Chapter 33

33

Nella

February 11, 1791

Before I lifted my own leg over the railing, I paused.

All that I’ve lost.It weighed on me now, a lifetime of misery, like the raw earth pressing into an open grave. And yet—this precise moment of breath, the light breeze at the back of my neck, the distant call of some hungry waterfowl on the river, the taste of salt on my tongue—these were all things I had not lost yet.

I stepped back from the railing and opened my eyes.

All that I’d lost, or all that I hadn’t?

Eliza jumped in my place. A final offering to me, her last breath an effort to fool the authorities and implicate herself as poisoner. How could I possibly throw her gift back into the water to sink alongside her?

As I stood on the bridge and looked east over the River Thames, another person came to mind: Mrs. Amwell, Eliza’s beloved mistress. She would return to her estate in coming days, only to find Eliza...gone. Disappeared. No matter the pretense and feigned grief Mrs. Amwell displayed now at the loss of her husband, once she discovered Eliza missing, the grief would no longer be a ruse. It might haunt her for a lifetime, this belief that the child had abandoned her.

I must tell Mrs. Amwell the truth. I must tell her that Eliza had died. And I must comfort this woman the only way I knew how: a tincture of scutellaria, or skullcap, which would ease the piercing ache of her heart when she learned that little Eliza would write her letters no more.

And so, I turned away from the railing of the bridge, willing the sob in my throat to delay until I was alone—until I was back in my shop of poisons, which I had meant never to see again.

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Twenty-two hours had passed since the moment Eliza jumped—an entire night and day, during which I’d prepared and bottled the skullcap I meant to deliver to the Amwell estate—and yet still my hands felt the chill of the empty air as I reached for her. Still I heard the plunge of her body, the sucking of the water as it took her in.

After I left the bridge and returned to 3 Back Alley, I could smell traces of the constable in the storage room—the sweaty, filthy scent of a man snaking about the room, looking for something he would not find. He had not found, either, the new letter in the barley bin. It must have been left only recently, perhaps when I went to the market and Eliza busied herself with her tincture.

I held the letter now in my hands. No scent of lavender or rose wafted up from the paper. The hand was not particularly fine or neat. The woman gave little detail, identifying herself only as a housewife, betrayed by her husband.

This final request, hardly different than the first.

The preparation would be uncomplicated. Indeed, a glass bottle of prussic acid sat within my arm’s reach; I could dispense it with minimal effort in less than a minute’s time. And perhaps this final poison, this last one, would finally grant me the peace I’d sought since my baby fell from my belly at the hand of Frederick.

Healing by way of vengeance.

But no such thing existed; it never had. Hurting others had only injured me further. I took the letter, traced the words with my finger and stood from my chair. Bending forward, I stretched one weak leg in front of the other, my breath raspy, and approached the hearth. A low flame ate away at a single scrap of wood. Gently, I set the letter into the dancing peak of the light, watching as the paper ignited in an instant.

No, I would not grant this woman what she wanted.

No more death would go forth from this room.

And with that, my shop of poisons existed no longer. The single flame in the hearth sputtered out, the final letter crumbled to ash. No balms left to simmer, no tonics left to blend, no tinctures to agitate, no plants to uproot.

I leaned forward and began to cough, a clot of blood making its way out of my lungs and onto my tongue. I’d been coughing up blood since yesterday afternoon—since running from the bailiffs, falling over the back wall of the horse stable and watching my young friend fall to her death. I’d expended a year’s worth of effort in mere minutes; the bailiffs, by way of chase, drove me closer to death than I’d realized.

I spit the blood clot into the ash, without even a desire to take a drink and wash the sticky residue from my tongue. I felt no thirst, nor hunger, and I had not urinated in nearly a day. I knew this did not bode well; when the throat ceases to beg, when the bladder ceases to fill, it is nearly over. I knew this because I had experienced it—I had watched it happen—once before.

The day my mother died.

I knew I must go to the Amwell estate, and soon. I would leave the letter and tincture with a servant, for Eliza said the mistress may be gone some weeks, and I did not expect her to be in. Then I would go to the river, sit along its silent banks and wait for a certain death. I did not expect the wait to be a long one.

But before I left my shop for good, a single task remained.

I lifted my quill, pulled the open register toward me and diligently began to record my final entry. Though I did not dispense the potion and I knew not what ingredients it contained, I could not leave without confessing the life of her, the loss of her.

Eliza Fanning, London. Ingr. unknown. 12 Feb 1791.

As the nib scratched along the paper, my hand shook terribly, and the words were so sullied that the handwriting appeared not even my own.

Indeed, it was as though some unknown spirit refused to let me write the words—refused to let me record the death of little Eliza.