Hemlock

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Thus, with or without contributions from Alex, the work had gone forward successfully. When it began, Elizabeth had been a modestly skilled artist; she became more skilled as time went on and she grew to love her subjects, which seemed always patient and cheerful and ready to share their small green secrets with her. Already an engraver, she learned how to do the work more expertly—and her copperplate handwriting improved. The weekly issues of the Herbal had sold well, exceptionally well, according to Mr. Harding’s accounting. Fifteen months after the very first issue was released, Elizabeth arranged to have the first sixty-three issues printed, bound, and published as a book. In another few months, she would arrange for the publication of the last sixty-two issues in Volume Two. She was still a troubling distance from repayment of her husband’s full debt, and one of the creditors was getting restive. But she would have to deal with that later. Her first task was to complete the book and to do it well.

  If Elizabeth had thought that life without Alex would be grim, she was wrong. Janet had become a friend and companion as well as a helper. The house was a calm retreat, the green and ever blooming Physic Garden a daily delight, and the children the joy of her heart. Elizabeth’s life was so blessedly full and busy and comfortable that she sometimes wondered if such contentment could last.

  It didn’t. There was a cruel sweep of disease across the land during the wet early weeks of May, and little William had died of a fever—just one of many children who died that month. Blanche followed her brother two years later, almost to the day. The only blessing was that they had been taken suddenly, both of them lively and laughing one day, feverish the next, and gone the day after that.

  The sadness still sat in Elizabeth’s bones, like a fatal infection that could be neither banished nor born. She thought of William and Blanche constantly, even allowing herself to pretend that they were simply asleep in their little beds just down the hallway from her drawing studio, telling herself that tomorrow they would walk to the river and wave at the boatmen or across the lane to the garden, where she would sketch while Blanche played with the hollyhocks and William made friends with the beetles. But these were just sweet stories, to comfort her grief. The children lay in the sweet green quiet of the parish churchyard, near enough that each Sunday she and Janet could take fresh flowers and herbs to them.

  And now she had thought of a way to manage the publication of the second volume and the rest of Alexander’s debt, both at the same time. There was still £150 owing—a debt that might take her another year to repay. But she had discussed the matter with John Nourse, a bookseller and printer near Temple Bar. Mr. Nourse had agreed to publish the second volume of the Herbal and she had agreed to sell him a one-third share of the book for £150.

  The money from the rights’ sale would go to pay off the debt. There was enough coming in regularly from the book to allow her to keep the Swan Walk house, which she loved. Alexander would be home at last, and they could pick up their life together. Elizabeth was still young and had been quite fertile: Blanche was conceived within a few months of their marriage and William even before Blanche was weaned. There would likely be more children to fill the empty space in her heart.

  But how would she feel, sharing her life again with her husband? Before the Newgate years, he had been headlong and impulsive, unwilling to do the hard work of preparation or the mundane work of routine tasks. One of his closest friends had said that while Alex was a “natural genius,” his brilliance was marred by “want of principle and unsoundness of judgment”—and Elizabeth agreed. Had he changed? Had he learned the importance of patience and persistence? Would he be willing to take up the task of earning the family’s living?

  But if Alex hadn’t changed, she had. The years she had worked on the Herbal had given her a new confidence in herself. She made her own decisions, conducted business as she thought best, earned enough to support herself and the children, spent money carefully, incurred reasonable debts and promptly repaid them, and developed a group of helpers, allies, and friends that she could count on. While the years had been full of challenge and darkened by grief, there had been joys, too, and the satisfaction of recognized achievement. And she had grown accustomed to living alone, with only Janet to keep her company. Would Alex step back into her life and attempt to direct it, as he had before?

  And what would he do for a living, once he was released? He couldn’t go back to the printing trade—no one would hire him. With the bankruptcy on his record, it would be difficult to start any new business. He had become intrigued with her reports of the new plants coming in from around the globe and had said that he might like to work with some kind of agricultural project. He had asked her for books about estate and farm management and had been reading about modern methods of drainage and the improvement of soils.

  This puzzled Elizabeth, for Alex had no firsthand understanding of plants or farming. But she didn’t doubt that he could turn his hand to anything he wanted, if he wanted it badly enough and if he had the patience to prepare himself.

  Anyway, it wasn’t up to her to decide what her husband would do. He had rarely taken direction or suggestions from her, even when it was her dowry they were spending. Thus, she executed the agreement with Nourse, took the money he paid her, and handed it over—with a great deal of satisfaction—to Alex’s last two creditors.

  There. That was done. She had achieved what she set out to do: earn enough money to buy her husband’s freedom from debtors’ prison. No one could say she had not done her wifely duty.

  At last, on a bright day in late September, Alexander walked free. In celebration, she met him at Newgate’s entrance, and they went to a small tavern where they had dined often when they were first married. And then hired a coach to take them to Chelsea, where they would begin their life together, again.

  And then . . .

  Chapter Fifteen

  Elizabeth Blackwell remained in London with her son until at least July 1747. There is no further record of her, although one historian claims she died in 1758 and was buried in Chelsea Old Church. Her work was acclaimed long after her death and was translated into Latin [and German] in 1773 as the Herbarium Blackwellianum, by the Count Palatine, Dr. Christopher Jacob Trew, and Christian Ludwig. It was unusual for a woman of her time to produce such a book, as it was intended for and used by a professional medical audience.*

  —Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women

  Edinburgh University Press, 2007

  And then? And then? I looked up from my tablet.

  “And then what?” I asked aloud. “I’ve come to the last page. Elizabeth has paid her husband’s debts and bailed him out of jail. She is about to finish the book. They’re starting over. So what happens next? When can I read your next chapter?”

  Jenna got up from her computer and went to put another couple of logs on the workroom fire. She wore a half smile. “What do you think happens next?”

  “But you’re the one telling the story,” I objected. “Do the two of them live together? Are they happy? Does Elizabeth have other children? Can they manage on the sales of her book, or does Alex have to go to work? He obviously doesn’t have a very good reputation. Who is going to hire him? To do what?”

  “Whoa.” Jenna lifted her hand. “Wow. So many questions. I wish I could answer them all.”

  “You can’t? Why not? It’s your novel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s my novel. But it’s Elizabeth’s life.”

  Oh, right. I had momentarily forgotten. “That’s true,” I said. “Well, okay, then. Tell me what happened to Elizabeth after she finished the Herbal.”

  “It’s easier to tell you what happened to Alexander,” Jenna said. “There’s still a lot of mystery but I’ve found at least some documentation on him.”

  She sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace, pulling it closer to the fire. “After Elizabeth got him released from prison
, he lived in the Swan Walk house with her for at least a year or two. We know that, because he’s listed on the tax rolls. Elizabeth did get pregnant—at least once.” She bent toward the blaze, warming her hands. “We know that because they baptized a son named Alexander in 1742. The baptism took place in St. Paul’s Church, in Covent Garden, so I’m guessing that Elizabeth wasn’t living in Chelsea at the time.”

  “At least once?” I calculated. “You think she might have had a miscarriage before Alexander was born?”

  “Or a baby who died.” She sat up and crossed her legs. “That wouldn’t have been unusual at a time when nearly half of the children didn’t live to celebrate their first birthday. We also know that somebody—most likely Alex himself—published a book under his name about how to drain clay lands and improve the soil. That was in 1741. The Blackwells had sold more shares of the Herbal to the printer John Nourse, so maybe they were using part of the money from the sale to finance the printing of that book.”

  “Under his name? You’re suggesting that he didn’t actually write it?”

  Jenna looked grave. “I am. I’ve read this book—in fact, I own a facsimile copy that I bought online. It’s called A New Method of Improving Cold, Wet, and Barren Lands. It’s quite evidently written by somebody who had spent decades improving the soils of Northern England. There’s absolutely no evidence that Alexander even traveled there or that he had any farming experience whatsoever.”

  “You’re saying he plagiarized this book?”

  “I think he somehow acquired the manuscript, perhaps when he was still in the printing business. He had it printed and then claimed authorship—or let people believe that he was the author, which amounts to the same thing. The title page has no author’s name and the dedication signature is missing. Even so, the book is still sold under his authorship, almost three centuries later. I saw it for sale recently for nearly eight hundred dollars. It’s said to be quite rare, so perhaps he had only a few copies printed and handed them out himself, rather than putting it in bookshops.” She grinned bleakly. “I can just see him, holding it out with a modest, ‘I thought you might like to have this little trifle of mine.’”

  I was puzzled. “But why would he do such a thing?”

  “To bolster his credentials.” Jenna’s mouth tightened. “Don’t you see, China? He was inventing himself all over again. This book turned him into a bona fide agricultural expert—which would be quite understandable, since his wife was now an internationally recognized expert in medicinal plants. He used it to leverage himself into what might have been a very good job, if he’d had any ability at all.”

  “What kind of a job?

  “Around this time the Duke of Chandos, probably on the basis of that book, hired Alexander to manage the gardens at Canons, near Edgeware. It was a prestigious post, because the gardens were thought to be among the loveliest in England. Some historians say that Alexander laid out the gardens—but that simply isn’t true, for the gardens were designed in the early 1720s, long before Alexander arrived on the scene.” A burning log shifted in the grate and she took a poker and pushed it back. “The duke’s estate was north of London about ten miles, a half-day by coach and too far to commute in those days of bad roads.”

  “Then I suppose he must have lived on the estate,” I said. “Did Elizabeth make the move with him?”

  “We don’t know.” Jenna returned the poker to its rack. “But we do know that Alex wasn’t at Canons very long. When he left, it was ‘under a cloud’ of some sort, as one of his friends diplomatically put it.”

  “No details?”

  She shook her head. “I think he had stretched his credentials with that book and couldn’t deliver. He was found out to be a fake, word got around, and he packed up and left England for Sweden. That would have been about 1742. Elizabeth didn’t go with him.”

  “Sweden?” I blinked. “Isn’t that rather . . . odd?”

  “I thought so, but maybe not. Maybe Sir Hans helped. Or he knew somebody who knew somebody. Anyway, he was invited by the Swedish prime minister to serve as an agricultural consultant—on the strength of that book, it seems. He must have talked a good line, for he was given an annual stipend, a house, and the supervision of a Swedish model farm. He also somehow managed to get himself named a court physician.”

  I chuckled. “Another reinvention.” But it wasn’t funny.

  “Exactly. But things must have gone downhill pretty fast. He wasn’t well liked—he was said to be self-important, arrogant, and ‘conceited of his own abilities.’ He made a mess of the model farm and people began to wonder whether he had actually written that book. Then he got involved with a woman and was implicated in the death of her husband.”

  “Wow,” I said, transfixed by the story. “Really?”

  “Really. Carl Linnaeus writes about it. It appears that he didn’t think much of Alexander, either.”

  “Carl Linnaeus? The Swedish naturalist who invented the binomial classification system? You mentioned him in the section I just finished. Did Elizabeth meet him when he visited the garden?”

  “I’m sure she did,” Jenna said. “Linnaeus wrote to a friend about Alexander’s scandalous behavior. As he tells it, Alexander was ‘intimate’ with the wife. The husband got sick. Alexander treated him. When the man died, it was apparently easy—and perhaps convenient—to blame Alexander, either for poisoning him or for being such a poor doctor that he couldn’t save him. Who knows?”

  “It could have been just gossip, couldn’t it? It sounds like he got a lot of preference from the Crown. People must have been jealous.”

  “I suppose. And it may have just been Carl Linnaeus who was jealous. But after that, things went from really bad to horribly worse for Alexander. He got involved in a political intrigue in the royal court, something to do with a plan to poison the heir to the Swedish throne and put the Duke of Cumberland—the youngest son of King George II—in his place. Alexander claimed to be acting for the British Crown, but King George called him a ‘liar and an imposter,’ so that explanation never went anywhere.”

  “Sounds like a spy thriller,” I said. “Like something out of a novel by Le Carré.”

  “You’re so right,” Jenna agreed. “The thing is that nobody ever knew whether Alexander made the story up—working for the British Crown, I mean—or whether the Brits actually put him up to it and then abandoned him. Whatever, he was convicted of plotting against the monarchy and beheaded.”

  “Beheaded?” I yelped. “Yikes!”

  Jenna leaned back in her chair, stretching her feet toward the fire. “He’s said to have made a joke about it. He apparently laid his head on the wrong side of the block and then apologized. He said it was an honest mistake—it was the first time he had ever been beheaded.”

  “Oh, God,” I said softly. “Oh, poor Elizabeth!”

  “Can you imagine?” Jenna was shaking her head again. “One account—the one that depicts her as a devoted wife—says she was on her way to join him in Sweden when she got word that he was dead. Personally, I doubt it.” She lifted her chin. “My Elizabeth probably gave that jerk his walking papers when he got fired by the Duke of Chandos and left England. After all, she had a continuing income from sales of the book. She could support herself and her son with that—or she could do something else. But no matter how she felt about Alexander, she had to deal with the fallout from what he had done. There were reports about his execution in all the London newspapers and magazines, in Scotland too—it was a huge story. And since nobody knew the details, there must have been dozens of rumors floating around. Can you imagine how difficult that was for her?”

  I thought of the elaborate copy of the Herbal that Elizabeth had signed and presented to Hans Sloane—the book that had disappeared from the library at Hemlock House. She would have been proud of what she had achieved and treasured the recognition of her work. So she must have felt
horribly embarrassed and even humiliated by Alexander’s irresponsible behavior, especially since it was out there in full public view. All the men she had come to respect would have known about it—would she have had to answer their questions? But could she? How much did she know about what her husband had been up to in Sweden?

  After a moment, I thought of something else. “In one of your early chapters, you mentioned midwifery. Is there any evidence that Elizabeth might have gone in that direction?”

  “According to a nineteenth-century account, that’s what happened. The Herbal had given Elizabeth plenty of connections in the medical community. She was still a young woman, educated, adaptable. But nobody knows for sure. She probably stayed on in Chelsea. When she died in 1758, she was buried in the graveyard at the Chelsea Old Church. Her name is on a plaque there, along with three other notable women.” She eyed me. “So what do you think, China?”

  I considered for a moment. “Your Elizabeth—the one you’ve already created in your novel—is a woman who knows her mind. She’s smart, gutsy, and able to make her own choices. I’m betting that she didn’t cut that husband of hers any slack at all. When he left England, she probably told him not to bother coming back. Not to her, anyway. I’m also betting that she wouldn’t have wanted to sit around twiddling her thumbs, living off her book sales. She would want to be doing something useful. So I would vote for midwifery.” I paused. “Since there’s lots that isn’t known, you can make it up, can’t you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jenna agreed. “But that’s the problem with biographical fiction, isn’t it? I can tell a story that fits with the recorded details of Elizabeth’s life. But it’s impossible to know her inner life. What she hoped, feared, loved, hated. I wish she had left a journal, some letters, a trail of breadcrumbs, something that would tell us more about her.”