The Lost Apothecary(16)
From that moment forward, I desired to know more of this thing called magick, and I could hardly wait to explore the city in which we’d just arrived.
At the servant’s registry office, my mother stood patiently aside while a pair of women looked me over; one of them was Mrs. Amwell, in a pink satin gown and a cap bordered with lace. I could hardly keep from staring: I had never in all my life seen a pink satin gown.
Mrs. Amwell seemed to take an instant liking to me. She bent forward to speak to me, crouching low so our faces almost touched, and soon after she placed her arm around my mother, whose eyes were brimming again with tears. I was delighted when Mrs. Amwell finally took my hand in hers, walked me to the broad mahogany desk at the front of the office and asked the attendant for the papers.
As she filled in the required information, I noticed that Mrs. Amwell’s hand shook badly as she wrote, and it seemed a great effort to keep the nib of the pen steady. Her words were jagged and bent at odd angles, but it meant little to me. I had been unable to read in those days, and all handwriting looked as illegible as the next.
After a tearful goodbye with my mother, my new mistress and I took a coach to the house she shared with Mr. Amwell, her husband. I was to work first in the scullery, and so Mrs. Amwell introduced me to Sally, the cook and kitchenmaid.
In the weeks to follow, Sally minced no words: according to her, I did not know the proper way to scour a pot or how to pick roots from a potato without damaging the flesh. As she showed me the “right” way of doing things, I put up no complaint, for I enjoyed my placement with the Amwells. I had my own room in the attic, which was more than my mother had told me to expect, and from there I could watch the amusing, ever-present activity on the street below: the sedan chairs rushing past, the porters bearing enormous boxes of unseen goods, the comings and goings of a young couple who I believed newly in love.
Eventually, Sally grew comfortable with my abilities and began allowing me to assist in the preparation of meals. It felt a small movement upward, just as my mother had said, and it gave me hope; someday, I, too, hoped to be toiling about in the magnificent streets of London, in pursuit of something greater than potatoes and pots.
One morning, while I was carefully arranging dried herbs on a platter, a housemaid rushed downstairs. Mrs. Amwell wanted to see me in her drawing room. Terror struck me at once. I felt sure I had done something wrong, and I ascended the stairs slowly, held back by a sense of dread. I had been at the Amwell house not even two months; my mother would be horrified if I were dismissed in such a short time.
But when I stepped into my mistress’s pale blue drawing room and she closed the door behind me, she merely smiled and asked me to sit down next to her at her writing desk. Here, she opened a book and produced a blank sheet of paper, a pen and an inkwell. She pointed at several words in the book and asked me to write them down.
I was not comfortable holding a pen, not at all, but I pulled the page close and steadily copied the words as best I could. Mrs. Amwell watched me closely as I worked, her brow knit together, her chin in her hands. When I finished the first few words, she selected several more, and almost immediately I noticed an improvement in my own pen strokes. My mistress must have noticed it, too, for she nodded approvingly.
Next, she pushed aside the sheet of paper and lifted the book. She asked if I understood any of the words, and I shook my head. She then pointed at several of the shorter words—she, cart, plum—and explained how each letter made its own sound, and how words strung together on paper could convey an idea, a story.
Like magick, I thought. It was everywhere, if only one knew to look.
That afternoon in the drawing room was our first lesson. Our first of countless lessons, sometimes twice a day—for my mistress’s condition, which I’d first noticed at the registry office, had worsened. The tremor in her hand had grown so severe, she could no longer write her own correspondence, and she needed me to do it for her.
In time, I worked in the kitchen less and less, and Mrs. Amwell called me often to her drawing room. This was not well received by the other household staff, Sally most of all. But I didn’t worry myself over it: Mrs. Amwell was my mistress, not Sally, and I couldn’t refuse the ganache balls and ribbons and penmanship lessons by the drawing room hearth, now, could I?
It took me many months to learn to read and write, and even longer to learn how to speak like a child who had not come from the country. But Mrs. Amwell was a wonderful tutor: gentle and soft-spoken, wrapping my hand in hers to form the letters, laughing with me when the pen slipped. Any lingering thoughts of home vanished; it shamed me to admit, but I did not want to see the farm, not ever again. I wanted to remain in London, in the grandeur of my mistress’s drawing room. Those long afternoons at her writing desk, when I was burdened only by the gazes of the jealous servants, were some of my best memories.
Then something changed. A year ago, when the roundness of my face began to fall away and the edge of my bodice grew tight, I could ignore it no longer: the feeling of another gaze, a new one, and the sensation that someone watched me too closely.
It was Mr. Amwell, my mistress’s husband. He had, for reasons I could only faintly understand, begun to pay attention to me. And I felt sure my mistress sensed it, too.
It was almost time. My bellyache was not so bad anymore; moving about the kitchen seemed to help. I was grateful for it, as following Nella’s instructions would require me to be careful and steady. A slip of my hand, which might be laughed about in my mistress’s drawing room, would be very bad today.