Chapter 3

3

Nella

February 4, 1791

When 3 Back Alley was a reputable women’s apothecary shop belonging to my mother, it consisted of a single room. Alight with the flame of countless candles and often teeming with customers and their babies, the little shop gave a sense of warmth and safety. In those days, it seemed everyone in London knew of the shop for women’s maladies, and the heavy oak door at the front of the shop rarely stayed shut for long.

But many years ago—after my mother’s death, after Frederick’s betrayal and after I began dispensing poisons to women across London—it became necessary to divide the space into two separate, distinct sections. This was easily accomplished with the installation of a wall of shelves, which split the room in two.

The first room, situated in the front, remained directly accessible from Back Alley. Anyone could open the front door—it was nearly always unlocked—but most would assume they had arrived at the wrong destination. I now kept nothing in the room except an old grain barrel, and who had any interest in a bin of half-rotted pearl barley? Sometimes, if I was lucky, a nest of rats toiled away at one corner of the room, and this gave further impression of disuse and neglect. This room was my first disguise.

Indeed, many customers ceased coming. They had heard of my mother’s death, and after seeing this empty room, they merely assumed the shop had closed for good.

The more curious or nefarious sort—like young boys with sticky fingers—were not deterred by the emptiness. Seeking something to snatch, they’d push deeper into the room, inspecting the shelves for wares or books. But they would find nothing, because I left nothing to steal, nothing of interest at all. And so onward they would go. Onward they always went.

What fools they were—all of them but the women who’d been told where to look by their friends, their sisters, their mothers. Only they knew that the bin of pearl barley served a very important function: it was a means of communication, a hiding place for letters whose contents dared not be uttered aloud. Only they knew that hidden within the wall of shelves, invisible, stood a door leading to my apothecary shop for women’s maladies. Only they knew that I waited silently behind the wall, my fingers stained with the residue of poison.

It was where I now waited for the woman, my new patron, at daybreak.

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Hearing the slow creak of the storage room door, I knew she had arrived. I peered through the nearly imperceptible cleft in the column of shelves, aiming to get my first dim look at her.

Taken aback, I covered my mouth with trembling fingers. Was it some mistake? This was no woman at all; it was a mere girl, not more than twelve or thirteen, dressed in a gray woolen gown with a threadbare navy cloak draped over her shoulders. Had she come to the wrong place? Perhaps she was one of those little thieves who was not fooled by my storage room, and she sought something to steal. If that were the case, she’d be better suited at a baker’s shop, stealing cherry buns so she could fatten up a bit.

But the girl, for her youth, arrived at exactly daybreak. She stood still and sure of herself in the storage room, her gaze directed at the false wall of shelves behind which I stood.

No, this was no accidental visitor.

At once, I prepared to send her away on account of her age, but I stopped myself. In her note, she had said she needed something for her mistress’s husband. What might become of my legacy if this mistress was well-known about town, and word got out that I sent a child away? Besides, as I continued to peek at the young girl through the cleft, she held high her head of thick black hair. Her eyes were round and bright, but she did not look down at her feet or back at the front door to the alley. She shivered slightly, but I felt sure it was on account of the cool air rather than her nerves. The girl stood too tall, too proud, for me to think her fearful.

With what did she brew her courage? The strict command of her mistress, or something more sinister?

I maneuvered the latch out of its hold, swung the column of shelves inward and motioned for the girl to come inside. Her eyes took in the tiny space in an instant, without need to even blink; the room was so small that if the girl and I stood together and spread our arms wide, we could nearly touch the opposite sides of it.

I followed her gaze across the shelves at the back wall, littered with glass vials and tin funnels, gallipots and grinding stones. On a second wall, as far as possible from the fire, my mother’s oaken cupboard held an assortment of earthenware and porcelain jars, meant for the tinctures and herbs that frayed and decayed in even the faintest light. On the wall nearest the door stood a long narrow counter as tall as the girl’s shoulders; on it rested a collection of metal scales, glass and stone weights, and a few bound reference guides on women’s maladies. And if the girl were to pry inside the drawers beneath the counter, she would find spoons, corks, candlesticks, pewter plates and dozens of sheets of parchment, many of them spoiled with hurried notes and calculations.

Treading carefully around her and latching the door, my most immediate concern was providing my new customer with a sense of safety and discretion. But my fears were unwarranted, for she plopped into one of my two chairs as though she’d been at my shop a hundred times. I could see her better now that she sat in the light. Her figure was a slender one, and she had clear, hazel eyes, almost too large for her oval-shaped face. Intertwining her fingers and setting her hands on the table, she looked at me and smiled. “Hello.”

“Hello,” I replied, surprised by her manner. In an instant, I felt a fool for having sensed any doom in the blush-colored letter written by this child. I wondered, too, about her beautiful penmanship at such a young age. As my sense of worry diminished, it was replaced with a relaxed curiosity; I desired to know more of the girl.

I turned to the hearth, which claimed one corner of the room. The pot of water that I had set over the fire a short time ago spewed entrails of steam. “I’ve hot-brewed some leaves,” I said to the girl. I filled two mugs with the brew and set one of them in front of her.

She thanked me and pulled her mug toward her. Her gaze came to settle on the table, on which rested our mugs, a single lit candle, my register and the letter she’d left in the bin of pearl barley: For my mistress’s husband, with his breakfast. Daybreak, 4 Feb. The girl’s cheeks, pink upon her arrival, remained flushed with youth, life. “What kind of leaves?”

“Valerian,” I told her, “spiced with cinnamon bark. A few sips to warm the body, a few more to brighten and relax the mind.”

We were quiet, then, for a minute or so, but it was not uncomfortable in the way that it can be between adults. I supposed the girl to be grateful, foremost, to be out of the cold. I gave her a few moments to warm herself, while I went to my counter and busied myself with a few small black stones. They needed smoothing along the grinding board, after which they would make ideal vial stoppers. Aware of the girl watching me, I lifted the first stone and, pressing down with my palm, rolled it, spun it around and rolled it again. Ten or fifteen seconds was all I could manage before I had to stop and slow my breath.

A year ago, I was stronger, and my strength was such that I could roll and smooth these stones in a matter of minutes, without so much as brushing a hair from my face. But on this day, with the child watching me, I could not go on—my shoulder ached too badly. Oh, how I did not understand this ailment; months ago it had been borne in my elbow, and then shifted into the opposite wrist, and only very recently, the heat had begun to slip into the joints of my fingers.

The girl remained still, her fingers wrapped tightly around her mug. “What’s that bowl of creamy stuff, over there by the fire?”

I turned away from the stones to look at the hearth. “A salve,” I said, “of hog’s lard and purple foxglove.”

“You’re warming it, then, for it’s too hard.”

I paused at her quick understanding. “Yes, that’s right.”

“What is the salve for?”

Heat rose in my face. I could not tell her that the leaves of purple foxglove, when dried and crushed, sucked the heat and blood from the skin, and therefore assisted a great deal in the days after a woman had birthed a child—an experience unknown to girls the age of this one. “It is for a tear in the skin,” I offered, taking a seat.

“Oh, a poisonous salve for a tear in the skin?”

Shaking my head, I said, “No poison in this, child.”

Her little shoulders tensed. “But Mrs. Amwell—my mistress—told me you sell poison.”

“I do, but poison is not all I sell. The women who have been here for deadly remedies have seen the extent of my shelves, and some have whispered of it to their most trusted friends. I dispense all sorts of oils and tinctures and draughts—anything an honorable apothecary might require in her shop.”

Indeed, when I began dispensing poisons many years ago, I did not simply clear my shelves of all but arsenic and opium. I continued to keep the ingredients needed to remedy most afflictions, supplies as benign as clary or tamarisk. Just because a woman has rid herself of one malady—a devious husband, for instance—does not mean she is immune to all other maladies. My register was proof of it; interspersed among the deadly tonics were also many healing ones.

“And only girls come here,” the child said.

“Did your mistress tell you that, too?”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, she was not mistaken. Only girls come here.” With the exception of one long ago, no man had ever stepped foot in my shop of poisons. I only aided women.

My mother had held tight to this principle, instilling in me from an early age the importance of providing a safe haven—a place of healing—for women. London grants little to women in need of tender care; instead, it crawls with gentlemen’s doctors, each as unprincipled and corrupt as the next. My mother committed to giving women a place of refuge, a place where they might be vulnerable and forthcoming about their ailments without the lascivious appraisal of a man.

The ideals of gentlemen’s medicine did not align with my mother’s, either. She believed in the proven remedies of the sweet, fertile earth, not the schemes diagrammed in books and studied by bespectacled gentlemen with brandy on their tongues.

The young girl in my shop looked around, the light of the flame in her eyes. “How clever. I like this place, though it is a bit dark. How do you know when it is morning? There are no windows.”

I pointed at the clock on the wall. “There is more than one way to tell the time,” I said, “and a window would do me no service at all.”

“You must grow tired of the dark, then.”

Some days, I could not distinguish night from day, as I had lost the intuitive sense of wakefulness long ago. My body seemed always in a state of fatigue. “I am accustomed to it,” I said.

How strange it was, sitting across from this child. The last child to sit in this very room was me, decades ago, observing my own mother as she worked. But I was not this girl’s mother, and her presence began to pull at me in an uncomfortable way. Though her naivety was endearing, she was very young. No matter what she thought of my shop, she could not need anything else I dispensed—the fertility aids, the cramp barks. She was here only for poison, so I aimed to bring us back to the subject at hand. “You have not touched your hot brew.”

She looked at it skeptically. “I do not mean to be rude, but Mrs. Amwell told me to be very careful—”

I held up my hand to stop her. She was a smart girl. I took her mug into my own hands, drank deeply from it and set it back down in front of her.

At once, she grabbed the mug and lifted it to her own lips, emptying the entire thing. “I was parched,” she said. “Oh, thank you, how delicious! May I have more?”

I maneuvered myself out of the chair, taking two small steps to the hearth. I tried not to wince as I lifted the heavy pot to refill her mug.

“What is the matter with your hand?” she asked from behind me.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been holding it funny this whole time, as though it hurts. Did you injure it?”

“No,” I said, “and it is rude to pry.” But I regretted my tone with her instantly. She was merely inquisitive, just as I was once. “How old are you?” I asked her in a softer tone.

“Twelve.”

I nodded, having expected something thereabouts. “Quite young.”

She hesitated and, by the rhythmic movement of her skirts, I presumed she was tapping her foot on the floor. “I have never—” She paused. “I have never killed anyone.”

I nearly laughed. “You’re only a child. I wouldn’t expect you to have killed many people in your short life.” My eyes fell on a shelf behind her where there rested a small porcelain dish the color of milk. Inside the dish lay four brown hen’s eggs, poison disguised within. “And what is your name?”

“Eliza. Eliza Fanning.”

“Eliza Fanning,” I repeated, “aged twelve.”

“Yes, miss.”

“And your mistress sent you here today, is that right?” The arrangement told me that Eliza’s mistress must trust her greatly.

But the child paused and furrowed her brow, and what she said next surprised me. “It was her idea initially, yes, but I was the one to suggest the breakfast table. My master fancies the chophouses for supper with his friends, and sometimes is gone for a full night or two. I thought breakfast might be the best idea.”

I looked to Eliza’s letter on the table and ran my thumb across one edge. Given her youth, I felt it necessary to remind her of something. “And you understand that this will not just harm him? This will not just make him ill, but—” I slowed my words. “This will kill him, as surely as it would kill an animal? That is what you and your mistress intend?”

Little Eliza looked up at me, her eyes sharp. She folded her hands neatly in front of her. “Yes, miss.” As she said it, she did not so much as flinch.