The Lost Apothecary(33)
“It’s just such a tiny little thing,” Gaynor said. “Rocque did a very good job with street size—the main thoroughfares are drawn widest, for example—but this is about as narrow as he would have drawn on the map. Must have been an unassuming little road, maybe no more than a walkway. Makes sense, as it’s labeled Back Alley.” She overlaid the current map yet again, clicking it on and off with the mouse. “And it definitely doesn’t exist today. It’s not uncommon—thousands of streets in the city have been replaced, diverted or simply built over.” She peeked over at me, and I pulled my hand from my mouth; I’d been absentmindedly chewing my fingernail. “Something’s bugging you,” she said.
Our eyes met. For a moment, I felt the almost uncontrollable desire to lean on her and unburden everything on my heart. But as heat began to prickle behind my eyes, I shoved my hands under my legs and turned my face back to the computer. James hadn’t arrived in London yet; this time was my own, and I wouldn’t spend it sobbing over him.
Looking again at the map, I hesitated, debating whether to tell Gaynor that I saw a door in exactly the spot where, according to the map, the now-obsolete Back Alley jutted off Bear Alley. But it didn’t mean a thing, right? As the plumber told me, the door led to a storage cellar in one of the buildings. Nothing more. “I’m all right,” I said, forcing a smile and turning back to the screen. “So Bear Alley survived two centuries, but Back Alley wasn’t so lucky. It must have been built over.”
Gaynor nodded. “Happened all the time. Let’s fast-forward to a hundred years after Rocque’s map.” She clicked a few more buttons and overlaid another map, this one with irregular shaded shapes throughout. “This is an ordinance survey map from the late nineteenth century,” she explained, “and the shaded areas represent structures, so we can easily see what buildings were in place.”
Gaynor paused a few moments, scanning the screen. “Okay, so this whole area was definitely pretty built-up by the mid-1800s. What this tells us is that even though Back Alley existed in the eighteenth century, it had essentially disappeared by the nineteenth century. But—” She paused and pointed to the screen of the ordinance survey map. “There’s a little jagged line here that seems to separate a couple of buildings, and it follows the path of Back Alley almost perfectly. Maybe even in the nineteenth century, Back Alley still existed as a walkway between the buildings. It’s just impossible to know.”
I nodded my head; despite my limited understanding of surveys and ordinances, I followed her logic. And with each passing moment, I felt myself more convinced that the narrow, jagged line representing Back Alley on the nineteenth-century map was related to the door I saw earlier today. The precise location of the door, relative to the two old maps that Gaynor had shown me, was simply too coincidental.
For the first time since finding the vial, I allowed myself to dream that I’d begun to unravel a significant historical mystery. What if something lay behind the door, something related to the hospital note, the vial, the apothecary? And what if I revealed the connection to Gaynor, and she thought it worthy of sharing more broadly with historians? Perhaps I’d be invited to assist with other research projects, or do a brief stint at the British Library...
I took a deep breath, reminding myself to follow the facts in slow, logical order. I couldn’t get ahead of myself.
“It’s pretty cool,” Gaynor continued, “cross-referencing all these maps. But if you’re looking to learn more about the apothecary, I’m not sure what these maps could tell you.”
I couldn’t disagree with her. “Okay,” I said, ready to move on to my second request—which was perhaps the more important one. “So, if we want to verify that this apothecary actually existed, what would be the best way to do that? Like I said, my own online searches were pretty fruitless.”
Gaynor nodded, unsurprised. “The internet is an invaluable tool, but the algorithms used by search engines like Google are a nightmare for researchers. It’s just not really built for searching antiquated documents and newspapers, even if they’ve been digitized.” She went back to the computer’s desktop and clicked on a new icon that brought up the British Newspaper Archive. “Okay,” she said, turning to me. “Let’s give it a go. This will search every line of text in most British newspapers for the last few hundred years. If there’s an article about the apothecary, it will be here, but the trick is searching the right keywords. What did you try earlier?”
“Something along the lines of 1800s, apothecary killer, London.”
“Perfect.” Gaynor typed in the keywords and hit Enter. A moment later, the page displayed zero results. “Okay, let’s remove the date,” she said.
Yet again, no results.
“Could there be something wrong with the search function?” I asked.
She laughed. “This is the fun of it—the longer and harder we search, the more rewarding it is at the end.” As she continued to try new keywords, I considered the dual meaning of her statement. I was searching for a lost apothecary, yes, but a sense of sadness came over me as I acknowledged what else I sought: resolution to my unstable marriage, my desire to be a mother, my choice of career. Surrounded by a thousand broken pieces, a long and hard search stretched ahead of me, one that would require sifting through the pieces I wanted to keep and the ones I didn’t.