The Lost Apothecary(37)
“Here we have the fruit,” she said, continuing to dig. “They prefer to eat the leaves, but this time of night, they will be burrowed in the soil.” And then, out of nowhere, she withdrew a glossy little bug, no longer than her thumbnail. “Now this is very important,” she said, dropping the squirming beetle into the bag. “Do not press them or crush them.”
I wiggled my toes in my shoes, hardly able to feel them even though we had been in the field only a few minutes. “How can I get one from the ground without pressing it?” I asked, my interest in the whole activity suddenly waning. “When I find one, I will need to grab him before he runs off, and I cannot do that without pressing on him a bit.”
“Let’s do the next one together,” she urged, patting the ground beside her. It seemed her aches and discomforts had lessened; perhaps the cold had numbed her. “Reach into that same spot, where I just put my hand. I’m sure I felt another set of legs.”
I shuddered. I had expected we would use a tool—a net or spade—instead of our gloved hands. But I did as she asked, grateful that the dark sky prevented her from seeing the grimace on my face. I moved my hand around the hard, smooth bulb of beetroot, and then I felt it: something crawled against my fingers, something very much alive. Steeling myself, I twisted my hand in the dirt and cupped my fingers around it. I lifted a pile of soil to show Nella and, sure enough, a green striped beetle crawled out of the dirt as though to greet us.
“Very good,” she said. “Your first harvest. Drop him in the bag and close it up, else he will make quick work of escaping back to his little beetroot. I’ll start over there, on the next row. We need one hundred beetles. Keep count of yours.”
“One hundred?” I glanced down at my single beetle, writhing around in the bag. “Why, we’ll be here all night.”
She cocked her head at me, her face serious. The moonlight reflected against her left eye, giving her a strange, two-faced appearance. “It’s curious to me, child, that you’d complain of the effort in catching a night’s worth of beetles—mere bugs—and yet you think nothing of killing a man.”
I shuddered, wishing she hadn’t reminded me of Mr. Amwell’s ghost, still pressing inside of me, making me trickle blood.
“It is hard work,” she said, “and harder for me, as of late. Go on, now, let’s get to it.”
The night passed, though how much of it, I could not in truth be sure. The moon moved a quarter of the way across the sky, but I was not wise enough to use it as my clock.
“Seventy-four,” I heard Nella say from behind me, her feet crunching on the hay beneath us. “And you?”
“Twenty-eight,” I replied. I had counted diligently, repeating the number in my head, lest I forget and be forced to reach in and count the crunchy bugs again.
“Ah! We’re finished then, and with two to spare.” She helped me to my feet, for my knees were sore and my hands raw.
We began to walk toward the road when I grasped her arm, distress warming me in an instant. “There will be no coaches running this late,” I gasped. “We do not have to walk all the way back, do we?” I could not do it, not for anything.
“You have two perfectly good legs, don’t you?” she replied, but at the sight of my miserable expression, she broke into a smile. “Oh, don’t despair. We will rest over there, in that shed. It’s quite warm, in fact, and perfectly quiet. We will take the first coach in the morning.”
Trespassing seemed a worse offense than harvesting deadly beetles, but I followed Nella willingly—excitedly, even, for I so desperately wanted to rest—as we went through an unlocked door into the wooden shed that was, as she had promised, warm, dark and quiet. It reminded me of the barn at home in the country, and I cringed at the thought of what my mother would say to me if she saw me now, awake in the middle of the night with a bag of deadly bugs in my hand.
It took my eyes several moments to adjust, but eventually I could make out a wheelbarrow at the far end of the structure and, closer toward us, an assortment of tools for tending a field. Along the wall to our right, several haystacks were pushed neatly against one another. It was here that Nella stepped forward, nestling herself against one of the stacks.
“It’s warmest here,” she urged, “and if you pile up a bit of hay on the ground, it makes a decent bed. Watch out for the mice, though. They like it here as much as we do.”
Looking back at the door, fearing that some angry grounds owner might come chasing after us, I reluctantly followed Nella and made my own spot. She sat across from me, our feet almost touching, then pulled a small bundle from underneath her coat and unwrapped a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese and a leather canteen of what I assumed to be water. The moment she handed it to me, I realized how desperately thirsty I was. As I drank, the beetles in the bag rustled next to me.
“Have as much as you want,” she said. “There’s a barrel behind this shed, full of rainwater.” I realized that not only had she used the shed previously for shelter, but she had, apparently, explored the grounds for other resources.
I finally pulled the canteen away and wiped water from my lips with a long edge of my skirt. “Do you often go onto other people’s farmland to get what you need?” I thought not only of this shed, which did not belong to us, but the field where we’d just spent almost an entire night.