The Apothecary's Curse

by Barbara Barnett

  Erceldoune’s shop was dark—not a surprise for the lateness of the hour. But the dim light filtering through a curtained window above the shop gave Simon hope that the apothecary might be at home and awake. But was it right to disturb him at home, after he’d closed for the night? Urgency dictated he ignore propriety and the stack of returned, unopened letters. How could the apothecary refuse him in the darkest hour of his desperation?

  Simon pounded on a door at the side of the building. It rattled, old and tired; slivers of peeling green paint fell onto the wet pavement. “Mr. Erceldoune! I’ve need of your assistance, if you please, sir!” For several moments, he continued slamming his fists against the desiccated surface, certain he would break either the rotting wood or his hand at the next turn.

  Simon stayed his fist at the welcome clang of a turning bolt, and then the door opened a crack. Simon held his breath as a finger of light slipped through, too bright in the dark alleyway. “Shop’s closed for the night. Come back tomorrow, if you please. We open at eight sharp.” The door rasped as it closed, leaving Simon in the drizzle, stunned. Had Erceldoune not recognized him? Perhaps it was too dark to have seen him properly. He pounded again.

  “Mr. Erceldoune! It is Simon Bell come to call. Please, sir, it is urgent. For some weeks now I have been endeavoring to contact you and—”

  The hinges creaked as the door opened again, this time wider. Dark, apprehensive eyes, luminescent in candlelight, scrutinized him; their wary gaze penetrated deep within Simon’s resolve, forcing him back a step.

  “What is it, then?” The inquiry was frigid as the November night.

  Simon pressed on, ignoring an urge to flee. “Do you not know me, then? It is Dr. Si—”

  Erceldoune replied with a sneer. “I know who you are, have known since I saw you from my window, before you took to breaking down my door. Now please, if you would be so kind as to leave! I’ve nothing to say to any of London’s gentlemen physicians. Not even Dr. Simon Bell!” The words rasped, bitter poison droplets.

  “My wife is ill . . . dying. Even tonight, she . . . I think she may be . . .” Simon did nothing to conceal his anguish. Would it be enough of an appeal to gain an audience, after camaraderie had come to naught?

  After a long moment, Erceldoune stepped aside, allowing Simon to pass beyond the threshold. They climbed a rickety, winding staircase, entering a spacious sitting room at the top. The room—comfortable, even elegant—seemed anomalous here in Smithfield, so like its owner.

  The sour-sweet smell of ink and old books, whisky, and dying embers permeated Simon’s nostrils. He sank into a faded chair, noticing the brimming shelves lining three walls of the room—thousands of volumes reaching to the corniced ceiling, piled high on tables and chairs. In the amber glow of candlelight, the room reminded Simon of a Baroque painting: organized chaos, shadows and light, great stillness, yet activity teeming beneath the surface. But there was a jarring untidiness about the room as well. Papers, quills, and open jars of ink were strewn among the books. Jars of herbs, dirty brass pestles, and broken crucibles littered the floor. None of this fit the meticulous man Simon had known for years.

  Erceldoune balanced a tumbler half-filled with amber liquid on his knee, making a game of keeping it steady there. “Why have you disturbed me this night, Dr. Bell?”

  Simon shivered from the iciness of the apothecary’s welcome, so unlike their cordial relationship had been.

  Erceldoune scooped up his glass with a deft move, downing its contents in a single gulp. He poured another, emptying the faceted crystal decanter. Simon noted the tremor in Erceldoune’s hand as he thrust his fingers through his hair, the tremble in every word, the almost nervous way in which he threw back another whisky. He had been the most reliable apothecary in London, whatever it was worth, for most of them were reprobates, enriched off the misfortune of others. But now?

  Could it have been the drink that changed him thus? Simon hesitated a moment, wondering if he had been wrong to come here. No. This was his last chance, the only chance, to save Sophie—and himself.

  “My wife has cancer of the breast. It has now spread. I . . .” Simon was unable to urge another word past the clot of tears in his throat.

  Erceldoune held up a hand, pinning Simon with his steely eyes. “Then she is dead. Had I a cure for that, I should be a famous and wealthy man and not living thus in cramped quarters above a shop. If that is what brought you from your warm home and into the night, I am afraid you’ve wasted your time—and mine. We are therefore done. I bid you a good night, sir.” He poured another whisky, downing it in one, before rising shakily, urging Simon toward the door.

  The corrosive finality to Erceldoune’s words burned through Simon’s chest, leaving him breathless. Simon vaulted from his chair, pounding his fist on the armrest. How could Erceldoune dismiss him, with nary a shred of compassion? “No! Hear me out! Are we not friends, at least? How can you—”

  Erceldoune’s hand was on the doorknob, knuckles white. His cheerless laugh stung with the precision of a saber. “Friends? We were never that. Never that!” Anger and the slur of liquor tinted his words with a deep brogue Simon had never before noticed.

  He’d been through this so many times the past year, searching for something—anything at all—to give him hope, but each time brought only disappointment. A long row of failed cures lined Simon’s laboratory bench, experiments from the workrooms of esteemed colleagues and patent cures from street-corner hucksters. Pitied by friends and laughed at by professional rivals, Simon had become somewhat of a joke around the club. But he cared not a jot.

  “But do you not recall those evenings when we—”

  “Aye, I do. That you, a gentleman, deigned to associate yourself with the likes of me—that is, beyond the fulfilling of your instructions. I should be grateful, then, for that, should I?” he snarled, quiet and dangerous. “And for that I now owe my services at this late hour?”

  Simon was dumbfounded by the venom punctuating each word. “No! Of course you do not owe me a thing, my dear Mr. Erceldoune. Why ever would—”

  Erceldoune continued the tirade. “You and your physician brethren—fine gentlemen all, sauntering the vaunted halls of Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh. You know naught of healing but leeches and laudanum, opium, and bloodletting. How many times these years have I’d the presence of mind to alter the prescriptions of reckless physicians whose cures would otherwise be poison? Yet I am unqualified to treat the unwell?”

  “Mr. Erceldoune, to speak true, I do not understand—”

  Erceldoune’s countenance softened from bitter rage to resignation. His shoulders slumped, and his eyes misted over. He let go of the doorknob and moved to the window, looking down into the street for a moment as if to compose himself before turning back into the room, blinking as if he were seeing Simon for the first time.

  “Forgive me. Where are my manners? Please, will you not sit a spell?”

  Simon sighed, relieved. He sat. “I—”

  “In truth, there is nothing I can do for her.” Erceldoune threw up his hands in an exasperated gesture. “Your wife has cancer. It is a piteous tragedy, but one for which I can be no help to you. Women die; wives die. It is sad indeed, but what can one do?”

  The finality of Erceldoune’s pronouncement ran cold through Simon’s veins. He shivered. Was this to be the bitter outcome? Nowhere to go, nothing left to do but stand by helpless as Sophie died . . . Simon struggled to maintain his composure as he stood to take his leave. “Is there nothing, then, you can do for my wife? Nothing at all?”

  “No. I am sorry, Dr. Bell.”

  A gilt-framed miniature portrait on the mantelpiece caught Simon’s eye: a woman posed in a garden adorned in white roses, her yellow silk dress twirling about her. Caitrin Kinston?

  “That is Lord Kinston’s daughter, is it not? Why have you got—” And then it dawned on him, the pieces fitting into place. He’d heard Kinston’s daughter had died of typhus a year before, in th
e 1836 epidemic. He remembered it now, the whole sorry tale, how she’d run off with someone well beneath her station ten years past, infuriating her father. The match had astonished all of London society. “Mesmerized,” he’d heard back then. “By some scoundrel. How else would that inferior sort have his way with her?”

  Had that been Erceldoune? How could Simon not have realized, even after ten years’ acquaintance with the apothecary?

  “Caitrin—my wife, and yes, Kinston’s daughter. So? What of it? She died of typhus last year, as did our wee babe Iain.”

  “My deepest condolences, Mr. Erceldoune. I should have known—”

  “So you see, Dr. Bell. I am of little help to the dying. I could not even save my own wife and child.” He clasped his hands behind his back, his eyes cast down as he drifted from door to fireplace and back as if wrestling with something deep within.

  “But,” Simon offered, “you realize it could not have been your fault, your wife’s death. I am quite certain you did all you could do . . . within your limitations as an apothecary. But perhaps even had she been treated by a qualified physician—”

  “Aye, she was ‘treated’ by ‘qualified’ physicians,” Erceldoune spat, “the lot of them her father’s retainers. Yet for all their medical diplomas, memberships in the Royal Society, and titles, the earl’s physicians could not save her.”

  Erceldoune was shaking now, hands balled tight into fists. “But I could have. And of all the fools about London practicing medicine, I reckoned that you might have been the one to understand that. Yet it seems I have vastly overestimated you.” He shook his head in disappointment, collapsing into a chair. “Had her father not meddled, had he not stolen her from her bed, my son from his cradle, they would both be yet alive.”

  “How? How do you know that? No one can know that, not with typhus. It’s—”

  “I do.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Gaelan considered Simon Bell: the eyes rimmed in red, the bruising beneath them suggesting a lack of sleep, the pallor of his skin, the grim set to his mouth all spoke of desperation, a companion Gaelan knew too well.

  A tremor of empathy flared up the skin of Gaelan’s arms and back. Bell had never been one of those incompetent fools populating far too much of London’s posh medical fraternity. He was, after all, grandson to Benjamin Bell. Gaelan revered the grandfather, a brilliant Edinburgh physician—a surgeon as well, and a man who knew his way around a diseased body, unafraid of dirtying his hands in the blood and guts of it. Had Gaelan been too hasty in severing his tie with the grandson, cutting him off along with the rest of the dandies displaying their Oxford diplomas as pretense for knowledge of healing?

  Contrite, Gaelan stood and ushered Simon back to his chair before sitting opposite him. He recognized the haunted look on Simon’s face from each time he had caught his own reflection this past year.

  “My father-in-law—your Lord Kinston—sent his men for Caitrin and wee Iain whilst I was out attending to a young boy, also suffering of typhus.” He shook his head derisively at the bitter irony of it. “And now? That lad runs about in the streets, robust and wild, whilst Caitrin and Iain molder beneath the ground. I knew how to purge the fever, vanquish the rash. I’d studied the disease well, fashioned a medicine that would have—” His hands clenched, fingernails digging into the soft flesh of his palms.

  Simon was staring at him, observing, judging. Why does he not leave this place and attend to his dying wife? Gaelan scrubbed the heels of his hands hard in his eyes, trying to erase the gathered tears. “Had she been not so weak by then, my Caitrin would have fought them off, a protective mother hawk, she was. She knew I could help in ways they never could, believed in my . . . my skill . . . my . . . deep knowledge of the healing arts. But for typhus, the dose had to wait for the exact moment when . . . or it would do nothing—or worse. But before . . . before I had the chance to—” Gaelan’s words lurched past the bile burning in his esophagus. “Before I even had the bloody chance, Kinston’s men came. I failed them both—all I had in the world, my beloved Caitrin and wee Iain.” Telling it aloud drained Gaelan of all energy.

  “Might I ask who treated her?”

  Gaelan looked up, realizing he wasn’t alone. He needed more drink, but the decanter was now dry. “Sir Phillip Rivers, a ridiculous fop with the good fortune to be born to a title, but not enough good fortune to be firstborn. So medical college for him, then on to an esteemed career as Kinston’s toady.”

  “Sir Phillip? But he is quite able—and a most excellent reputation; he is no fop, sir. You could not wish a finer . . . And with typhus it is impossible to know—”

  Furious, Gaelan leapt from his chair, sweeping the empty decanter from the table. “Have you not been listening, Bell? Under his so-called care, they died. Had he but left to me—”

  “I beg you to see reason, Mr. Erceldoune. But can you not put yourself in her father’s place . . . understand that he wished for his daughter only the best of care. From a physician with the best university education. That she died under his care is, to be certain, a terrible shame, yet—”

  Gaelan had little stomach to continue this debate, but futility failed to rein in his frustration. “How dare you presume to know anything of my education, my training? Indeed, when the residents of Smithfield Market fall ill, where are the Sirs Phillip and Drs. Bell then, hmm? Would he come calling? Would you?”

  He would delight in testing his mettle as a practitioner against any and all gentleman physicians. “Yet,” he said, pointing his finger in Simon’s chest, “you come to me, and not one of your peers. Forgive me, sir, if I find no small measure of irony in this situation.”

  Gaelan glanced at Caitrin’s portrait, then at his guest. Bell had not come to debate the state of medicine, not this night. And it was unfair to challenge him thus. Bell had come as a desperate husband, a man not much different than himself a year past: frantic and terrified. “I believe I can help you,” he whispered, and Simon exhaled a long, deep breath.

  “Have you truly something that can drive away the demon cancer?”

  That was the question, then, was it not? There were so many professed “cures,” volumes of them lining two bookshelves, and not one of them worth the effort of concocting. There was but one possibility, and that in a book so extraordinary, so dangerous, it had long ago cost his family its lands and fortune, his parents and elder sisters their lives. Then there was his own life, altered forevermore by the power contained within its extraordinary pages. Should he now presume to take it up once again? What then, should something go wrong, an incorrect measurement, an instruction misapprehended? Either, or both, quite possible with a manuscript of such infinite complexity.

  Tendrils of icy fear crept up his neck as he contemplated the decision. An opportunity, perhaps it might be—should the medicine cure Bell’s wife. The demonstration of his true skill so much in contrast to the polite distance of the physician’s impotence: laudanum and leeches. Vindication for him and all of his trade, too often maligned, the object of derision for the few frauds among them.

  Gaelan scoured the bookshelves, searching the titles, although he knew exactly where to find what he sought. “I have an ancient pharmacopeia,” he explained, unable to think of a better description for the volume. “But the recipes in it are unusual. I have used the book only rarely and, I confess, not for cancer. But if there be at all a cure for medicine’s most ruthless enemy, I venture it would be in this remarkable book.”

  The volume he had hidden high on the topmost shelf, away from his sight. Placed there after Caitrin and Iain died, it was too much a reminder of what might have been had he the opportunity to use it to save them. The steep ladder groaned as Gaelan mounted the rungs. Reaching the top, he stretched his arm yet higher, finally dislodging the large leather volume.

  “This is your miraculous book?” Bell called up from the base of the ladder, startling Gaelan as he descended and nearly causing him to lose his balance.

  He ig
nored the derision in Bell’s tone, sweeping past him as he brushed his shirtsleeve across the cover; a swirl of dust erupted between them. Then with a rag pulled from his trouser pocket, Gaelan burnished the cover with meticulous, minute strokes, revealing the engraved image of an intricate tree. Emerging from deep within the leather, its bare branches entwined and diverged into snakes, each consuming its own tail—an ouroboros. The snakes merged, transforming once again into an elaborate border of interconnected and twisted helices. Gaelan beheld the marvelous engraving, considering the complexity of its design.

  The hawthorn: sigil of balance between life and death. A reminder that all medicines were a paradox, curative or poisonous and, as Gaelan well knew, too often producing unexpected consequences. And then there were the ouroboroses—they were alchemy’s symbol for the circularity of life: life from life, life from death, from death to living in an eternal chain. For what was the true nature of medicine’s practice? To lift the dying, to forestall death’s knock at the door, and recommence life. But Gaelan knew, more than most, that the ouroboros also signified life eternal . . . immortality, alchemy’s eternal quest.

  “This volume, indeed, dates back many centuries, Dr. Bell. It was, I am told, a gift given to an ancestor of mine.” He leaned in conspiratorially, whispering into Bell’s ear. “It is a unique book of healing, said to have within its recipes the cure for all sickness that might befall man, no matter how dread.” Gaelan continued to polish the leather, bringing forth colors as vibrant as fine stained glass. Every engraved line radiated metallic inks: ruby, lapis, emerald, gold, and silver.

  Standing close by, Simon thrust a finger at the volume, a sneer curling his lip. “What is this, then?” he demanded. “This is no medical book; it seems more alchemist absurdity than anything. And I suppose it contains magical incantations to be recited whilst conjuring these ‘ancient’ recipes?” Bell spat the words, disdain plain on his features. “Do you forget, apothecary, to whom you speak? I am no peasant awed by pretty pictures and talk of ancient remedies.”