The Apothecary's Daughter (54 page)

Fire. Near the shop. Father in bed. Dear God, no. Lilly hurried
to meet her brother.

“He’s burning it, Lilly,” Charlie cried. “Burning it all. Grandfather’s pretty pots, all broken! “

Lilly ran.

Adam Graves turned the corner and dashed down the High Street.
Smoke billowed from a mound in the street before Haswell’s door. A
small crowd of people had already gathered. Mortimer Allen stood
on the opposite side of the High Street watching the proceedings with
cool detachment. John Evans came out the shop door, heaved a crate
onto the fire, then turned back and disappeared inside once more.

As Adam ran across the cobbles, he saw Mr. Shuttleworth cross
the green in his odd upright trot.

Bill Ackers suddenly appeared before Adam, blocking his view
and path. “Steady on.”

He tried to step around the bulky man, but Ackers took his arm
in an iron grip. “Stay back, Dr. Graves. Woe betide ye if Foster hears
of ye meddlin’ in this affair.”

Ackers’s bailiff, his brother in size and strength, held Shuttleworth
as the surgeon, cravat askew, strained forward. His dark troubled eyes
met Adam’s over the bailiff’s beefy shoulder. “Good heavens, man,”
he cried. “Do something.”

“Nothin’ he can do to puh a stop to it,” Ackers said. “Haswell’s
in quiy’ a lot of trouble. Gentlemen come down from London town
with papers.” He nodded toward John Evans, coming back out with an armload of dried herbs. “That man in the queer une-ee-form showed
me. All legal an’ so like.”

“Foster paid you off,” Adam said. “You knew what would happen today.”

“I am only doin’ my duty. Keeping the peace, innum? You’ll keep
yers, too, if yer a clever man.”

Adam stopped resisting, stepping back from the constable’s
hold.

“That’s it. Just go on to yer offices, now. Nothing to concern you
here.”

Adam stepped back, into the shadows beneath a lime tree on the
green. Across the waves of heat and roils of black smoke he saw Miss
Haswell, clutching a thick book in one arm, and with the other, holding her father back.

Their gazes caught, and for a moment hers alighted, but then,
as he stood there, unmoving, her focus dimmed and finally fell away
from him. Adam realized it was happening again. He was once more
held in fear’s grip. Frozen. He uttered a rare prayer, Lord in heaven,
help me!

The beadle carried out a tall eighteenth-century jar bearing the
Haswell crest, and seeing it sent a jolt through Adam’s limbs. As if
in boiled syrup, he strode heavily across the cobbled street and stood
before John Evans. Recognizing him, the beadle hesitated. His hard
eyes grew angry and his Welsh accent lilted his answer. “Not workin’
fahst enough for you, is thaht it?”

“Please stop, Mr. Evans John. The charges Dr. Foster brought
are unjust.”

“Thought you worked for the mahn?”

“Yes. But I can prove that a person would have died if Haswell’s
had filled Foster’s order.”

“Show it to the Master, then.” He jerked his head toward Mortimer
Allen, across the street.

“No, John. I am showing it to you -a man of honor. Your master
and mine are in league together. Would you destroy the livelihood
the legacy of an innocent man? A noble apothecary?”

Evans hesitated. “I’ve a writ with two charges not just the one.
Are you telling me there’s no truth in either of them? Thaht … this”
he nodded toward the pile of broken rubble “was unjust?” For a
moment the man’s green eyes looked bleak, urging him to deny it, to
renounce his guilt.

“What other charge?” Adam asked warily.

“Thaht one Lillian Haswell, female, has been practicing as an
apothecary, unlawfully diagnosing and dispensing physic without legal
qualification to do so. Can you prove this charge false as well?”

Again Adam hesitated, held by the earnest, forthright eyes of the
man staring back at him. “I … cannot.”

Mr. Evans blinked.

“But this is a lesser charge, surely,” Adam added. “Not requiring
such a heavy toll. No charge of adulterated medicine, no harm done.
Her father has been dreadfully ill she has been nothing but a credit
to him.”

Something in the man’s eyes glinted, as if he understood Graves’s
reasons for interfering were not merely professional. Evans stared
at him a moment longer, then shoved the tall jar into his arms and
turned away.

“Why do you stop?” the Master of Wardens called after him.
“Who told you to stop?”

“We are well beyond our jurisdiction here. I’ve done all I will.”

“We are not finished here!”

“We are.”

John Evans strode down the street, his golden tassels flapping
against his blue gown. On him, the effect was regal. Adam Graves
had no doubt he had just been in the presence of a true gentleman. A
man worth knowing.

The Master sputtered with anger and looked as though he might
continue the dark task himself. But he seemed to consider the growing
crowd of onlookers, and the fact that the burly constable was retreating
with his bailiff, and instead followed after the beadle.

Standing there with smoke burning his eyes and lungs, Adam held
the Haswell jar in his arms, feeling defeated and useless. He slowly walked toward Miss Haswell, who stepped forward to meet him as
he drew near. Tears streamed down her cheeks. He met her eyes and
held out the jar toward her. An offering. She took it mutely from him.
For a moment, they both held it. Then he let go, turned, and walked
away. Tears stung his own eyes, but that was only the smoke, doing
what it would.

The past is the beginning of the beginning …
the twilight of the dawn.

H. G. WELLS

uch had been lost. But they would have lost far more without
Dr. Graves’s interference.

Still, Lilly was not surprised when he appeared at the shop door two
days later, carrying both valise and medical case. That he had shaved
off his moustache did surprise her, and she regarded the pale exposed
skin above his lip with a feeling of nearly maternal tenderness.

He cleared his throat. “As you know,” he began quietly, “I came
here to see if a provisional partnership would work out.” He smiled
wistfully. “It did not.”

“I am sorry,” she whispered.

He nodded. “I have given up my partnership with Dr. Foster, though
he no doubt would have broken our agreement had I not done so first.”

“I do not blame you, for that decision nor for that day.”

He looked down at the floor. “There comes a time, Miss Haswell,
when a man must admit defeat.”

She knew he was speaking of more than his profession. “Of course
you must not yoke yourself with Foster, but might you not set up on
your own?” She attempted a wry grin. “I know where you might let
a surgery very cheaply.”

“Thank you. But I know this village cannot support two competing physicians.”

“Does Foster not mean to retire after all?”

He shrugged. “It does not signify. I go to London.”

“To practice there?”

“Not private practice. I own now, I am not fit for it.” With a lift
of his hand, he cut off her objections before she could voice them. “I
intend to return to Guy’s Hospital. I was offered a teaching post there
before and turned it down. Now I shall take it. No doubt I shall be
quite content. I excel in academia.” He grinned bravely. “It is only
real life I fail to master.”

He bowed and took his leave of her. She watched him go, regretting that he had come there only to be disappointed. Yet she knew it
was not within her power to make him happy. Nor whole.

The shop cleanup continued. Given her father’s state of health and
their shaky finances, they could no longer fool themselves that they
could restore the shop to its former glory. Humpty Dumpty had taken
too great a fall. Though clearly grieving its loss, her father seemed
oddly resigned to the closing of Haswell’s. Perhaps even relieved. Lilly
felt a muddle of conflicting emotions herself.

It took days to sort through the rubble and salvage what they could,
to sweep up the spilled powders and scrub away the syrups soiling the
shop floor, and to make sense of the jumble which had been her father’s
surgery. Her father had always been disorganized. His desk and sideboard were forever piled high with papers, but now those papers carpeted the floor and were wedged between sideboard and wall, desk and
window. Lilly piled and sorted and read and tossed until the dustbin
threatened to overflow. If the beadle must burn, Lilly thought tartly, why
could he not have burned this lot? Such calamity was likely the only thing
that would have driven them to this frenzy of purging and cleaning.

Charlie’s cat, jolly, had fled the house during the fire, and had not
been found. Though discouraged, Charlie did his best to help, splitting his time between Marlow House and home. At the moment he
was sweeping the floor near the large front window, its display empty
now save for the rescued apothecary jar.

Still in the surgery, Lilly reached down and pulled at a corner of paper
sticking out from under the desk like a child sticking out its tongue.

“Charlie, come here a moment, please,” she called.

Charlie was not clever, but he was very strong. When he appeared,
she asked, “Do lift the corner of the desk for me, will you? Father’s
papers have flown everywhere, and knowing me, I’d miss the only
one worth recovering.”

Charlie heaved the heavy oak desk and Lilly snatched the paper
out. “Well done, Charlie. Thank you.”

He grinned meekly before returning to his task.

She began to put the letter on the stacks remaining to be sorted
when the handwriting caught her eye. This was no bill of lading, no
chemist’s advertisement. Hairs prickled at the back of her neck. Her
heart began to pound. She remembered this handwriting. Of course
she would. It belonged to her mother.

Trembling, she sat on her father’s desk chair and studied the letter.
When had her mother written it? The paper was starting to yellow
and bore deep indentations like a triangular leech bite, as though it
had been pressed under that desk for a long time.

It had been directed to Charles Haswell without return address.
The postal markings were faded and unreadable.

From where had she posted it? From someplace exotic, as Lilly
had long imagined? From her London lodgings? Perhaps even from
some nearby estate where she had a post? Lilly wondered if her father
had read it and purposely hidden it from her all these years. Lilly ran
a fingernail under the fold; the yellowed wax seal still held. It might
very well have been lost in the chaos of her father’s surgery, and lain
there unread by anyone. Or perhaps the seal had become reaffixed
from the pressure of the desk.

What answers did it hold?

Part of her longed to open it right then and there. Part of her was
too exhausted to care. Did she really want to know?

She dutifully carried it up the stairs to her father’s bedchamber.
She was relieved to see him up and dressed, sitting at his little letterwriting desk, quill in hand.

He looked at her over his new spectacles, and she handed him the
letter without comment. He turned it over in his hand, then sat still,
staring at it, head bowed.

“I found it under your desk in the surgery.”

He did not move.

“Do you know its contents?”

He gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

“Father? “

“No, but I fear it.”

“What more can she do to hurt us? After all this time?” Lilly
held out her palm. He looked at her for a moment, blue eyes wide,
before lowering his head again. He thrust the letter toward her without
looking her way.

She took it from him and carried it to the window, where the
light was better. She peeled open the shrunken wax seal and carefully unfolded the stiff yellowed paper.

A clue to the letter’s age was given in its opening line.