The Lost Apothecary(78)

Putnam nodded as though he, too, hated to finally admit to this. Craw gave him a stiff pat on the back. “Your case against this woman is losing its legs, good sir.”

Putnam spat at my feet. “Get out of my face, wench,” he said. The three men gave a final glance over the railing, nodded at one another, and headed back down the bridge.

After they had gone, I peered over the edge, my eyes searching desperately for the swirling fabric of a soaked gown or the creamy paleness of skin. But I saw nothing. Only the muddy, unsettled churn of the river.

She needn’t have done it. Her little heart must have thought that by bringing the devastation upon us with her mistake, she must be the one to take the fall. Or perhaps it was something more, like her fear of spirits. Perhaps she feared my spirit, haunting her after my death, cursing her for bringing this upon us. Oh, how I wished I’d been gentler with her about the ghost of Mr. Amwell! How I wished I had softened my tone, gained her trust, convinced her of what was real and what was not. I wanted more than anything to reverse time and pull her back upward to me. I stumbled backward a step, my knees weakened under the suffocating sense of regret.

Regret, but also discontent.

I meant to be the one down there. I meant to be the one to die. Could I live another day bearing this new agony, too?

The crowds had mostly dispersed; they no longer pushed inward, curious. And if I forced aside the memory of Eliza’s fall, I could almost convince myself that nothing had changed. It was just me, alone with the end I had always imagined.

I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of all that I had lost, and then I stepped toward the railing and leaned over the hungry black waves.



32

Caroline


Present day, Wednesday

James lay still next to me, his breaths slow and even, while I sat in the chair by the head of his hospital bed. The article rested in my lap. After reading it a moment ago, I could only lean forward and put my head in my hands. Though I didn’t know her name—I knew the woman only as the apothecary—her self-chosen death tugged at me, uncomfortable in the way of a slow-building headache.

Of course, she lived two hundred years ago; I’d known from the first moment I learned of her that she was no longer alive. The shock was how she died.

Maybe it was that I’d been to the River Thames, where the woman jumped, and I could picture the whole event in my mind. Or maybe it was that I’d been inside the apothecary’s hidden shop, the discreet and shadowy place where she lived and breathed and mixed her potions, however menacing they were, and so I felt a sense of solitary connection to her.

With my eyes closed, I imagined the events set out in the second article: the family and friends of previous victims—those who died before Lord Clarence—coming forward after seeing the first article, bringing with them their own vials and jars, all of them bearing the same logo of the little bear.

The police understanding, at once, that they were hunting a serial killer.

The mapmakers enlisted late in the night; every instance of B ley in the city turned over, inspected, considered.

The three officers descending on Bear Alley on the eleventh of February, their arrival so abrupt that a woman began to run and did not stop until she was standing at the top of Blackfriars Bridge.

The article mentioned Back Alley, too, albeit briefly. After the woman began to run, the third and most junior officer remained in the area to inspect the door from which he thought the woman had come. It was the door at 3 Back Alley. But upon entering the room, he found only an old storage cellar: a wooden bin of rotted grain and empty shelves at the far end of the room, but little else.

This place, I knew, was the very same in which I’d stood last night—the room with the crumbling shelves at the back. It served as the apothecary’s cover, her facade, akin to the mask one might hold over their face at a masquerade. Meanwhile, behind the room lay the truth: the shop of poisons. And though the two-hundred-year-old article assured the public that police would continue to dig until they uncovered her name and place of work, the untouched space I found last night told me that they never did. The apothecary’s facade had been resolute.

But there was something odd. Although the article seized a fair amount of space on the page, the author glossed over the most significant part of the whole event: the woman who jumped. Her description and features were not discussed, not even the color of her hair; it only said she wore dark, heavy clothing. The article did not reveal whether any words were exchanged with the woman and noted the whole affair had been rather disorderly. A number of spectators had descended upon the immediate vicinity, the confusion and chaos such that the officers briefly lost sight of the woman before she stepped over the railing of the bridge.

According to the article, there was no doubt the woman was an abettor in the death of Lord Clarence, and officers were certain the string of murders associated with the woman they’d dubbed the apothecary killer had come to an end. The River Thames was hostile that day, swift and frigid, littered with ice. After the woman jumped, police monitored the area for a long while. But she did not surface. She did not reappear.

Her identity, according to the article, remained unknown.

As twilight fell over London and nightfall neared, James began to stir. He turned over in the hospital bed, facing me, then slowly opened his eyes. “Hi,” he whispered, a smile pulling at his lips.

Sobbing in the waiting room had been more cathartic than I realized, and after fearing this morning that I might lose James, something within me had softened. I was still desperately angry with him. But in this moment, at least I could bear to be close to him. I reached for his hand and took it in my own, wondering if this might be the last time we would hold hands in a very long time—or perhaps forever.