Beloved Poison (20 page)

I saw Eliza and Mrs Magorian pass by. Would they come in? Eliza glanced in at the window. She saw me, and smiled. I bowed my head in acknowledgement. But then she realised that her father was inside too, and the smile dropped from her face. Dr Magorian bounded to the door. He flung it open, and drew his wife and daughter inside. ‘Dear me, dear me,’ he scolded. He took his wife’s hand and steered her towards the warmth of the fire. ‘You should not be out in this weather, my love. You know you have a weak chest. You must have my umbrella and take a cab home directly.’

‘But I feel quite well,’ replied Mrs Magorian. The rain dripped from her bonnet. She smiled up at him and patted his hand. ‘It was my idea that we come out. And the rain has stopped now.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Come closer to the fire. The warmth will do you good.’ He chafed her tiny fingers between his large strong hands. ‘How cold you are. Your hands are like ice. Eliza!’ He turned to his daughter. ‘You should not let your mother come out in such weather. And without her gloves too!’

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ said Eliza. She did not look at him. Her skin had a dry, greyish appearance and she looked tired. Her fingers, I noticed, plucked restlessly at the cuffs of her coat. Her hair, which I could see beneath her bonnet, was dull and lustreless, her ringlets limp and unravelling in the damp. I wondered what the matter was. Was she ill? But the crowded apothecary was no place to ask.

‘Miss Magorian,’ Dr Graves smiled. He removed his cloak – perhaps to show off the new Dr Bain-style emerald-green waistcoat he was wearing underneath. The reek of the dissecting rooms billowed from its folds. Eliza recoiled, though Dr Graves did not appear to notice. ‘You’re looking pale,’ he said. ‘The wards are no place for a lady. I have always said as much.’

‘Tea,’ said Mrs Magorian brightly. ‘That’s all you need, my dear, a hot cup of tea. And then we shall go directly to the Magdalene ward. They value our Bible readings, I know, and I don’t like to disappoint them.’

‘This is an apothecary, not a tearoom, Mother,’ said Eliza.

‘Tea leaves are both a diuretic and a stimulant,’ I said. ‘We always have them in. It’s no trouble, Miss Magorian. There’s a pot on the stove already. Gabriel!’

Gabriel vanished into the scullery. He reappeared with a tray, upon which was our best china – cups, saucers, milk jug, sugar bowl, silver sugar tongs. I stared at them in astonishment. Those were my mother’s things. We never used them. None of us was even allowed to touch them. I expected my father to say something, but when I looked over to his chair, he was no longer there. I had not noticed him go out.

Eliza took her cup of tea. And then something curious happened. I could make no sense of it, not then, and not later, when I went over in my mind what I had seen – or what I thought I had seen. Her father was standing beside her, and as I put the tea tray on the table, he rested a hand upon her shoulder. Was it my imagination, or did Eliza’s face seem to close over, shutting in upon itself? She put milk in her tea, her expression stony. It was as though I were watching an automaton. I had seen such things in the museum of curiosities in Vauxhall Gardens, lifelike, robotic figures driven by clockwork, which moved their arms and heads like real people. Her father’s hand seemed peculiarly large, white and bony in the dim light of the apothecary. It was as if she were shrinking beneath it, recoiling, and yet not moving a muscle. She dropped a sugar lump into her cup, picked up a tea-spoon and began to stir, round and round and round, making the tea whirl. And yet Eliza did not take sugar in her tea; she had always told me she despised the stuff – the smell, the taste, made her sick, she said. I could not make it out.

And then the door to the apothecary opened, and the spell, or whatever peculiar enchantment it was that had stolen over me, was broken.

Dr Magorian turned to his colleagues. Mrs Magorian, oblivious, was holding out her hands to the fire and humming a snatch of
Lead, Kindly Light
.

Eliza stared down at her cup, her expression one of confusion and surprise, covering her nose with her hand as she tried not to gag at the smell of the sugary steam.

Then I noticed who had come in. Dr Graves said, ‘Out-patients is on a Monday morning, madam.’ He sniggered. ‘And the lock ward is across the courtyard. This is the apothecary.’

‘I know what it is,’ came the reply.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ I said. It was my ex-seamstress from Wicke Street, come for her prophylactics. She had done her best to look respectable, with a closed bonnet and a shawl drawn tightly around her shoulders. But her profession was plain to anyone who cared to look – in the directness of her gaze, the sway of her hips as she walked, the way she trailed her hand against the table top. The wink and the grin she gave me didn’t help. But she had little reason to appear demure, and had probably forgotten long ago how to ape the coy mannerisms of respectable girls.

Dr Graves looked her up and down and shook his head. ‘I see Dr Bain’s influence has taken root here too. Is our apothecary to become a trysting place for prostitutes and their
clientele
?’

‘Our relationship is purely professional,’ I said.

Dr Graves sniggered again. ‘Undoubtedly.’

I steered the girl away from him, though the apothecary was so crowded now there was nowhere for us to go to speak privately. ‘Don’t mind him,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘I don’t mind nuffink from any of them. Not even him, though there’s many of the girls that won’t go with him. Smells something awful, he does. Like as though you’ve got the Reaper himself on top o’ you . . .
inside
you.’ She raised her voice and looked over her shoulder at Dr Graves. ‘You gets used to anything, but not that smell. He’s as strong as the Devil,’ she whispered. ‘Hands like whip-cord.’

‘Tea?’ I said. I could tell by the mud that coated the hem of her skirt that she had walked all the way from Mrs Roseplucker’s.

‘I ain’t got time for tea.’ She looked longingly at the delicate cup resting in Eliza’s saucer.

‘I have just poured this one,’ said Eliza. ‘Please, take it.’ She pushed the fine bone china cup and its filigree silver spoon across the counter. ‘It’ll warm you up a little.’

‘Thank you, miss.’ The girl sipped the sugary brew. ‘I’ve come for those herbs,’ she said. ‘Against the pox. The others wants some too.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And whatever you have to bring a girl on. You know what I mean?’ She slid a few coins onto the table.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘You keep that. I know exactly what you require. Now then, peppermint, camomile, sage, wintergreen – was there something else on the list?’

She handed over the list of herbs I had given her that night at Mrs Roseplucker’s. How long ago that seemed now. The world had become a much darker place since then. I reached for the pennyroyal.

‘That doctor you came with that night,’ she said. ‘Dead, ain’t he?’

I nodded. ‘How d’you know?’

‘Whole district knows,’ she said. ‘Everyone knew Dr Bain, and now everyone knows he’s dead.’ She leaned towards me across the counter, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He came back, you know. Later. After you’d gone. Came back to see Lily. Said he had something for her to look after. Told her to give it to you as soon as she could if he didn’t come back for it himself, but she knew I were coming here so she gave it to me to pass on. Nasty, queer thing it is. Can’t think what it means.’ She opened her bag, and placed a small, cardboard coffin onto the table.

Hideous, battered, dusty, it lay amongst the shining glass retorts and gleaming bottles like a lump of earth amongst a cache of gemstones. I felt my flesh prickle, as if someone had whispered in my ear. But there was no sound at all, other than the snap of the coals in the fireplace. Behind us the apothecary had fallen silent.

‘Why did Dr Bain save this particular coffin?’ I said. ‘How can my mother be connected with these horrible things?’

Will had returned from St Saviour’s churchyard. He could not have been wetter if he had fallen in the Thames. He sat before the fire, wrapped in a blanket whilst his clothes steamed on the pulley overhead. He sipped at the cup of tea I had given him. ‘If we knew the coffins’ purpose—’

‘But we
don’t
know their purpose.’

‘I don’t think the connection can be found in the present,’ said Will.

He was right. The past was the only place where answers might be found, and yet I could not determine how to get there. I flung the coffin back onto the table in frustration. The hollow-eyed doll, the torn and bloody strips of fabric, the dead flowers – they were all things we had seen before. The words on the scraps of paper that lined it were painfully familiar:
Elizabeth Maud. 18th July 1822
.

‘We need to go back to Mrs Roseplucker’s,’ said Will. ‘We must speak to the woman who was Dr Bain’s companion than night. Lily, I think her name was?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid we must.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. I could see from his face that he did not relish a return to the place. Poor Will. The city was draining the life from him. He was a country boy, as I had guessed, from Wiltshire. His work at St Saviour’s was his first commission – I had been right about that too – and he wanted to impress his Master. But it was clear to me that Will’s task amongst the corpses was consuming his soul. Every hour he spent at the churchyard made his cheeks paler, his eyes more sorrowful. Even away from the excavations, death seemed inescapable – Dr Bain’s demise, the knowledge that there was a murderer somewhere at St Saviour’s. As much as he was intrigued and curious, he was also sickened and dismayed. I could see it in his face. The city was ugly and cruel and filthy, the hospital dark and morbid, the people he met ambitious and spiteful. And the coffins, the grim
memento mori
whose appearance seemed to have precipitated such unspeakable events . . . I could think of only one remedy.

The physic garden was half a mile from the infirmary, at the western end of St Saviour’s Street. It was set back from the road, bordered by a high stone wall. Next door was Dr Magorian’s primped and preened garden, and his soot-blackened villa. There was a gate that led from Dr Magorian’s property into the physic garden, though I had never seen anyone use it. Dr Magorian ensured that it was locked at all times. He kept his own botanical specimens in his own garden and his own hot house. Perhaps he did not trust me to keep them. Perhaps he did not want me to see what he had grown.

‘Do the medical men come here? Dr Graves? Dr Catchpole?’ said Will as I pushed open the heavy wooden side-gate and led him into the garden.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not even Dr Bain, though he charged me with growing some of the poisonous plants. Only Eliza – Miss Magorian – comes. Sometimes.’ In fact, I had not seen Eliza in the physic garden for months. When she was a child she had come all the time, scrambling over the wall from the garden next door, holding out her arms as she asked to be lifted down. She would make herself a crown out of the bindweed I had pulled up, or crouch in the rhubarb like a pixie, one of the giant leaves upturned on her head. I had made her a swing on the apple tree and helped her to make a den out of birch twigs. Such adventures seemed a long time ago now.

‘Have you been naughty?’ I had once asked when I had not seen her in the garden for weeks. ‘You are always kept inside.’

‘My father says so,’ she had replied. ‘Though he will never tell me what it is that I’ve done.’

Will and I sat on an iron bench in the sun, our legs stretched out before us. We were sheltered from the wind, and far removed from the sights and sounds of St Saviour’s Street. Before us, bushes of wintergreen and box, rosemary and spike lavender filled the air with their perfume – astringent, woody, cleansing. The fogs that plagued the city blocked out the feeble March sun and chilled the earth, so the plant beds were still ragged, waiting for the warmth of the spring to call forth green shoots and new growth. But the place was more pleasing on the eye than the dreary walls of the ward building or the dissecting rooms. Will gave a sigh of contentment. He bruised some lavender leaves between his fingers and breathed in their scent. ‘Do you tend the place alone?’

‘There’s a gardener,’ I replied. ‘And a boy. I come when I can.’

‘I’m surprised you have the time.’

‘I don’t. And with my father’s illness – we may need to consider getting another apprentice.’

‘Really?’ Will sounded surprised.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘They’re so slow, and have to be taught, and disciplined, and shown how to do everything. At first anyway. Hardly a help.’

‘I didn’t mean that—’

‘Oh? Then what did you mean?’

‘Only that . . . that your household is less than orthodox. Your father. You.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes,’ I said after a moment. ‘There’s that too.’

There was silence between us. Then, Will reached forward and plucked a single flower from a golden crown of early daffodils that grew beside the lavender bush. He handed it to me, the gesture shy and hesitant. I took it, surprised and a little puzzled. ‘Narcissus,’ I said.

‘You know what it means?’