The Apothecary's Curse

by Barbara Barnett

  She danced on the edge of ecstasy, aching and pulsing with desire. He hesitated a moment, sitting back on his knees, looking at her. He was beautiful as he sat poised between her knees, aroused, his pupils black, and dilated with desire. Yet he seemed to falter. He was unquestionably ready, but there was clearly something on his mind.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. “Sorry. It has been a long time for me, not counting . . . earlier, and I don’t know that I can—”

  “Here, let me.” She reached for him, and he inhaled deeply as he let her guide him, as if he were a virgin. She gasped as he filled her, and she felt whole in a way she’d never felt with Paul. Their rhythm built to a crescendo as he took her to the edge, then pulled her back and left her in delighted frustration until finally they fell together, not into a black void, but into the warmth of light buoyed by each other.

  They were both panting, drenched in sweat and each other as he rolled to his side, propping himself on an elbow. He curled his hand through her hair, drawing her into a last, deep kiss. “Good morning,” he said finally.

  Anne sat up. She ran her thumb down his face, temple to cheek, cupping his jaw. A final kiss. “That was . . .” From the corner of her eye she could see the faintest light begin to seep through the blinds into the room. “We have to talk.” She sat up cross-legged, running her fingers through her hair shakily. “A very lot happened, my darling, whilst you were sleeping.”

  He pulled on his T-shirt, his gaze no longer dreamy, attention focused on Anne.

  What to say first? She wanted desperately to know about the photograph, but she needed to warn him about Paul. Maybe he could get away, go somewhere . . . something. Even if Paul’s—now very much plausible—theory was wrong, it didn’t matter. Gaelan’s regenerative abilities were so unusual that he would never be allowed to escape examination. If he was right . . . “Two things, one urgent, the other, a coincidence so strange you will never believe it.” She located their clothing tangled beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. She tossed his clothes to him, and dressed quickly.

  “Urgent. What is it?” She watched the blood drain from his face, as if he had some inkling. He was about to stand; she stilled him.

  “First the urgent. My ex. Paul Gilles—”

  “Yes. The chap with the diaries.”

  “He’s to arrive from Heathrow in only a few hours.”

  “Why? And what does that have to do with me? Do you think he’ll challenge me to a duel?” Gaelan reached for her, but she batted his hand away.

  “My darling, this is more serious than anything you might imagine.” It was clear from his worried expression that he quite understood. Probably more than he intended to let on. “He has a photograph—an old photograph found with those Bedlam diaries, and the man appeared to be . . . Well, according to Paul, it appeared to be . . . you.” She said it quickly, as if to do so would make it easier. It did not.

  “I see.”

  His mouth opened into an O, as if he intended to say something more. He looked away.

  “There’s more.”

  No reaction at all. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. There was no easy way to do this. Out with it—for all its ghoulishness. “He also discovered tissue samples. Preserved, apparently quite expertly for the time.” She rose and moved, crouching in front of him so he could not avoid her gaze. “One finger, left hand. The samples match a journal entry made . . . the final clinical entry by the doctor of record. . . .”

  Gaelan closed his eyes for a moment, his face ashen. He stood, steadying himself on the bedpost, and silently finished dressing. Ignoring Anne, he went wordlessly into the bathroom, closing the door quietly, as if to slam it would break the silence now surrounding them.

  “You have to leave before he lands.” No response. “I know this is a shit hand. Even if you are not the man in the diaries, the simple fact of . . . your recovery from the accident . . .” She went to the bathroom door and knocked shouting his name. No response. She tried the knob; the door was unlocked.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, back against the claw-foot tub, elbows propped on his knees, head in his hands. He seemed unaware she’d come into the room. After putting down the lid on the toilet, she sat close to him.

  “I saw in your library a book autographed by Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination,’ it said. Are you the improbable truth that remains after I have eliminated all else? Can you possibly be that man described in the Bedlam diaries? Did Conan Doyle inscribe that to you? With you in mind?”

  No response. He simply stared ahead, withdrawn into someplace deep inside himself.

  Anne slid to the tile and lifted his chin, looking deep into his eyes.

  He nodded slowly and sighed; her heart broke as she saw the defeat in his expression. The game was no longer afoot; it was up. And he believed he’d lost, running out of places to hide. “Handley,” he said simply.

  Anne shook her head, not understanding.

  “His name was Handley. Francis Handley, mad doctor of Bedlam.” He was speaking as if to himself.

  “You must get out of here—”

  “Wait. You mentioned there was something else?” His voice was unsteady, as if processing that there was something, perhaps even more unimaginable, she’d not yet said.

  She took his hand, and he allowed her to lead him back to the bedroom. “There’s something I need to ask you.”

  His eyebrows arched as he shook his head. “More?”

  Anne wondered how much more he could handle. He looked shell-shocked, like a bombing victim trying desperately to make sense of his surroundings. “You’ll see.” Would it be too much to show him the photograph of Eleanor Douglass? Her medical training—and her heart—told her he was teetering upon a razor-thin cliff, but would the connection draw him away from that dangerous place or push him over the edge? She wasn’t sure.

  Anne left and came back into the room with the two photographs of Eleanor Douglass. Sitting on the bed, she grasped his right hand, carefully entwining their fingers. “Who is she?”

  He glanced at the daguerreotype before him, quickly looking away. He answered simply, as if from a dream. “Someone from another lifetime.”

  Anne held her breath, taking the other image from her lap and placing it on his. “Is this the same woman?”

  CHAPTER 51

  In the photograph, Eleanor Bell Braithwaite stood between Simon and a man Gaelan did not recognize. She wore an exquisite wedding gown; her eyes, so sad and beautiful, seemed distant for so happy an occasion. She held in her arms an infant, draped in white lace.

  Gaelan blinked back tears as he touched the screen of Anne’s phone, caressing the image of Eleanor. He walked away, out of the room, after taking the phone from her hand, his gaze never leaving the screen. Opening the glass doors, he went out on his terrace, staring into the dawn sky, overwhelmed. He knew he had to say something, but had not a clue where to begin.

  He heard Anne step out onto the small balcony. He cast a backward glance to see her standing on the threshold observing him with solemn eyes, such a beautiful deep, dark blue. He turned back, gazing east toward the lake, at the low-hanging clouds, ominous, yet magnificent in the early-morning light: dark purples and greens, pinks and reds.

  “Who are you?” she asked quietly, now at his shoulder, her hand resting upon his arm. There was no accusation in her voice, only compassion.

  He had answered that question only twice before, once to Simon and the other to Eleanor. The world was more sophisticated than it had been in 1625, when people merely ran away frightened. Or threw you on the pyre to burn. But now, as then, the urge to pick apart and study anyone who was “different” overpowered men’s good judgment and nobility, no matter that the object of curiosity was a flesh-and-blood human being.

  Some would call his condition—and Simon’
s condition—a gift from God. And some would yet risk all, would steal or murder—or torture—to obtain the faintest clue. The holy grail. The philosopher’s stone. The Elixir of Life. It had so many, many names. To him, to Simon, it was a curse—an existence in limbo.

  For Gaelan, the curse was to live without love, without family. His compensation, though meager at best, was to experience the joy and delight of discovering in each successive generation the evolution of science and technology: electricity, flight, space exploration, movies, computers, etc. The incredible advances he’d witnessed had been enough to lighten the burden of a life lived too long. But it had not filled the void of a heart empty for well over a century. Since the day Eleanor died. . . .

  She had been ninety, and Galan had not seen her in sixty years. Simon was angry he’d shown up then—1902—when there had been no word from him in all those years, not even a note. Had Simon not realized, even then, that Gaelan was in a hell that not even Dante might have imagined? Cut off, isolated, apart from everything and everyone he cared about, even his own daughter? He was supposed to be dead, and he needed to stay that way. What else might he have done?

  “Do you think this has been easy?” He’d argued bitterly with Simon upon his arrival. “Look at me! I look the age of her grandchildren. How would that have gone with her, I ask you, hmm? I need to see her!”

  Simon grasped Gaelan by both his arms gently, imploring, “Leave her be, Gaelan. Leave her to die in peace.”

  Gaelan swallowed hard, looking up into Simon’s cold eyes. “You think I’ve not had regrets?” He held up a hand, calmer now, and Simon released him. “How many times,” he confessed, tears gathering, “how many times I booked passage . . . only to turn back at the last moment. But I could not let her go to her rest without seeing her one last time. I need to tell her . . . How can I let her die without telling her not a day has gone by when I’ve not thought of her, gone to sleep with her face in my dreams?”

  Simon nodded. He sat next to Gaelan, placing a comforting hand on his back. “She’s upstairs in her old room.”

  He returned to the drawing room an hour later shaken, as if his heart had been ripped to shreds. “She’s gone,” he said finally, voice hoarse and choked. “She’s gone,” he repeated, falling into the arms of the sofa, his body shaking with sobs, inconsolable.

  “I know you loved her, Erceldoune,” Simon had acknowledged finally. “And I suspect that, though she has never confessed it to me, her eldest child—Ariadne—might well be yours. I know the two of you . . . At any rate, she was born in March the year following your departure.”

  The sweet, sad memory faded to a blur of dull grief as Gaelan noted Anne now standing by his side, her hands on the railing. “The sky is beautiful at this time of day, Gaelan. Remarkable, the clouds, the sun just breaking the horizon. What an amazing view to greet you every morning.”

  “How is it you came by this photograph, Anne?” He tried his best to keep the chaos raging inside him from seeping into his voice.

  Anne quirked an eyebrow. “Why don’t we go in and sit a minute? But we’ve not much time.”

  He nodded, again allowing her to take his hand.

  “This photograph,” she began, “is of my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s grandmother Lady Eleanor Douglass.”

  Anne’s ancestor, Eleanor? But how?

  “But why do you have her photograph?” she asked.

  “It is a very long story, Anne, and I am not certain we have time.” He was still riveted to the image, so clear—much clearer than his battered old photo, stolen from Simon’s study the morning he’d left for America. “Suffice to say, I loved her, and I had a daughter with her, born in 1843.” There. He’d said it. Honestly as he knew how. “Had I told you a week ago, you’d have thought me quite delusional. Bloody hell, you might yet.”

  A horrifying thought crossed Gaelan’s mind as he paced from the settee to the window and back, refusing to look at Anne. Finally, he came to a halt in front of her. Horrified.

  “No! No, no, no. This cannot be. I understand that you are her descendent, but is it possible you are mine as well? My God!” What a cruel, cruel irony that would be! After nearly two hundred years in the desert, to be falling in love with a woman quite possibly his great-great . . . however many greats-granddaughter? He scrubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to comprehend it all. It was impossible.

  “Gaelan. Come back to me. Focus. The book. Is that connected to all of this, somehow, do you think? Is that why it’s been in my family—because of this strange connection? Paul believes there is mention of it in those diaries. A magic book of some sort.”

  Finally, he laughed harshly, shaking his head. The final piece of the puzzle had set in place for her at last. “Ah, the book. I am certain that somewhere in the diaries there is mention of it. But so much of everything that happened during those five years is a blur.”

  He blinked away an image of Handley’s face as it slithered into his vision. “Yes, the book is, in fact, mine; it went missing immediately not long before my . . . my captivity. It was 1837. But I cannot say how it ended up in your cousin’s attic. I have been seeking it myself for nearly two centuries, both here in North America and in the UK, but never found it. It is why I became a rare books dealer in the first place. I’d always held out a hope, but never, ever a clue, a valid lead . . . to the one manuscript in the world that really means anything to me.”

  “A moment.” Anne grabbed her messenger bag, taking from it a sealed envelope. “This was tucked into the book when I first discovered it. It was sealed, and I felt . . . I had no right to open it. But my heart tells me you are the intended recipient.”

  Gaelan took the envelope with trembling hands, his heart racing. He ran his thumb over the words “To Papa,” but he couldn’t manage opening it. He was shaking too badly. Ariadne. “Would you . . . ?”

  She opened the envelope, handing it back to him before turning toward the bedroom.

  “Anne, stay. You’ve every right to know what is in this letter.” He scanned the page, his eyes too filled with longing and emotion to make out the words. “Would you . . . ?”

  Anne took the paper, stained with age and tears. “Of course.” She read, stopping several times, the words choked in her throat:

  “My dearest Papa, I do not know if this book shall ever find its way into your hands. I came upon it three years after my mother’s death. She had long ago told me who you are, and what you did for her. For us. But she refused to divulge how I might find you—not even your name. Mama told me that you must dwell in secret.

  “Recently, I learned of a half brother, here in my old age. Your son, he told me. Iain he is called. Lord Iain Kinston. And it is from him I acquired this manuscript, your book. He said it was given him by a man you knew who wished only to return it to you from his safekeeping. I tried to explain to Lord Iain that I did not know you. But he told me how his family had badly wronged you, and that he did not deserve to keep so precious a gift. And so I hold fast to this book, and although I am now past seventy, and a great-grandmother, I cannot help but wonder at times if you are nearby or if I only dream it.

  “I leave this letter for you in hopes that, should this book someday find you, you shall understand you were cherished and loved—and sore missed. With love and affection, Your Ariadne.”

  “My son, Iain . . . but he died. I was told . . . I was certain of it. But how is it possible?”

  Gaelan remembered the day he’d returned to Kinston’s estate. He’d found Caitrin’s grave easily enough, but never Iain’s. Then Kinston’s lackeys came, and the arrest and all else happened in such quick succession he’d never given it any more thought. He’d assumed the worst, of course, that Iain had been disowned and thrown into a pauper’s grave, never thinking that Kinston would raise him as his heir. Then it came back to him in a flash of memory. The family watching him being led off the Kinston estate. He’d thought it odd they’d include a servant to enjo
y the spectacle, but there she’d been, and holding a baby in her arms. Might that have been his Iain?

  His son . . . an earl? This was unbelievable. And Iain and Ariadne had met. It warmed him to know that. But of course they were now long, long in their graves. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the grief of sons and daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren all dead. None of whom he’d ever known. He wept for them all.

  Anne interrupted his thoughts. “Gaelan, we must go, and soon.”

  He nodded slightly, allowing her to brush away his tears.

  “You say the book is yours,” she said, “and I gladly return it to you. But I must ask the question, given what we’ve discovered about it. Is there a connection between the book . . . and your condition?”

  Gaelan explained how he’d used the book—and how it had changed him, never mentioning Simon. No need to involve him in this mess.

  The telephone interrupted, and Gaelan jumped, startled by the jarring sound. He fell upon it to answer before it rang a second time.

  “It’s Simon.” There was something not right about his voice. “We have to talk. Now.”

  “I’m not alone,” Gaelan whispered. “Hang on.” He placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the portable phone. “Anne, I have to take this call in private.”

  She nodded and went back out to the veranda, closing the glass doors behind her. Gaelan went into his room, his eyes on the bedroom door. “What is it?”

  “Transdiff Genomics.”

  “The firm researching the diaries. Anne . . . Dr. Shawe, she—”

  “Yeah. Her. She bloody works for them. Have you any idea what they’re up to?” Gaelan noted a rising panic in Simon’s voice he had never before heard.

  “I do. I was going to ring you up as soon as the hour was decent and I was sure you weren’t going to throttle me for waking you.”

  “I’ve been researching my new novel, and I came across something disturbing enough, but I’ve only just come across another . . . This firm . . . they’re actively engaged in medical experimentation on humans. Without consent. Children stolen from their beds, purchased from desperate parents trapped in distressed countries. Injected with infectious cocktails . . . I am sending you a link to the site now. Check your e-mail. And you must get as far away from this Anne Shawe as you can. . . .”