The Lost Apothecary(68)

I looked at the clock by the door. Thirty-seven minutes had passed. I rushed forward to the shelf above the table, the contents of which I was now familiar, and I pulled down the jar filled with tear-shaped drops, resin of frankincense. I had seen Nella take them once before, after rubbing at her swollen fingers.

“There is more,” I said. “Take some of these while I tell you.” I explained that I had passed by the Clarence home and heard it all from the mistress herself. After the papers were printed, another person—perhaps two or three or more—came forward with vials that were engraved with the same bear. All the vials were found in the days or weeks following untimely deaths, and now authorities believed the vials might be associated with a repeat killer.

“I had not heard that,” Nella said, her face calm. Had she gone mad? Did she not understand the urgency, and what this all meant? Only minutes ago she was the one telling me to make haste; why did she not do it herself?

“Nella, listen to me,” I pleaded. “You cannot stay. Remember the night when you helped me with the beetles? Somehow, you drew together your strength. Do it now, please!” Then I was struck by an idea. “We can go to the Amwells’ until we determine what to do next. It is the perfect place. No one will bother us there.” So long as Nella was with me, I felt I could stand to be inside the home while waiting for the tincture to finish curing. Mr. Amwell’s spirit would not harm me with her so close, would it?

“Easy, child,” Nella replied, putting a handful of resin pills into her mouth. “I do not intend to stay here.” She pushed the jar of frankincense aside. “I know where I am going, and I was about to leave, anyhow. But you mustn’t come with me. I will go alone.”

If my agreement was what she needed, she had it. I smiled at her and helped her with her coat. As I did so, I was reminded of my first visit to the shop, only a week before. How much had happened in recent days, and none of it good. I remembered sitting at the chair across from her, hesitant to drink the valerian hot brew, while Mr. Amwell and Lord Clarence were still alive and ignorant of the plans laid out before them. I remembered, too, my second visit—pleased with the success of the poisoned eggs but plagued with a new terror and crouching forward in pain as my belly bled.

At once, a memory struck me. “Nella, after we harvested the beetles and you told me about Frederick, you said that if you’d bled again, you might have stopped this long ago.”

Nella looked sharply away, as though my question had just struck the side of her face. “Yes,” she said between clenched teeth. “Perhaps I would have. But you are too young to understand what I meant, so you may forget I said it at all.”

“When will I be old enough to understand?”

“There is no set age,” she said, checking the buttons on her coat. “When your womb is ready to carry a baby, you will begin to bleed, once each month as the moon makes her route across the sky. It is a passage, child. Into maturity.”

I frowned. As the moon makes her route across the sky. Didn’t Mrs. Amwell say something similar on the night I began to bleed, the night we killed her husband? “How long does the bleeding last?” I asked.

Nella looked at me strangely, her eyes narrowed, as though reconsidering me. “Three or four days, sometimes more.” She lowered her voice. “Did your mother, or Mrs. Amwell, never tell you any of this?”

I shook my head.

“Are you bleeding now, child?” she asked.

Suddenly embarrassed, I said, “No, but I did a few days ago. It hurt very much—my belly felt swollen and cramped.”

“And it was the first time?”

I nodded. “It happened right after Mr. Amwell’s death. I feared he did it to me—”

Nella raised her hand and smiled softly at me. “A mere coincidence, child. You are blessed, and more so than me. I only wish you’d told me sooner. I could have mixed something up to ease the cramping altogether.”

I wished I’d told her sooner, too. For the first time since the death of Mr. Amwell, I allowed myself to consider the possibility that the bleeding might not have been his wicked spirit taking hold of me. Could it have been simply the monthly bleeding of which Nella just spoke? A passage into maturity? I had never thought of myself as a woman—only a child, a girl.

I wished to think on it longer, but there was no time. We should have left long ago.

Nella’s register was still open on the table, and I glanced down at it. She had opened it to the year 1770, more than twenty years ago. The page was badly damaged; a dark red stain, like wine, smeared across the side.

Why had Nella returned to this old entry? Perhaps she meant to turn back the pages of her life—to remember the early days, before it all began. When this page was written, Nella’s heart was not yet scarred. Her joints were not yet swollen and stiff. Motherhood, and her own mother, had not yet been taken from her. Perhaps she’d revisited the entry because she meant to remember these things: the honorable work she once did, the sort of apothecary she could have been, the virtuous woman her mother wanted her to be.

All of it, thrown aside in the bitter wake of Frederick’s betrayal.

Nella caught me looking, then closed the book with a loud snap and led us to the door to go our separate ways.



26

Caroline


Present day, Wednesday