Scarlet Widow (3 page)

‘A female apothecary? I can hardly see
that
being acceptable! Especially one so young and so pretty! How many gentlemen will feel comfortable coming to a female apothecary, especially if they have any kind of
private
ailment?’

‘I doubt if it will be any fewer than those who ask me every day of the week for calomel lotion. It’s never for themselves, you see. It’s always for a “friend”.’

Beatrice said, ‘Calomel lotion? That’s for the French disease, isn’t it, papa?’

‘Oh! I’m quite shocked!’ Aunt Felicity exclaimed, throwing up her black-gloved hands. ‘The girl is no more than twelve. What does she know of the French disease?’

‘Actually, I’m thirteen in three weeks’ time,’ said Beatrice. ‘And papa has never made a secret of people’s illnesses and where they catch them from.’

Clement put his arm around Beatrice’s shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. When he looked down and smiled at her, though, she saw more pain than hope in his eyes, and she could tell how much he was suffering.

*

As summer gave way to autumn, and then to winter, Beatrice tried to keep up her attendance at Mrs Tutchin’s academy every day. Mrs Tutchin was young and blonde-haired and almost skeletally thin. She was the wife of a banker, although she was childless herself. There were nine girls in the class altogether and Mrs Tutchin taught them manners and deportment, and how to speak colloquial French, and how to add up and multiply. She also showed them how to sew on buttons and embroider, and how to bake a lardy cake with raisins folded into it.

Beatrice loved the academy because Mrs Tutchin was so gentle and soft-spoken and smelled of diluted rosewater. She was patient with all of her girls, but especially sympathetic to Beatrice because she knew how much she missed her mother. Sometimes, when Beatrice was bent over her sewing, she would come and stand behind her and gently rest one of her bony hands on her shoulder, as if she were reassuring her that her mother was watching over her.

Every week, though, it became harder for Beatrice to find the time to attend the academy, even though Mrs Tutchin’s house was only three streets away, at the top of Snow Hill. Now that it was colder, and it was growing dark so early in the day, her father was becoming more and more depressed and erratic in his behaviour. He had started drinking – only in the afternoons at first, with his dinner, but then he started to take a glass of genever before he opened the shop, and more glasses throughout the day, from a brown stone bottle that he kept hidden under the counter. Almost every evening he would fall asleep in his armchair in front of a gradually dying fire, and every night she would hear him stumbling upstairs to bed when the fire had turned to ashes and he had woken up shivering.

Almost every morning she would have to wake him because he was still snoring thickly when it was time for him to open up the shop – wrapped up tightly in his blankets but fully clothed and crusty-eyed and reeking of stale alcohol.

He would open his eyes and stare at her as if he didn’t know who she was. Then he would sit up and croak, ‘I’m sorry... I’m so sorry, Bea. It won’t happen again, I swear to God.’

Once he had washed himself and changed his clothes and come downstairs to eat breakfast with her, he was almost back to his old self again, especially if she served him oatmeal gruel with butter and wine in it. By then, however, it was often too late for her to go to Mrs Tutchin’s and her father would coax her to stay at home and help him prepare his medicines because he had such a backlog of prescriptions waiting to be filled, and so many customers who were beginning to lose patience with him.

‘I’m blessed by God to have such a clever daughter,’ he said to her almost every day, kissing her on the top of her head. ‘If only your mother could see you now!’

Beatrice would put on a long linen apron and a stiff linen bonnet, and her thick wool cloak, too, if it was cold, because there was only a small wood-burning stove in the outhouse to keep her warm. Then she would sit all alone for most of the morning, making up pills and powders and lotions and bottles of various cordials, following the recipes in her father’s dog-eared notebooks.

Some of the medicines took her hours. One of Clement Bannister’s most popular cure-alls was Mithridate, which was claimed to be effective against poisoning and animal bites and even the plague. It contained over fifty ingredients, which Beatrice had to measure out in very precise quantities – including opium, cardamom, frankincense, saffron, ginger, anise, parsley and acacia juice. Once measured, they all had to be pounded together in honey. Almost as popular was Venice Treacle, which had sixty-four ingredients – roots, herbs, peppers, even bitumen and animal parts, like roasted adders – although it was much more expensive.

Apart from these, Beatrice had to mix up a mouthwash of dried marigold petals and erigeron, as a remedy for chronic toothache. For nosebleeds, she would stir together comfrey and plantain water, sometimes adding yarrow.

Every time she smelled the pungency of yarrow leaves, she thought of the song that her mother used to sing to her when she put her to bed. If she wrapped yarrow leaves in a handkerchief, her mother had told her, she would wake up in the morning and know who she was going to marry.

Thou pretty herb of Venus’ tree,

Thy true name it is Yarrow.

Now who my husband he will be

Pray tell me thou tomorrow!

She could almost hear her mother’s clear, high voice, and it was so hard to think of her lying in the crypt of St James’s Church, dead, cold, and in darkness.

One of her father’s best-selling preparations was Bannister’s Patented Hair Invigorator, but she hated making it because it smelled so rancid. For this, she had to boil up houndstooth leaves in water, with a little oil and salt added, and then mould a poultice with pig fat which she had to buy at Smithfield Market, just up the street. The balding customer was supposed to spread this on his scalp overnight, covered with a hot towel, and wash it off in the morning.

She didn’t like making calomel lotion, either, because the mercury in it stained her fingers black. It was supposed to cure the French disease, or syphilis, but she had seen for herself the effects on those men who had used it for any length of time. Their gums were rotted red-raw, all their teeth had dropped out, and their jawbones were so decayed that they could hardly open their mouths to speak.

All the same, they still came into the shop and begged her father in mumbling voices for more because they believed they were taking too little of it, rather than too much.

*

On the last Monday of the year, Beatrice was rolling out a long pipe of pills when Clement pushed open the outhouse door with a bang that made her jump. He stepped unsteadily inside, bringing with him a gust of icy-cold air. Behind him, snow was falling fast and thick and silent. The walled herb garden was blanketed with snow and Clement had snow melting in his hair and in his beard.

‘Bea, my darling!’ he cried out. ‘Why aren’t you at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

‘Papa – the door! It’s freezing!’

‘What? Oh, yes, I’m sorry! Can’t have my daughter catching her death! My lovely daughter sent by God!’

He came up to the workbench and stood next to her, swaying slightly.

‘Papa, have you been drinking again? I hope you’ve locked up the shop.’

‘What? The shop? Yes, yes, I’ve locked it! Locked it securely! Locked it up tight as a drum!’

‘Perhaps we’d better go into the house. I was going to give you mutton for your dinner, with boiled potatoes and carrots. But you can have bread and cheese if you’d rather.’

She started to rise off her stool, but Clement laid his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her back down.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked her. He frowned at the long rope of dry white paste that she had rolled out on to a blue Delft tile, ready for cutting up.

‘I’m making those carminative pills you asked me for. You said they were urgent, because you’d run out of stock.’

Clement leaned forward and sniffed. ‘Ah, yes. Peppermint and fennel and anise, guaranteed to settle the stormiest of stomachs. Good girl. Blessedly good girl. But you can stop for now.’

‘I thought you needed them in a hurry.’

He tilted his head from side to side as if he had a stiff neck. ‘You’re not at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

‘No, papa. Don’t you remember? You wanted me to stay here and make you some carminative pills and some lung syrup.’

‘Did I? Well, even if I did, you don’t have to. Not any more. You can stop now. You can put aside your pestle and we’ll do something much more amusing instead. Something to make us laugh instead of cry.’

He stared at the workbench for a few long seconds without saying anything, his eyes unfocused. Then he looked back at Beatrice and said, ‘I’m so tired of crying, Bea. I don’t want to cry ever again. I was standing in the shop. I was standing in the shop and that woman came in. What’s her name? She always wears green. She came into the shop and said she needed something for melancholy.

‘I was just about to suggest my tincture of borage when my throat choked up as if I had swallowed thistles and tears began to roll down my cheeks. Right in front of her. She was nonplussed, but I couldn’t stop myself. I thought, this woman is asking
me
how to cure melancholy? Me? When I’m still wracked with grief for your mother.
Wracked
, that’s a strange word, isn’t it, wracked? Wracked, wracked, wracked! But it feels exactly as it sounds.’

‘Papa—’ Beatrice put in, but her father carried on talking as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘She said that her husband had recently passed away and that she had been suffering from deep depression ever since. Do you know what I told her? I told her the truth. I told her that there
is
no cure. I told her that she could drink three bottles of my tincture of borage every day until her face turned green to match her coat and her bonnet. But there is no cure. Not for death, Bea. Not for death.’

Beatrice reached out for him and held both of his hands. ‘Papa, you should come into the house and have something to eat. Your hands are so cold! I could make you a hot drink of chocolate, if you like.’

‘Chocolate?’ he said. ‘What good is chocolate?

Then he stared at Beatrice intently and asked, ‘Why aren’t you at Mrs Chew-chin’s?’

‘You wanted me here, papa. Now come back into the house.’

‘We shall entertain ourselves!’ he said, loudly, like an impresario addressing a theatre audience. ‘Today, we shall make lightning! And smoke that changes colour! Smoke! And fire! Today, we shall tear paper into a thousand pieces and make those thousand pieces dance like a snowstorm! We shall melt pewter spoons into puddles! We shall set off explosions so loud that we will be deaf for a week thereafter! But we shall laugh! And dance! And we shall make ourselves as happy as we ever have been!’

Still holding on to Beatrice’s hands, he performed a slow, shuffling dance, nodding his head and tunelessly humming as he did so.

‘Papa, you need something to eat,’ said Beatrice, tugging her hands free. ‘Come on into the house.’

‘Ah,’ said Clement. ‘Now I remember why I came out here to find you! I’ve run out of gin and I need you to go to The Fortune and buy me another bottle!’

‘Papa, you really don’t need any more! You’ve drunk enough already today.’

Clement opened the outhouse door again and stared out at the snow. The silence was overwhelming. Not only did the snow deaden the sound of carriage wheels, and keep the street peddlers indoors with their rattles and trumpets, but it had stopped the driving of livestock through the streets. It was like London seen in a dream.

‘Bea,’ said her father, ‘I can’t carry on without it. It’s deathly cold in the shop and yet my shirt is drenched with sweat and my hands have been shaking so badly that I can barely measure out a powder. Please, my darling. I know that I shouldn’t, and I promise you that I will start tomorrow with a clean slate and not drink another drop.’

Beatrice blew out the decorative brass lamp she used for heating opium. ‘You have made that promise every day, papa, but still not kept it.’

‘I know, my sweetest one. I know I have. But tomorrow I swear that I will, and every tomorrow thereafter. Today, though, please go to The Fortune and fetch me another bottle. Here—’ he dug into his pocket and produced a sixpenny piece. ‘You might as well fetch me two bottles to save you going out again later.’

‘Papa—’ she said, but still he continued to stare at the snow falling. It blew in through the doorway and curled across the wooden floor.

‘I don’t want to beg, Bea. Please don’t make me beg. But if you won’t do this for me, I fear that I shall die.’

Beatrice stepped out into the snow and closed the outhouse door. Her father took out the key, but his hands were trembling so badly that he was unable to fit it into the keyhole. Beatrice took it from him, locked the door, and handed it back.

‘Don’t tell me that I was sent by God,’ she admonished him, as he was about to open his mouth. ‘If I go to buy you more gin, I was more likely sent by Satan.’

‘You are my angel, Bea. You know that, don’t you? My angel and my saviour. And you look so much like your mother. You could be her, resurrected, risen from the crypt.’

Beatrice was tempted to tell him not to speak like that because it upset her to be constantly reminded that her mother was dead, and it frightened her to think of her coming alive again. She had nightmares about her suddenly appearing in her bedroom doorway, looking the same as she had when she was lying in her coffin in the parlour, her eyes dark and hollow, her hands as shrivelled as chamois gloves that had been left in the rain.

She helped him into the house. He stumbled into the parlour and sat down heavily in his armchair, close to the fireplace, shivering uncontrollably. The cinders in the hearth were still glowing so Beatrice prodded them with the poker, and scooped on more coal from the scuttle.

She knelt down and blew on the fire until a few small flames began to lick up between the coals, but her father opened his eyes and said, ‘What? Haven’t you been to The Fortune yet? Never mind the fire.’