The Apothecary's Curse

by Barbara Barnett

  Gaelan pressed down on his ire, difficult as it was. Bell had come to him, not the other way around. But he understood that Bell was at his wits’ end, much like any other patient. “I assure you this is no book of sorcery, no fraud. All is of this natural world. Its magic, if such a word signifies at all, is solely within the elegant and inventive, but proper, combining of herbs and elements. Magic is a relative term. What is now known scientific fact was once feared as sorcery, its proponents exiled, executed, ripped from exalted society, and thrust—” Gaelan halted himself from going further, cutting too close to his own truths.

  The book originated, Gaelan knew, with a people out of myth, a goddess of healing long ago vanished from the face of this earth. But who was to say their knowledge was any less than the greatest of the Enlightenment’s science, yet called by another name?

  This he could not say to Bell, for then Bell would walk out without another word, thinking him mad or one of those street mountebanks who sold curatives from horse carts in the marketplace. “Please allow me, Dr. Bell, to save her as I was not able to help my dear wife and wee son.”

  “Is there a harm in trying it?” Bell pleaded.

  The question should have been expected, yet still it took Gaelan aback. There was too much of the manuscript beyond his grasp, and some amount of fear. Yet he was confident he could comprehend one recipe, at least, down to the last letter, and used well, the medicine would, in fact, cure Mrs. Bell.

  After all, he explained to Bell, had his own wife and son been left to his devices and not taken from their beds, he would have used this very book to prepare a medicine. “There is potential harm in any medication, as I am certain you know, but if you heed the instructions I write out for you, it shall be fine. But,” he warned, emphasizing each word, “the recipes from this book require a unique sort of care; there can be no improvisation, no room for even the minutest error in handling or dosing.”

  Simon nodded; he seemed resigned to the risk. “I ask you, sir, what sort of consequences might befall a woman already written off as dead by every physician in London? None will touch her; no remedies remain, no medicine.” Almost to himself, he added, “I have little choice but to trust you.”

  “Good, then. It is settled. I shall prepare it for, shall we say, ten o’clock tomorrow morning? Now if you would not mind leaving me to my work—” Gaelan led Simon down the stairs and out through the side door, watching as he tried to hail a carriage, recalling the last time he’d employed the ouroboros book.

  CHAPTER 4

  Simon staggered through his foyer, clothes soaked through, barely noticing his cousin Dr. James Bell, hands behind his back, awaiting him, foot nervously tapping on the marble tiles. But Simon could not fail to miss the disapproving glare examining him head to foot as he removed his sodden coat and boots.

  “My God, Simon! You are a sight. You’ll do Sophie no good if you collapse! And where the devil have you been in the pouring rain?”

  Simon had taken far too long with Erceldoune, and it had started to rain again. With no carriage to hire, he’d slogged the two miles home in the downpour. A brandy and blazing fire was needed, but it must wait until he’d seen Sophie.

  James was perhaps the last person Simon wished to see at the moment. In a different family, his politically astute cousin might by now have a seat in the House of Commons, but he was a Bell. As other families cultivated politicians and barristers, bankers and explorers, the Family Bell cultivated physicians: successful physicians, respected physicians, invariably well-connected physicians like James, who was newly appointed to serve the young Queen Victoria.

  “Stay if you wish; I am going up to my wife.” He had no time for James and his searching expression, ever judging him these past months. Simon refused to countenance any discussion regarding his whereabouts—or Sophie.

  “Then let us go up together.”

  “As you wish.” He shrugged, too weary and anxious to argue.

  The portraits of Simon’s ancestors stood in judgment as he mounted the stairs—generations of Bell patriarchs. His mettle as both physician and husband strained beneath the oppressive weight of their stares. But would they have fared any better in the face of such a monstrous medical villain as cancer?

  Dread knifed through Simon’s chest as he approached the gallery—as it had these past months whenever he neared the top of the stairs. Would he find his dear Sophie dead and cold? And what then? How long would he survive without her by his side? Not a month.

  The threshold to Sophie’s boudoir had been, for the fifteen years of their marriage, an open invitation into her private niche—an anticipated delight. Now the room held not the fragrance of her rosebud bath salts and jasmine perfume, but of pall of disease and impending death: putrefied flesh and lye soap. First one step beyond the doorstop and then another until he fell to the mattress and at her side.

  For now, Sophie slept; at least she looked at peace. A lock of blue-black hair had fallen across her eyes; Simon brushed it gently aside, kissing her softly at the temple. She was feverish again. He dampened a small cloth in a bowl of cool water, wiping her face with it before placing it across her forehead. He felt James’s presence at the door, the man watching his every move, his reproving eyes bearing down on Simon like his ancestors’.

  James stepped forward, placing a hand on Simon’s shoulder. “She’s not likely to improve much. You need to prepare yourself, cousin.”

  As if there were a way to prepare your heart to be cleaved in two. “I cannot simply wait and do nothing. Watch her die a little more each passing hour, and this fever . . . it consumes her; I fear it will hasten her demise.” Sophie’s chest rose and fell, slow and even breaths—a deception. For just beneath the surface lay the truth of it.

  James sat upon the other side of the bed; quietly, he removed the brocade blanket, exposing Sophie’s chest. Small beads of perspiration were joined there by gooseflesh as James prodded the swelling prominent upon her breast, repeating the task in the pit of her arm. She did not stir from her sleep.

  “The cancer has weakened her; you know that, cousin. She cannot fight off fevers of any sort. And this latest illness . . .” He gently replaced the bedcovers, rising to place a hand on Simon’s back. “But we should not disturb her rest. Come, let us speak out in the hallway.” He led Simon out into the corridor.

  “I do know she is weak, and the fever has not helped her cause—” Simon barely caught himself as he faltered, nearly collapsing as he reached for the doorjamb. No longer possessing the strength to remain upright, he slid to the floor, face buried in his hands.

  James could not be right; all could not be lost if only they refused defeat. Simon knew he could convince James, despite his infuriating skepticism—he must. Rallying, Simon pushed himself from the carpet, dusting off his trousers. “James. There might yet be a way to save her. A friend—an acquaintance, to speak true—who shall this very night create for me a medicine that could save her. I have been to see him—”

  “And this is where you have been? Dear Lord, not again! And a friend, you say? What sort of . . . ? You cannot be serious! Simon! What manner of patent hokum is it this time? A poultice? A tonic? A magic pill?”

  Simon would not back down. “This apothecary . . . Erceldoune of Smithfield . . . his reputation is without blemish. I have known him for several—”

  “Mark well my words, cousin. Do not pay heed to one of these apothecary fellows, no matter how well you may think you know him. They lure you in with promises from antiquity and deliver nothing but false hope. He shall only do you—and our dear Sophie—ill!”

  CHAPTER 5

  The world had much altered, grown, since the seventeenth century when Gaelan had used the book to cure himself of plague. Late autumn, it had been, October 1625, and plague had ridden into London like the Pale Rider himself. Death everywhere, in every home; on every street people were dead or dying: in pesthouses, in plague pits, dropped dead in the streets or forgotten in their beds,
rotting as the rats feasted on their remains. No one—no physician, surgeon, apothecary—had the ability to face it down and win. Gaelan’s few successes, he’d realized, had likely not been plague at all, but some lesser pestilence.

  Then one morning he awoke from a fitful sleep, and there they were: swellings in his armpits, his groin—unmistakable signs. Fever consumed him; the tips of his fingers had gone dusky and then began to blacken within the span of a day, and Gaelan waited for the disease to rob him of all thoughts but welcome death.

  As he lay in bed, shivering and drenched, he saw it—a shimmering vision of the hawthorn tree with its odd snakes. He remembered his father talking of the 1574 plague that had decimated Edinburgh. Yet, his father, Court Physician Thomas Erceldoune had saved the lives of the boy king and half his courtiers with a tonic from the ancient volume.

  Clawing at the book like a lifeline, Gaelan found the page, but in his delirium, he could barely follow the instructions. With trembling hands, he ground, distilled, and mixed, nearly dropping the crucible twice as he toiled. Finally it was done, and he hungrily drank it down, ignoring the metallic taste and foul smell. He’d little enough chance of surviving, and his last thought before losing consciousness was a prayer that death take him quickly should this effort fail. But it did not, and miraculously, before two days had passed he felt right enough to venture outside. His thoughts turned to rescuing others from the scourge of Black Death—perhaps all the afflicted of his Shoreditch street.

  Yet his neighbors had recoiled at the sight of him, fleeing across the cobblestones, calling out one to the next, “He’d the plague! And now it’s vanished! Magic . . . sorcerer . . . always knew it . . . suspected him from the start! Something not right with that one. . . . Must be a witch!”

  Gaelan shuddered at the memory, and sighed, his thoughts returning swiftly to Simon Bell and the matter at hand. He hauled the book up to his laboratory, footsteps echoing through the narrow, windowless turret and into the large room above his flat. A full moon lit the room through high-arched windows. Seldom had Gaelan reason to come up to the laboratory at night—except to gaze upon the stars, count the constellations he’d known by heart since he was a lad—but tonight the moon rendered the sky too bright. It was just as well, with only until morning to fix Bell’s potion.

  Young Timothy Gray entered behind him, kindling a fire in the hearth while Gaelan lit glass orbs about the room. Their phosphorescence subdued the shadows and bathed the workbench in luminous daylight.

  “Ah, much better than candlelight, Timothy. You would do well to remember that! Now, off to bed with you, lad, and take with you my pharmacopeia to study before you fall to sleep—and do not neglect your Latin verbs either. I shall be quizzing you on them tomorrow!”

  Timothy was a good lad, an able apprentice. A fast learner, too, knowing when to inquire—and when to hold his tongue. Gaelan listened for Timothy’s footfalls on the back stairs, then the clang of the door to his rooms behind the shop.

  Gaelan ran his hand over the hawthorn tree engraved into the book’s cover, the leather smooth as velvet beneath his fingers. As he opened the volume, the fragrances of antiquity wafted up: grass newly shorn and the tang of acid mingled with the mustiness of aged paper and vanilla soaked through him, evoking memories of childhood and family long forgotten. He breathed it in, the finest brandy sneaked from his father’s chalice. The illuminations glimmered above the page to which he’d opened—an illusion, its colors a kaleidoscopic bending and merging.

  Fanciful script framed and formed the images, curling into shadows and tucking into the spaces between illuminations. Gaelan turned one page to the next, pausing occasionally to take in the beauty of the drawings, the colors of the inks, the sense of history, of memory . . . of family, nearly causing him to weep.

  Ah, there you are. Karkinos. The crab. Its claws reached out, tentacle-like, grabbing hold and never letting go of its prey.

  His father’s voice whispered into the shell of his ear; Gaelan could nearly feel his presence at his shoulder. “The crab possesses a kinship with this most tenacious of diseases . . . cancer, it be called.”

  A woman shimmering in silver and black, holding no weapon but an emerald tree branch, vanquished the crab’s claws, which faded into a trail of pewter dust to the edge of the page. A ruby and gold-leafed ouroboros bordered the entire image.

  The text was as difficult to navigate as the North Sea, only partially in recognizable English. Latin and Greek, Gaelic in a florid hand, and other languages barely remembered rendered the interpretation thorny at best. But he must get this right. Perfect.

  The hour grew later, and Gaelan nearly had it, squinting past burning eyes to match the bottles lining his bench to markings and glyphs in the manuscript text: quicksilver, antimony, lead, nitrates, chromates, sulfates, crystal salts, and viscous liquids. Simple enough, but what of the glyphs in the manuscript for which he could find no match among the assortment of chemical compounds? These must be referencing fine herbs, for the medicines were not only made of elements but of botanics. Gaelan possessed many, used daily in his trade, but these symbols were unfamiliar. Perhaps at one time he’d understood, but it had been too many years. . . .

  The glint of a rounded flask flickered in the periphery of Gaelan’s vision, the light reflecting and bending around its shape. The glassblower’s art of molten lead, fine ground oxides, amorphous and unknowable liquids formed like magic to crystal, to glass. Elements and heat, chemistry and physics, art and science in perfect harmony, so like the creation of medicines conjured from nothing even remotely recognizable to the end result—strong and fragile.

  Then it came to him; Gaelan remembered where he had seen those glyphs before. It had been in his father’s apothecary case, hidden away on that same shelf, its rotted wood suddenly catching Gaelan’s eye through the convex form of a beaker.

  Eighteen amber glass jars, each bearing a symbol matching those on the Karkinos page of the manuscript, rested in the rotting velvet-lined box. Beneath the jars lay several animal skin pouches tucked away and knotted securely . . . more glyphs.

  Text to ingredient, instruction to symbol, the process was slow and arduous, careful and tedious. Embers of splintered sleep burned sharp as broken glass in Gaelan’s eyes as the sky turned from black to the dusky pink of predawn. He needed to be quick; time grew short until Bell would return.

  Gaelan tapped the ingredients into a large stone vessel, grinding them anew at each step—the pestle a magician’s wand in his skilled hand. Candle flame would do well to heat the spacious crucible, and Gaelan’s hands trembled as he watched it brew and bubble, sputter and flare. Finally he added the common salt and water. Finished!

  Dawn’s first dim awakening bled red-orange through the windows, the wood in the fireplace long since turned to ash, the globes of light paled to dull amber. Breathless from hours of concentration, Gaelan waited a moment for the elixir to rest before decanting it into a small cobalt bottle, stoppering it with a ground glass bung.

  Running his index finger along the curves of text on the page, he identified the dosing guidance. Inked in scarlet and set apart from the other text, in Latin, “Once prepared, bottled and sealed, do not open until prepared to administer, lest the contents be oxidized and altered prematurely, irrevocably, thus rendering the contents hazardous to life and limb.”

  With a skilled hand, Gaelan copied the words onto a parchment, carefully rolling it before affixing it to the bottle with glue. On a separate label, and with scarlet ink, he drew the skull and crossbones, and below that, “POISON.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Timothy Gray was already about, dusting the shelves, when Gaelan finally found his bed. An hour’s rest and he would be revitalized for the day. Weariness tugged at him, dragging him toward sleep.

  A noise broke through his drowsy haze. A rat skittering across the floor? No, the distinct crackle of fire pricked his ears. Was the shop ablaze?

  Gaelan could not see; he was surrounde
d by blackness, when only a moment before, the night had been brightening into dawn. And now it was not exhaustion that blurred his vision, but thick smoke.

  No flame scorched his skin, yet he recognized the pungent, sickly sweet stink of burning flesh. He retched thin bile.

  A whisper ricocheted against the walls and echoed through the distance of time. He well knew that voice, and it terrified him. No longer an adult, Gaelan was but a frightened eleven-year-old boy.

  “You are to come with us, young Erceldoune. His Majesty demands your presence.” Gloved hands, brutal as a cur’s jaws, gripped Gaelan’s arms; already he could feel the bruise arise, purple and tender.

  At last accustomed to the dark, he saw them—palace guards, two of them towering over him. Black mail covered their faces beneath iron helms that could not keep from his nostrils the reek of their rotting teeth.

  The bright light of the palace courtyard blinded him, but he well knew this place, this time. And the disquiet of sickening anticipation prickled at the back of Gaelan’s neck.

  Edinburgh Castle. A fleeting thought of happier times there as a lad at play and study quickly shattered in the midst of the yard. Gaelan tried to look away from the platform, which arose like an altar from the center. Where was his mother? Where were his sisters, Isobel and Margaret? He could not see them for the crowd.

  With all his heart he wanted to scream for them, to cry out, but Father had told him he must have courage, no matter what he might be asked to do or say.

  “You must watch, lad. It is His Majesty’s desire—his command.” Gaelan’s head jerked up as one of the guards pulled back on his hair and the other braced his narrow shoulders, forcing him to gaze upward. King James glowered upon the scene from a high window, no longer friend and benefactor to his family, but executioner.