Chapter 23

23

Nella

February 11, 1791

If the poisons I dispensed, and the deaths they subsequently caused, were indeed rotting me from the inside out, then I felt sure the death of Lord Clarence hastened the decay. Was it possible the consequence upon me increased with the renown of the victim?

It was of only some significance that the Lady Clarence returned the damnable jar, for the immediate crisis of the gallows was averted, but the slow rotting within me did not cease. A thick, bloody trickle in my throat had plagued me the last day, and while I would have liked to blame it on the late nights in the beetle field, I feared something worse: that whatever plagued my bones and skull had moved into my lungs.

Oh, how I cursed the day that Lady Clarence dropped her rose-scented letter into the barley bin! And how maddening that none of my own concoctions could resolve this. I hadn’t the name of the disease, much less the remedy for it.

I could not sit in my shop another moment, turning to stone, and I needed a block of lard besides. And although I had not the heart to send Eliza away immediately after Lady Clarence’s visit, the next morning I had no choice. As I prepared to depart for the market, I told Eliza, once and for all, that it was time for her to leave.

She asked me how long I planned to be gone. “No more than an hour,” I said, and she begged me to let her rest another thirty minutes, claiming a deep ache in her head on account of yesterday’s anxieties. Admittedly, I suffered a bad headache myself, and so I gave her an oil of herb prunella to rub into her temples and told her she could rest her eyes just a few minutes more. We said goodbye, and she assured me she would be gone by the time I returned.

I gathered my tendrils of strength and made my way to Fleet Street. I kept my head down, fearing as always that someone might look into my eyes and discern the secrets I kept within, every murder as clear as the crystal glass from which Lord Clarence drank to his death. But no one paid me any mind. Along the avenue, a hawker woman offered lemon confections, and an artist sketched lighthearted caricatures. The sun began to peek out of a cloud, its heat wrapping around my tired, sore neck, and around me floated the safe, relaxed din of conversation. No one seemed interested in me; no one even noticed me. I could not help, therefore, but think it a good day, or at least better than yesterday.

As I passed a newspaper stand, I found myself tangled up with a small boy and his mother. She had just bought a newspaper and now attempted to wrestle him back into his coat as he ran in circles around her, making a game of it. Since my head was down, I could not properly see, much less avoid, the chaos, and I found myself stepping straight into the little boy’s path.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. My market bag flew forward and gave the boy a good knock in the head. Behind him, his mother lifted her newspaper and gave him a firm smack on the bottom.

Under attack from two women, including one stranger, the young boy relented. “Fine, Mama,” he said, and stuck his arms out like a featherless bird, waiting for his coat. The mother, victorious, handed the newspaper to the person nearest her—which happened to be me.

Yesterday’s evening newspaper, headlined The Thursday Bulletin, fell open in my hands. It was thin, unlike the stacks of The Chronicle or The Post, and I glanced down at it with disinterest, expecting to return it to the woman as soon as she had a free hand. But an insert, a hastily printed advertisement, had been stuffed within, and my eye caught several words toward the bottom.

Like black, inky beasts, the words read “Bailiff Searching For Lord Clarence’s Murderer.”

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 impressionof 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.

That wasn’t to say I would find myself alone; I expected the constables would soon bring in the countless other women whose names were in my register. Women I intended to aid, to comfort, would then be alongside me behind the iron bars, and we would be accompanied only by the unwanted groping of the prison guards.

No, I refused it. I refused both possibilities, because there was one more alternative.

This third and final choice was to lock up the shop, leave the register safely behind the false wall, and hasten my own death: to dive into the icy depths of the River Thames, to make myself one with the shadows of Blackfriars Bridge. I had thought of it many times, most recently while crossing the river with baby Beatrice in my arms, as I’d gazed at the waves lapping against the creamy white stone pillars and felt the film of mist on my nose.

Had all of my life led me to this destiny, that fateful moment when the cold water would braid around me and pull me under?

But the child. Eliza was at the shop, just where I left her, and I could not leave her alone to suffer the inquisition of a bailiff that might find his way to 3 Back Alley. What if Eliza heard a commotion, peeked out of the door and unwittingly exposed what lay behind the false wall? She’d made one grave mistake already; if she made another and found herself facing an angry constable, I could not ask the poor child to defend all that I’d done.

It had hardly been fifteen minutes since I left her. Stuffing the newspaper back into my bag, I stepped out of the alley to return to my shop of poisons. I could not choose a certain death. Not yet, anyhow.

I had to go back for her. I had to go back for little Eliza.

“Eliza,” I hissed, closing the cupboard door behind me. “I can hear your clatter from halfway across the city. Have you no—”

But my breath caught at the scene before me: at the table in the center of the room, Eliza sat before numerous jars, bottles and crushed leaves of all colors, sorted into separate bowls. There must have been two dozen vessels in all.

She looked up at me, pestle in hand, a look of concentration frozen into her brow. Her cheek was smeared with reddish pigment—merely beet powder, I prayed—and the strands of hair above her forehead jutted out in all directions, as though she’d been boiling water over the fire. For a moment, I was returned to this same scene thirty years ago, but it was me at the table and my mother stood over me, her eyes patient if not a bit vexed.

The memory lasted only an instant. “What is all of this?” I asked, fearing that the crushed leaves that littered my table, floor and instruments might be deadly. If so, the cleanup of such a virulent mess would be dreadful.

“I—I’m working on some hot brews,” she stammered. “Remember the first time I visited? You gave me—ah, it was called valerian, I think. Here, I found some.” She pulled a dark reddish jar toward her. Instinctively, I glanced to the third shelf from the bottom of the back wall; the spot where the valerian should be was indeed empty. “And here, too—rosewater and peppermint.” She thrust the vials forward.

Where to begin with this ignorant child? Had she no sense? “Eliza, don’t touch another thing. How on earth do you know that none of these may kill you?” I rushed to the table, my eyes scanning each jar. “You’re to tell me that you began pulling things from my shelves without any knowledge of what they may do to you? Oh, heavens, which ones have you tasted?”

Panic rose inside of me as I began to consider antidotes to my most lethal poisons, cures that could be quickly blended and administered.

“I have been listening very closely in recent days,” she said. I frowned, not believing I’d had any recent need for things such as rosewater and venom and fern root, the last of which was clearly marked on the wooden box balancing precariously at the edge of the table. “And I also referenced a couple of your books over there.” She pointed at the books, but they appeared untouched, meaning that Eliza was either lying about this, or she had the sleight of a well-practiced thief. “I’ve prepared a couple of the teas here, for us to try.” She bravely pushed two cups toward me, one of them brimming with liquid of a deep indigo color and the other, a pale brown resembling the inside of a chamber pot. “Before I leave for good,” she added, her voice trembling.

I had no interest in her hot brews and I had a mind to tell her as such, but I reminded myself that Eliza hadn’t read the news article that left me with such taut nerves. Now, more than ever, I needed to remain diligent and discreet—and it would be prudent to resume tidying the shop once and for all. Though I had no aim to return, I could not bear to leave it disheveled.

“Listen very closely to me, girl.” I set down the market bag, empty except for the newspaper. “You must leave. Right now, without a moment to waste.”

Her hand fell into a pile of crushed leaves on the table. Defeated and heartbroken, she seemed in that moment more a child than I’d ever known her to be. She glanced at the cupboard where the canister stood, the one that Lady Clarence had returned to us. How confused Eliza must have been by my forcefulness and the sudden necessity to make haste.

Still, I would not tell her my reasoning—I would not tell her what I knew. I meant, even then, to protect her.

I tilted my head, pitying the both of us. I wished I could send her to Lady Clarence’s, but knowing that the authorities were there, asking questions, it was much too close for my comfort. “Please go back to the Amwell house, child. I know you fear it so, but you must go. It will be safe, I promise.”

Surrounded by crushed leaves and colorful spills, Eliza gazed over the jars and bottles in front of her as she considered my request. At last, she nodded and said, “I will go.” Then she wrapped her fingers around something I could not see and stuffed it into her dress. I did not care enough to question her about it; let the child take what she wants. Greater concerns awaited me.

After all, our very lives were at stake.