The Lost Apothecary(39)
And so she began her story, and though each word seemed to rise painfully to the surface like a boil, I also sensed that her words were a form of release. I might have been only twelve, but sitting together amid the hay bales, I felt as if Nella considered me a friend.
“My mother died when I was a young woman,” she explained. “This was two decades ago, though the grief is still tender, like a bruise. Have you ever grieved?”
I shook my head. Other than Mr. Amwell, I’d never known someone who’d died.
Nella took a deep, steadying breath. “It is a terrible, exhausting, lonely thing. One day, at the very peak of my grief, a young man named Frederick arrived at the shop—which was not one of poisons, yet—and he begged for something to give to his sister, Rissa, to induce bleeding, for the cramping in her belly was unbearable and it had been half a year since her monthly course.”
I frowned. I was not sure what monthly course meant, but no matter how Rissa played into the story, I could empathize with her belly pains. “He was the first man to step foot into my shop,” Nella continued, “but he was so desperate! And if Rissa did not have a sister or mother to send, how could I refuse him? So I gave him a tincture of motherwort, an emmenagogue.”
“Motherwort,” I repeated. “Is it for mothers?”
Nella smiled and went on to explain that more than a century ago, Culpeper—the great healer—believed it to bring joy to new mothers and remove the melancholy so common in the days after childbirth. “But you see,” she continued, “motherwort also settles the womb and stimulates the belly to shed what’s inside. In doing so, it must be administered very carefully, and only to those who are positive they are not with child.”
She pulled a stem of hay from the bale and began to twist it around her finger, like a ring. “The next week Frederick returned, vibrant and gentlemanlike, thanking me for returning his sister to her normal, healthy self. I found myself intensely drawn to him for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. I thought it love, then, but now I wonder if it wasn’t simply the emptiness of grief, seeking something to rush in and take away the barren feeling.”
She exhaled. “Frederick seemed drawn to me, too, and in the weeks that followed, he promised me his hand. With each passing day, each promise, something in my heart came back to life. He promised me a house full of children and a beautiful shop with pink glass windows to carry on the memory of my mother. Imagine how that made me feel... What could I call it other than love?” She looked down at her hand, where the stem of hay was wrapped in a perfect circle around her finger. At once, she let go and it fell to her lap.
“I soon became pregnant. One would think I knew how to prevent such a thing, but that is not how it happened. Despite my grief, the new life inside of me gave me a great deal of hope. Not everything in the world had given up its last breath, like my mother. And when I told Frederick about our baby on that early-winter morning, he seemed overjoyed. He said we would get married the week after next, following Martinmas, before anyone else could see that I was with child. You may be young, Eliza, but you know enough to see that the sun does not shine so brightly on a child born out of wedlock.”
Concern bubbled inside of me. Nella had never mentioned a child, grown or otherwise; where was the child now?
“Well, as you might suspect, I was not with child for much longer. It happens often, little Eliza, but that does not make it any less terrible. I hope that you never have to experience it.” She pulled her legs up closer to her body and crossed her arms, as though protecting herself from what she was to say next. “It happened very late at night. Frederick meant to leave the city for a week to visit family, so we’d spent the entire evening together. He fixed us supper, helped with the repair of several shelves, read me a poem he’d written...a perfect evening, or so I thought. He left me with a long kiss, promising to return the next week.” Nella shuddered and was silent a moment. “Hours later, the cramping began, and I lost my child. No words can describe the pain. Afterward, I needed nothing so much as the comfort of Frederick’s embrace. In bedridden agony, I waited for the week to pass, repressing my grief until he returned and could help me with the burden of it. But he did not show—not after the second week, nor the third. I began to suspect something terrible, and I thought it very strange that the night I fell ill—the night I lost our girl—was the last night he’d shown his face.
“Frederick was familiar with many of the shelves and drawers at my shop. And as I said, even the most benign remedies may be deadly in great quantity. I checked several bottles against my register, and to my horror, I saw that the motherwort was not at its recorded level. Frederick knew of its properties, since I had dispensed it to his sister, Rissa. I realized, then, that he had used my own tinctures against me. Against our child. We had spent so much time together, and it was not out of the realm of possibility that he had somehow disguised it and tricked me into ingesting it during supper. I felt sure, as the days passed, that the motherwort—meant to remove melancholy and bring joy to a new mother’s soul—had taken the child right from my womb.”
The back of my throat burned and tightened as Nella spoke. I wanted to ask how Frederick managed to deceive her—how he could have rooted through her things, slipped a single drop into her food or drink without her noticing—but I did not want to turn this against her, to make her feel any worse about it than she must already.