The Lost Apothecary(23)
The woman tilted her head in pity. “Oh, do come with us, we’ll hire a boatman. This little one is far too heavy for walking.” She looked down at her baby, then nodded to one of the several men waiting along the nearby riverbank.
“Thank you, but I’m perfectly well, really,” I insisted, lifting my foot to ascend the staircase. I smiled at the nice couple, wishing they’d take their leave, but another cough tugged at my throat and my effort to stifle it was futile. I could not help but turn my head to cough again and, as I did so, I felt another grip on my shoulder—firmer this time.
It was the woman, and her look was fierce. “If you must be out, I insist you come with us on the boat. You won’t make it up this staircase, I assure you, much less across the bridge. Come on, just this way.” She tugged me along, one hand on the head of her infant and the other hand on my back, and led me to one of the waiting boatmen by the river.
I relented, and once we were settled into the boat with thick, woolen blankets on our laps, I felt instantly grateful for the respite.
The baby began to fuss the moment the boat pushed away from the riverbank. The mother pulled out her breast, and the boat began to bump and roll in the icy waters. I leaned over slightly, hoping I would not lose my stomach on the ride across the river to Southwark. For a moment, I forgot altogether my reason for being in the boat, on the river, with this beautiful family. And then I remembered: the beetles. The gatehouse. The footman. Something to incite lust.
“You feel sick?” the man asked. “The water is a bit rough today, but I assure you, it is still better than walking.”
I nodded in agreement with him. Besides, the feeling was not foreign to me; it felt much like morning sickness, which I still remembered despite the passage of two decades. The rolling waves of nausea had struck me early, even before I missed my monthly course, and the fatigue came soon after. But I had known it was not just any fatigue; as well as I could hold two seeds side by side and declare which was borne of a yellow lily and which of a white, I knew without doubt that I carried a child inside of me. Despite the sickness and fatigue, one would think I had discovered the secret to all happiness, for never in my life had I been more gleeful than I was in those early days, carrying Frederick’s child.
The mother smiled at me and pulled the sleeping baby off her nipple. “You would like to hold her?” she asked. I flushed, having not realized that I was staring at the child.
“Yes,” I whispered before I knew what I was saying. “Yes.”
She handed me the child, telling me that her name was Beatrice. “Bringer of joy,” she said.
But as the weight of the child filled my arms and her warmth carried through the layers of fabric to my skin, I felt anything but joy. The bundle of peach skin and tiny breath settled in my arms like a gravestone, a marker of loss, of having had something special ripped away. A knot formed in my throat, and I instantly regretted this means of passage to Southwark.
To die in the arms of a lover as I lie alone, waiting, the corridors silent. The words in the letter that brought me here seemed a curse already.
The baby must have sensed my discontent, for she startled awake and looked around, disoriented. Even with her full belly, her brow crumbled as though she was about to wail.
Instinct told me to bounce her up and down, up and down, and hold her tighter. “Shhh,” I whispered to her, aware of the mother and father watching me. “Shhh, little one, there now, nothing to fuss over.” Beatrice calmed and locked her gaze on mine like she meant to see into the depths of me, to peek at my secrets and all that made me ache.
If only she could see what rotted within. If only her little heart could understand the heaviness that had plagued me for two decades, kindling the trail of vengeance that now blazed across London and burdened me with a lifetime of other people’s secrets.
It was on this that I dwelt as our boat rolled over the waves and we crossed to the other side. And yet, even with beautiful baby Beatrice, the bringer of joy, in my arms, I could not help but turn my gaze to Blackfriars Bridge. Looking up at the stone arches that supported the structure and lifted it high above the water, I allowed myself to dream for a moment about the release and freedom that could be so easily seized with a single step off the bridge.
A moment of free fall, a blast of frigid water. Just a moment to be done with this curse, and all the others—to seal the secrets inside and protect what had been entrusted to me. Just a moment to suck the loss and rot out of my bones. Just a moment to join my own little one, wherever she was.
I continued to bounce Beatrice up and down in my arms, and I made a silent plea that she would never think thoughts as dark and terrible as my own. And I felt sure if my own baby had lived—she would then be nineteen years old, a young woman—I would not have entertained such things. I certainly would not look so longingly to the black shadow of the bridge a short distance away.
I pulled my gaze down to Beatrice’s face. There was not a flaw on her, not so much as a birth blemish. I tugged the cream-colored blanket away slightly so that I might better see the little folds of skin around her chin and neck. By the softness of the wool against my thumb, I believed the blanket swaddling the child cost more than the clothes on both the mother and father put together. Beatrice, I said silently, hoping to somehow communicate the meaning to her with only my eyes, your mother and father love you very much.
As I said it, I could have cried out; my womb had never felt so hollow, so void. I wished I could have said the same thing to my own lost child—that her mother and father loved her very much—but I could not have said it, because it would only have been half true.