The Lost Apothecary(58)

“I’m so sorry, Gaynor. I can’t come now, I need to stay in this part of town in case—” I paused. Despite our long research session together, I still didn’t know Gaynor well enough to start on about my unfaithful husband who was now vomiting in my hotel room. In fact, I hadn’t even told her I had a husband—we hadn’t discussed our personal lives at all. “I just can’t make it over there right now. But I’m about to grab coffee, if you want to join? You could bring the documents with you?”

I heard her laugh on the other end of the line. “Taking them out of the building is a hell of a way to lose my job, but I can make copies. Plus, I could use a coffee.”

We agreed to meet in a half hour at the café near my hotel, and I passed the time at a small table in the corner of the café, eating a raspberry croissant and analyzing the photos of the apothecary’s book as best I could.

When Gaynor walked through the glass door at the front of the café, I flicked off my phone and closed my notebook, shoving it safely inside my bag. I reminded myself to play it cool; I couldn’t let it slip that I knew anything more about the apothecary than I did yesterday while at the library. I hardly knew Gaynor, and sharing this information would reveal that I not only broke the law, but that I infringed upon what might be a valuable historical site. As an employee at the British Library, it was possible she’d be bound by a professional commitment to report me.

I nibbled on the final bite of my croissant, the irony not lost on me; while I came to London because I was hurt by someone else’s secrets, now I was the one hiding things.

Gaynor slid into the chair next to me and leaned in excitedly. “This is...unbelievable,” she began, pulling a folder from her large purse. She withdrew two sheets of paper, black-and-white copies of what looked very much like old newspaper articles, divided into several columns with a header toward the top. “The bulletins are dated only a couple of days apart.” She pointed toward the top of one page. “The first one is February 10, 1791, and the second one is February 12, 1791.” She set the earlier bulletin, from February 10, on top, and leaned back in her chair to look at me.

I looked closer at the bulletin and gasped.

“Remember yesterday,” Gaynor explained, “when I texted you that one of the documents contained an image? That’s the image.” She pointed toward the center of the printout, though it was unnecessary; my eyes were locked on the page. There was a drawing of an animal, so rudimentary it looked like something a toddler scribbled in sand, but there was absolutely zero doubt in my mind that I’d seen the image before.

The image was a bear—identical to the tiny bear etched on the light blue vial I’d plucked from the mud of the Thames.



22

Eliza


February 10, 1791

It was after eight o’clock in the evening, and though Nella had worked ceaselessly over the last few hours, she would not let me help. Instead, she strained under the effort of pushing corks as far into their bottles as they would go, nesting the empty boxes as tightly as they would fit and scrubbing a few of her gallipots with all her might. She tidied and organized as though she meant to leave—if not permanently, then at least for a long while—and it was due entirely to my careless mistake.

Of all the errors, great and small, I had made in my twelve years of life, I believed that taking the jar from the lower cabinet was my greatest offense of all. How could I have overlooked the address etched into the jar? I’d never before made such a mess of things, never in my life.

Oh, how I wished I could turn back the hours. And to think I was once merely useless to Nella. At present that seemed a dream; with my mistake, I might have doomed her and all of us within the pages of her book. I thought again of the many names I’d traced in the register a couple of days ago. I had darkened the ink strokes in order to preserve and protect the names of the women, to give them a place in history, just as Nella had explained. Now, I feared I hadn’t preserved and protected anything at all. Instead, my mistake with the canister might expose the countless women in the book. Might ruin them.

I considered any practical ways to repair my wrongdoing but could think of none. Only the reversal of time could fix this, but it seemed a daunting thing to ask, even of magick.

And yet, Nella had not sent me away. Did she mean to kill me? Force me to account for my mistake? The room in which we sat, not speaking to one another, was thick with her frustration. I aimed to be as quiet as possible so as not to further agitate her, and I shrank in shame near the fated cupboard, hunched over myself, only three things before me: the book of household magick from Tom Pepper, lying open in my lap; the book of midwives’ magick from Nella, set aside; and a candle that was nearly spent. I had not the heart to ask Nella for a new candle, and would be forced soon to put away the books and—what? Fall asleep with my head against the stone wall? Wait for Nella to issue her punishment?

I lifted the dying candle above the open page before me. In the dim light, the printed words of Tom Pepper’s magick book seemed to dance and move on the page, and it took great effort for me to focus on a single line of text. This frustrated me greatly; if there was ever a time to rely on magick, what with its ability to give breath to stillborn baby Tom, it was now. I needed to find a spell to fix it all, and it couldn’t happen a moment too soon. Whereas this afternoon I sought a potion to unburden me of a man’s spirit, now I wished to remove the burden I had unwittingly placed upon Nella and myself and many others: the threat of arrest, condemnation and perhaps even execution.