The Lost Apothecary(61)

I froze, rereading the words and covering my mouth lest I retch onto the clean pages. My nervous state must be playing tricks on me. Lady Clarence had returned the jar and all was perfectly well—certainly no one was suspected of murder. Why, I must have misread the text. I forced myself to pull my eyes off the page and look at something new—the purple, ribbon-adorned hat sitting atop the lady across the street, or the blinding glimmer of sunshine on the mullioned window of the milliner’s shop behind her—and then I returned my gaze to the page.

The words had not changed.

“Miss,” came a soft voice. “Miss.” I looked up to see the mother, holding the hand of her now-obedient son, resplendent in his thick coat, waiting for me to return the paper to her.

“Y-yes,” I stammered. “Yes, here you are.” I handed it over, the paper trembling as it passed from my fingers to hers. She thanked me and stepped away, after which I rushed immediately to the newsboy at the stand. “The Thursday Bulletin,” I said. “You have more copies?”

“A few.” He gave me one of two remaining copies on his table.

I dropped him a coin, shoved the paper into my bag and rushed away from him lest the terror on my face betray me. But as I fled to Ludgate Hill, forcing one foot in front of the other with as much speed as I could muster, I finally began to fear the worst. What if the authorities were at my shop right that moment? Little Eliza, she was there alone! I crouched between two rubbish bins at the side of a building, opened the paper and read it as quickly as I could. It was printed overnight; the ink was fresh.

At first, I found the article so impossible to believe, I wondered if I’d been given a prop in some performance, one in which I acted the unwitting performer. And perhaps I could have been convinced it was mere theatrics if the details did not tie together so well.

The lady’s maid, I learned, did abruptly resign from her post, just as Lady Clarence said—but she must have put two and two together about Lord Clarence’s sudden death, for she went to the authorities with a wax impression of my mother’s engraved jar. At this revelation, I nearly cried out; it was of no consequence that the jar now rested safely in my shop, for the maid took a damned impression of it! She must have done it before Lady Clarence seized the canister from the cellar. Perhaps the maid was fearful of taking the jar itself on account of being found out and labeled a thief.

According to the article, the wax impression revealed a partially legible set of letters—B ley—and a single, thumbprint-size drawing, which appeared to authorities to be that of a bear on all fours. The lady’s maid told authorities that her mistress, the Lady Clarence, instructed her to put the contents of the canister into the dessert liqueur that was ultimately ingested by Lord Clarence. The maid presumed it a sweetener; only later did she realize it was poison.

I continued reading and clasped my hand over my throat. The authorities went to Lady Clarence’s home late last evening—it must have been soon after she had returned the jar, which would explain the hours-old ink on the hastily printed insert—but Lady Clarence vehemently denied the maid’s claim, insisting no knowledge of any poison or canister whatsoever.

Upon turning the page, I learned that the identification of the origin of the poison was now of utmost importance, as the “dispenser” (at this, I let out another small cry) might serve to resolve the conflicting stories of Lady Clarence and her maid. The bailiff hoped that, in exchange for a reasonable amount of clemency, the dispenser would identify who actually purchased the poison that was used to kill Lord Clarence.

And yet, the utter peculiarity of it! Lord Clarence was not meant to suffer a sure and sudden death at all. Miss Berkwell was the one who was meant to drink the cantharides, and yet she escaped the entire thing unscathed—she was not so much as a suspect in her lover’s death, her name not even mentioned in the article. I had mourned the possibility of her death all along, but by God, how things had swung in her favor!

At the end was a crude image: a hand-drawn copy of the wax impression provided by the lady’s maid. If the canister itself was hardly legible, this drawing-of-a-drawing certainly wasn’t any better. That, if nothing else, gave me a moment of ease.

I tore my eyes from the page. My damp, hot fingers had smudged the ink in several places, and the flesh of my inner arms and my groin was damp. I stood in the narrow alley between the two bins of rubbish, breathing deep, sucking in the odor of decay.

As I saw it, there were two possibilities: I could return to my shop and blow out every candle, lest the authorities locate 3 Back Alley and I must rely on my final disguise—the cupboard wall—to protect me and the secrets housed within. But even if it did protect me, for how long would I subsist under the relentless grasp of my illness? Only days, I feared. And oh, how I did not want to die while trapped inside of my mother’s shop! I had spoiled it enough with my killing; need I ruin it further with the decay of my body?

The second possibility, of course, was that the cupboard wall might not protect me. As safe as I’d felt behind it in years past, my shop’s address had never been exposed in such a blatant way. The disguise was not infallible; the authorities might arrive with hounds at their heels, and the dogs would surely smell my scent of fear through the wall. If the authorities broke their way through and arrested me, what legacy was left to preserve from prison? The lingering trace of my mother was delicate enough; memories of her came easily as I moved about my shop, but these precious recollections would not follow me to Newgate.