A Death Along the River Fleet (27 page)

Peering into the room at the very end of the hallway, she could see that this interior was far larger and laid out differently from the others. Unlike the cells, which contained only a bed, table, and chair, this room reminded Lucy of Dr. Sheridan's study. There were shelves full of bottles and jars, and a table covered with books, mortars and pestles, and small pots. This, she supposed, might be the workplace of an apothecary.

Seeing that the room was empty of inhabitants, Lucy went in. Immediately, she was overwhelmed with the strong scent of herbs, not unwelcome after the stench she had smelled in the corridors. She picked up one of the jars left open on the table and sniffed the sweet smell. Chickory, she thought, before setting it down and smelling another. Anise.

A collection of amulets hung from a peg on the wall. They looked similar in quality to what the woman outside was wearing. By the table, there was a shelf of heavy leather books, very much like those Dr. Larimer kept in his own study. Above the table, someone had pasted comely woodcuts of flowers and herbs on the wall. Spread out along a shelf, there were quite a few tracts and broadsides describing herbal remedies, astrological influences, and even witchcraft, including the
Daimonomageia.

On the shelf below, someone had sorted a variety of cheap penny pieces into stacks. Atop each stack someone had written a single word on a small sheet of paper.
Infanticide. Matricide. Self-Murder. Regicide.
A last category simply read
Melancholia.

On the table, Lucy noticed, a cup half full of a dark tisane had been left next to several open tracts. She touched the cup. It was still warm, suggesting that the inhabitant of the room might be returning soon. She kept her head cocked, so that she would be ready.

Flipping the tract to its frontispiece, she saw that it was William Gouge's treatise on self-murder. Someone had underlined the opening passage.
I suppose that scarce an age since the beginning of the world hath afforded more examples of this desperate inhumanity, than this our present age; and that of all sorts of people, clergy, laity, learned, unlearned, noble, mean, rich, poor, free, bond, male, female, young and old. It is therefore high time that the danger of this desperate, devilish and damnable practice be plainly and fully set out.

She glanced at the tract that lay open beside it, as if someone had been reading them together.
“The Self-Murder of a Tanner's Wife,”
she read out loud. Then, with a start, she realized what she was reading:
The true and sad account of a most desperate woman, driven to madness and frenzy, after her husband, a tanner, was mistaken for a highwayman, and killed by two ignoble noblemen, Henry Belasysse and Lord Buckhurst.

Excitedly, she continued to read, quickly finding it to be a sad tale indeed. The tract described how the tanner's wife had lost her livelihood and income because the tanners' guild would not allow her to continue her husband's trade, even though they did give her a widow's pension.
She did discover that her husband was in deep debt from a sickness with gambling. The guild would not pay off those debts, so ignobly accrued. With two young children clamoring for food, she set to begging and the meaner arts, until she had only her body left to sell.
They found her not too long after, at the base of a bridge, where all presumed she had thrown herself in a final fit of despair.

Lucy shuddered. A pathetic end indeed. And to think that these noblemen had been pardoned by King Charles. She could not help but curl her lip in disdain.

A step at the doorway and a muffled exclamation caused her to whirl around. Despite her best intentions, she had gotten lost in the tract and failed to pay attention to her surroundings.

Sure enough, the man standing there was the same one who had given her the concoction for Miss Belasysse yesterday morning. As before, he was dressed completely in black.

“You!” he cried, looking nervously about. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you. You are the Bedlam apothecary, are you not?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Jonathan Quade. I procure the herbs, mix the elixirs and tisanes, and attend to the patients. There is no resident physician, so it falls to me to keep the inmates well. Such as we can.” He watched her, a question in his eyes.

“Miss Belasysse was an inmate here,” she said. “Is that not the truth of the matter?”

He nodded, still watching her nervously.

The questions she had been holding in bubbled up. “Why did her family not know she was here? Or were they lying about not knowing where she was? Was she here for ten months? Who brought her here?”

After looking up and down the hallway, he shut the door behind him. “Miss Belasysse came to us at the end of June,” he whispered. “In 1666, a few months before the Great Fire. I was tending to a patient when she arrived. I never saw who brought her.”

“She never told you?” Lucy pressed.

He was quiet for a moment. “No. The last thing she remembered, as she told me later, was that she had been taking a walk near her family's London home. I suspect that she suffered a seizure and likely lost any memory of how she came to be here. The
epilepsia,
you see.”

Lucy frowned. Before she could ask another question, he asked one of his own. “What of Miss Belasysse? Has she recovered her memory? Is she well? Or is she still—fitful?” His eyebrows furrowed. “You have not brought her back here, have you?”

Lucy regarded him closely. His concern for the woman seemed genuine. “No, she is still in the care of Dr. Larimer. I do not think she is well,” Lucy admitted. “She did take the tonic you sent easily enough, and that seemed to soothe her. But she is still melancholic and very anxious. Sometimes, she is quite gay, and she alarms me.”

“But she is safe.” Nervously, the man began to quickly grind a few herbs together with the mortar and pestle, causing a strong aroma to arise from the basin.

“St. John's wort,” he said. “For melancholy. There are many who suffer from that same complaint here, and I seek to lessen the torments of anguish when I can. Is that why you have come?” He paused, licking his chapped lips. “Or did she send you to see me?” He looked hopeful.

“Dr. Larimer needs more of the unguent you made for her. One of her physicians is here, speaking to the keeper.”

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed, setting down the pestle. “I can supply him with the ingredients he needs. The keeper must not be informed of her whereabouts!”

“Why not?” Lucy asked.

“He is not a good man.”

Distantly she heard a bell ringing.

“What is that?” she asked. “It did not sound like a church bell.”

Mr. Quade frowned. “We use bells to help our inmates remember what they are supposed to be doing.” Far off, she heard a man begin to scream. Miss Belasysse's fearful whisper echoed in her mind.
I was afraid to ring for her,
she had said
. Afraid of who might come.

Lucy blinked. “What happened to Miss Belasysse here?” she whispered. “Was she … a prisoner?”

“Not a prisoner,” he replied. When she waited, he threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. “Some inmates suffer from a great imbalance of the humors. Their spirits and minds are broken, and we can little understand how to help them.” He rubbed his forehead. “There are things we must do to help them heal, so that they will not bring harm to themselves or others. They are often allowed to roam freely about the grounds. Most of the time we only lock them up when we feel they are dangerous. I never believed Miss Belasysse would cause harm to others, but her fits…”

“They tied her up,” Lucy said, thinking of the marks on her wrists.

“May the good Lord show them mercy, they did. At first, I believed it was for her own good.” Mr. Quade rubbed his eyes. He began to rap his knuckles on the table. “The keeper kept her locked up. I never knew why. He would not say. I asked him once, but he said that she was of ‘special concern' to them.”

The man's screaming grew louder. With great effort, Lucy turned her attention back to the apothecary. “I met a woman here who knew Miss Belasysse, I think,” Lucy said. “She called her a bluebird.”

“Ah,” he said. “I daresay you were speaking to Lucinda. Mrs. Jamison, I should say. She and Miss Belasysse were fast friends, and she has been quite melancholic since she left.” He sighed. “Mrs. Jamison rather thinks she is a bird. I don't know why. Harmless, though.”

“She said a quail had helped the bluebird fly away. To escape.” Lucy paused, feeling a little ridiculous. “Are you the quail, Mr. Quade?” she whispered. “Did you help Miss Belasysse flee from this place?”

He nodded. “Octavia, I mean Miss Belasysse, begged me to let her leave. She asked me to write letters to her brother and her family. I began to believe that they would never reply, as every letter she wrote went unanswered. For months. Only when she sent a letter herself did her brother finally come to fetch her.”

“He did come? Henry Belasysse was here?”

“Yes,” Mr. Quade replied. “A little over a week ago. Miss Belasysse was delighted when he came.”

“When was this?” Lucy asked.

The apothecary scratched his head. “That would have been Saturday, the thirtieth of March.”

And I found her on the first of April, Lucy thought to herself. “Was she injured when she left here? Were her hands cut at all?”

Mr. Quade frowned. “Injured? Of course not. She had, of course, undergone treatment during her time here. Bloodletting and the sort, but she had not sustained any injury. Why? Is she all right?”

“She is fine,” Lucy said hastily, seeing the concern in his eyes. “Could you tell me, what was she wearing when she left?”

“Her brother had brought her a blue dress so that she would not draw attention to herself when she traveled. I took the dress to her, and then led her to her brother who was waiting beyond the gate, so the keeper would not see them go.”

“And did her brother say anything else about their journey? Where they planned to go?”

“I assumed to their family seat. He was nervous, naturally, about her condition, but I gave him enough of the concoction to last them the journey home.” He paused. “But his worries seem to have been for naught, as he managed to get her to the care of Dr. Larimer.”

Lucy shook her head. “No, I found Miss Belasysse wandering about, senseless, near Holborn Bridge, several days after she left here. I brought her to Dr. Larimer's as I was concerned for her. Her brother has not been seen in over a week. His wife is quite worried.”

He paled a bit. “I know he was afraid of someone; I do not know who. Please miss. I have told you all I know.” He opened the door.

She pointed to the tract on the table. “I could not help but notice you were reading about the murder of the tanner for which Henry Belasysse was pardoned. Why is that?”

“What?” he asked, following her gaze. “Oh, yes. Mr. Browning, the assistant keeper, gave the tract to me several months ago. He knows that I am interested in better understanding melancholy and self-murder, as well as the impulses that drive a man to murder.”

“So the tanner's wife killed herself? What a desperate act!” Lucy said.

“If you spent more time here, you would see the toll that melancholia and desperation take upon a person's soul.” He sighed.

“But is it not an odd coincidence that Mr. Browning had this very tract in his possession?”

“No, it was no coincidence. When Miss Belasysse first came here, Mr. Browning recognized her straightaway. Said he knew for a fact that her brother was not innocent, and that even though the king had pardoned him in this temporal world, there was no pardon to be had in the hereafter.”

Lucy nodded. She understood the anger over the king's pardon.

The apothecary continued. “I am ashamed to say that he taunted her with her brother's crime, from a place of deep anger. Even more so after the tanner's wife took her own life. I caught him waving this tract in front of her, tormenting her with the knowledge that her brother's thoughtless act had driven another to such a terrible end.”

“Did he know the tanner's wife?” Lucy asked, wondering. “His anger toward Miss Belasysse seems so
personal.
” Then a thought struck her. “Was she
here
, at Bedlam?”

He shook his head slowly. “I do not think so. Although…” He paused, still thinking. “Now that you mention it, I am not certain.” He paused again. “I remember now there was a woman here for a short spell, shortly after the tanner's murder occurred, whom Mr. Browning had taken a particular interest in.”

“Do you remember anything about the woman?” Lucy asked.

“No, she was full of melancholia. A surgeon performed some bloodletting upon her, but when she did not respond and—I suspect—when she ran out of funds, she was released.” He rubbed his forehead. “Wait, yes! It must have been the tanner's wife. I never realized—”

“Why, what happened? What did you remember?”

“She had a violent outburst—just once. In full hysterics, as I recall. She screamed that her husband had been deliberately killed, by two men, and that even the king had covered the crime.”

“Yes, that must have been her! What happened to her?” Lucy asked, breathless now.

Mr. Quade rubbed his eyes. “She was dragged into isolation, and that was the last I heard of it. She left shortly after that, but still well before Miss Belasysse joined us at Bedlam.”

“So the two women did not know each other?”

The apothecary shook his head. “I do not believe they did.”

Lucy thought about the notes that Susan Belasysse said her husband had received. “But someone believed her story, I think.”

“Perhaps.” He paused. “I only looked at this tract after Miss Belasysse left. This may sound pitiful, but I find I have missed her. It is the only reminder that I have of her time here.”