mentioned it to Beresford and, to her surprise, he encouraged her. He had talked her into choosing Dublin, convinced her that the city was thriving, that news of her incomparable skill would spread and she’d be swamped with eager clients willing to pay handsomely for her help.

  ‘Sea’s cruel to a woman’s face,’ Beresford had told her. ‘This is a stalw
art business venture, you can’t lose. Trust me.’

  Then he confided that he was retiring to his country house on the outskirts of Dublin, to focus on building a parliamentary career.

  ‘And I don’t want to be worrying about you, stuck on this leaky pitcher. The damn boat is waiting until we’re far enough away to split on us and bring us down with her into the grimy blue.’

  That’s what happens when you let yourself be flattered, she thought. You let the charming old man with his silver hair and gorgeous eyes talk you into a disaster because he wanted to keep you close. She thought of Beresford’s eyes and the night he had lost one in battle. How worried she had been that he would go blind. How hard she had worked to save his sight. Her heart squeezed a little recalling how well they worked together and how much she needed him back then . . . She caught herself and took a deep breath. The reason you’re here is because you’re the only one who can effectively treat his gout. Damn self-serving, handsome . . . Well, he can write me a promissory note if I get strapped. She sighed, imagining herself having to go to the bank to cash in on her friend’s social position.

  She was emptying the tray when Janey Mack appeared in the doorway, peeking in as she swallowed a chunk of bread, holding her bandaged hand to make sure no maggots fell out.

  ‘This is lovely,’ the little girl exclaimed, looking at the shining glass cabinets and the polished floor. ‘The smartest shop I’ve ever seen.’

  The sunlight streamed in through the large windows falling in rectangular patterns across the wall, making the glass cases gleam. Janey Mack looked filthy in the daylight. Her face was streaked where Merriment had run the cloth over it, her neck was black and her hair looked sticky. The haphazard shift she was wearing had so many patches and tears that Merriment wondered if she had a shirt she could whip onto the little girl. She frowned at Janey Mack’s muddy feet. The girl would need proper shoes if she were to work here. The child interrupted her musings by pointing to a green door next to the cabinet holding herbal teas.

  ‘Where’s that go?’ she asked.

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Where you sleep?’

  ‘That’s right.’