The Lost Apothecary(87)

The whole day lay empty in front of me, and I expected to be here a long while. I settled into my chair, pulled one leg up underneath me and opened my notebook. Who is Eliza Fanning?

It was the one question, the only question, I’d jotted down two nights ago.

In the search bar for the British Newspaper Archive, I typed two words: Eliza Fanning. Then I hit Enter.

Immediately, the search results returned a handful of entries. I scanned them quickly, but only a single record—the one at the very top of the page—appeared to be a match. I opened the article and, since it had been digitized, the full text was displayed in an instant.

The article was published in the summer of 1802, by a newspaper called The Brighton Press. I opened another tab in the browser to search for Brighton, learning that it was a seaside city on England’s south coast, a couple hours south of London.

The headline read “Eliza Pepper, née Fanning, Sole Inheritor of Husband’s Magick Book Shoppe.”

The article went on to say that twenty-two-year-old Eliza Pepper, born in Swindon but a resident of the outskirts of Brighton since 1791, had inherited the entirety of her husband Tom Pepper’s estate, including his wildly successful book shoppe at the north end of town. The shoppe carried a wide assortment of books on magick and the occult, and customers hailed regularly from all parts of the continent seeking remedies and cures for the most unusual of ailments.

According to the article, unfortunately Mr. Tom Pepper himself could not seem to conjure an antidote for his own troubles; he’d recently fallen ill, believed to be pleurisy of the chest. His wife, Eliza, was his sole caregiver until he met his untimely end. But as tribute to the life and success of Mr. Pepper, a celebration was held at the shoppe; hundreds were in attendance to pay their respects.

After the event, a small group of reporters interviewed Mrs. Pepper about her intent for the shoppe going forward. She assured the men that it would remain open.

“Both Tom and I owe our very lives to the magick arts,” she told the reporters, before explaining that long ago, in London, her very own magick blend saved her life. “I was only a child. It was my first tincture, but I risked my life for a special friend, one who still encourages and counsels me to this very day.” Mrs. Pepper then added, “Maybe my youth was to blame, but I had not an ounce of fear when the moment of death presented itself. Indeed, I found the little blue vial of magick to be feverish against my skin, and after swallowing the tincture, the heat of it was so powerful that the frigid depths were a welcome respite.”

The article stated that the reporters questioned her further about this last bit. “The ‘frigid depths’? Do explain, Mrs. Pepper,” one of the men asked. But Eliza only thanked the men for their time and insisted she was needed back inside.

She then reached out her arms on either side of her, taking the hands of her two young children—a boy and a girl, twins, aged four—and disappeared with them into her late husband’s store, the Blackfriars Shoppe of Magick Books & Baubles.

I left the British Library less than an hour after I arrived. The afternoon sun shone hot and bright above me. I bought a bottle of water from a street vendor and settled on a bench in the shade of an elm tree, considering how best to spend the rest of the day. I’d intended to spend the entire afternoon at the library, but I’d found what I was looking for in almost no time at all.

I understood, now, that the apothecary was not the one who jumped from the bridge. It was her young friend, Eliza Fanning. This explained how the apothecary made an entry in the register on the twelfth of February. It was because, contrary to what police believed, the apothecary was not dead. But neither was Eliza; whether on account of her tincture or sheer luck, the girl survived her fall.

But the article about Eliza didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain why the ingredients of the tincture were unknown to the apothecary, or whether the police ever knew of Eliza’s existence. The article didn’t state whether the apothecary subscribed to Eliza’s same beliefs about the efficacy of magic, nor did it expand on the nature of Eliza’s relationship with the apothecary.

And still, I did not know the apothecary’s name.

There was something poignant, too, about young Eliza’s involvement. Shrouded in mystery was the role she played in the apothecary’s life and death; she’d only revealed to the papers that she’d risked her life for a special friend, one who still counseled her to that day. Did this mean the apothecary lived another decade and had left London to join Eliza in Brighton? Or had Eliza been referring to something else—the apothecary’s ghost, perhaps?

I would never know.

Perhaps I would glean more information about these missing details, someday, when I began my research work and returned to the shop with a proper light and a team of historians or other academics. Undoubtedly, a wealth of unexplored possibility existed inside that tiny room. But these sorts of questions—especially those about the subtle, mysterious interactions between two women—would likely not be found in old newspapers or documents. History doesn’t record the intricacies of women’s relationships with one another; they’re not to be uncovered.

As I sat underneath the elm tree, the soft twitter of larks somewhere above me, I mused on the fact that after learning the truth about Eliza, I hadn’t gone back upstairs to tell Gaynor. I hadn’t told her the name of the person who really jumped from the bridge on February 11, 1791, and lived to see another day. To Gaynor’s knowledge, it was the apothecary who jumped from the bridge and committed suicide.