The Poison Diaries (2 page)

Father often says he wishes they had torn down the chapel and left the monk’s library standing instead, but I like our home just as it is, a long, rectangular structure made of rough-hewn blocks of stone. Long ago Father divided the interior into rooms. My bedchamber is small and up a long flight of stairs, in the old bell tower. On the main floor is a bedchamber for Father, a study in which he does his work, and a front parlor where we take our meals. It is where I write my garden diary, too, at the end of each day’s labors.

Of all these rooms, the parlor is the largest, and the one that still looks most like a church. There is a high, vaulted ceiling, and tall arched windows that Father says once had stained-glass pictures in them. Now they are filled with thick, plain glass that is divided into many small panes. On sunny days the light slants through the panes and makes narrow, glowing path
ways across the dark wood planks of the floor.

I used to play hopscotch with those paths of light when I was small—
if I leap over the light without touching it, Mama will live,
I would say to myself.
But if my foot touches the light she will die.

My foot never, ever touched the light—to this day I will swear it—but Mama died anyway.

Oh, how I wept! I was only four, so perhaps the outburst can be forgiven. But I remember how Father’s voice stayed calm.

“That is the way of things,” he explained to me at the time. “All creatures die when their time comes. No matter what we do, or how we may feel about it, nature always gets her prize in the end.”

Father is always so strong and wise. Sometimes I wish I were more like him. I wish I could accept that the way fate has arranged things is both right and good, and that living here alone with him, sewing and cooking and tending the garden, and perhaps, when I am old enough
—perhaps,
in my mind I can hear him say it!—learning to help him with his work, as I am
beginning to do now with the belladonna seeds, is exactly the way my life was intended to be.

But, other times, the scent of bread baking, a remembered, loving smile, or an especially lonely winter night, with no one to sing me to sleep, leaves me weeping in secret for Mama, and filled with a kind of fury I cannot name.

It happens less often as the years go by, though.

F
ROM THE TOWER WINDOW
in my bedchamber I can see quite a distance: over the crumbling stone wall
that encloses the courtyard and cottage, past the quilt pattern of farmers’ fields marked by hedgerows, to the narrow path that snakes through the hills to the main crossroads where the four directions meet.

Down the road to the south is the town of Alnwick, where the duke’s castle stands guard over Northumberland. To the north, the Cheviot Hills and Scotland. The westbound road will carry travelers to Newcastle, if they are not murdered by highwaymen along the way. To the east lies the sea.

If I happen to be looking out of my window when Father returns, I will be able to see him coming two miles away, a lone, stoop-shouldered figure walking from the crossroads down the winding footpath that cuts across the sheep fields.

Even when the need for his services is urgent, Father prefers to walk. He likes to stop and examine whatever grows by the side of the road. There he might find a rare type of wildflower that he covets for our garden beds, or some creeping plant whose properties are unfamiliar to him, or a strange mushroom growing
on the back of a rotted stump.

Many times he will return home from a journey with his satchel full of specimens. I always offer to sketch them for his plant notebooks. These notebooks fill many shelves in his study, but none of them contain the formulas for his medicines. That information is secret. The recipes for making his tinctures and tisanes, oils and ointments, smudge pots and poultices are recorded in a leather-bound volume he keeps in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. I have only seen it once, years ago, and then only because I walked in on him while he was writing in it—a mistake I have not made since—

I burst in without knocking and stood in the doorway to his study, a breathless, saucer-eyed girl with mudspattered legs and a five-legged frog cupped in my hand.

“Look, Father! I found it in a puddle at the foot of the wall, that great stone wall that hides the ‘pothecary garden! I ran straight back to show you. Have you ever seen such a freakish creature? Will it live? Should it live?”

As soon as he saw me he shoved the book away,
locked the drawer, and pocketed the key.

“Set it free, Jessamine.” His eyes stayed fixed on his desk as if they would bore two holes in it. “The frog’s destiny is no business of yours.”

Now there are two men in the distance, but neither of them is Father. One is too short, and the other is too fat. They are the Wesleyan preachers, a loudmouthed pair from one of the nonconformist sects. They used to come to the door now and then, in their long coats and strange hats, saying, “The end of the world is nigh!”

I find them funny, to be truthful. “The end of the world”—what a notion! As if there were anything to be done about that. Surely it would be better not to know.

I do not think the preachers will pay a call today, though. The last time they came, Father spoke to them very harshly. “That it will someday be the year eighteen hundred, rather than seventeen what-you-please, is a simple mathematical fact of the Gregorian
calendar. It is a new century, not a harbinger of doom!” he bellowed. “Take your superstitions, and be gone!”

They have not knocked on our door since.

I watch through the window as the two figures disappear into the valley at the foot of one hill and reappear a short time later, as the path rises over the slope of the next. But there is no Father, not yet.

I awaken in Father’s chair, the one in the parlor nearest the hearth. I had not meant to fall asleep, but an hour’s sewing made me close my eyes to rest them. Now the cloud-veiled sun is low in the sky, and the skirt with the torn hem that I was in the midst of mending has slipped from my lap to the dirty floor.

Father is not home. Could some misfortune have befallen him? It makes my chest tighten to think of it, like a heavy rope has been coiled around my body and pulled hard, until I can barely breathe.

If something happened to Father, then I would truly be alone.

I would be alone with the cottage that once was a chapel, and the gardens, and the ruins, and whatever ghosts of dead monks still wander the fields. I might never have cause to speak aloud again.

Unless I left. I could leave, I suppose, if something happened to Father.

Why not? I could leave Hulne Abbey to crumble and the gardens to grow wild. Someday, after many seasons of snow and rain, the iron lock that seals the great black gate to the apothecary garden would rust and break open. The heavy chain would slip to the ground, and all the deadly plants would be loosed upon the world—

This is all more foolishness. I am used to being alone, and it is ridiculous to mind it. Father is fine, I know it. He is too clever and strong to let anything bad happen to him. And I have plenty of work to occupy me and keep my thoughts from straying into dark corners. I check my list:

I will turn over the empty garden beds and prepare them for planting.

I will spread a fresh layer of mulch over the strawberry patch.

I will cut back last year’s dead growth on all the kitchen herbs, right to the ground, so the new sprouts will have sun and room to grow.

Good health to Father,
I think nervously.
A quick recovery to his patient, whomever it may be. A safe and speedy return to the cottage.

But it occurs to me: Perhaps there is no one sick. Perhaps Father is at Alnwick, at the castle library, lost in his research and the workings of his own mind, and that is why he has not thought to send word to me. Perhaps he has finally found the mysterious books he has sought for so long, among the duke’s many ancient and dusty volumes—the ones he believes may have been rescued from the hospital of the old monastery, before the soldiers came to burn what would burn and smash the rest.

Do these volumes even exist? Father believes they do. He believes passionately and without proof, the way other men believe in God. He often talks of these
books in the evenings in our parlor, a glass of absinthe and water in his hand. When he speaks of them, his speech quickens and his eyes flash.

“The monastery hospital was famous throughout Europe,” he begins, as if I had not heard this tale from birth. “The monks’ power to heal the sick was so great that the people called them miracle workers, and sometimes even saints.” Then he laughs. “Anyone could be such a saint, if they had access to the same information as those long-dead holy men! Someone must have saved the volumes that contain all the monks’ wisdom. It would have been madness not to.”

He sips his green, licorice-scented drink and continues in this vein until the fire dies and my head nods forward on my chest.

Sometimes I think Father’s hunger to know what the monks knew is a madness all its own. Once, long ago, I watched him dig up a ten-foot square in a distant field to twice the depth of his spade. He planted nothing, but visited the place daily for weeks, to see if
anything unusual had sprouted in the freshly turned earth.

“Did you think your shovel might wake the bones of all those dead monks, until they rise and tell you their secrets?” I joked nervously as I watched him sift through the dirt with his fingers.

“The monks may be dead, but their medicines still lie sleeping in the ground.” There was an edge to his voice. “Hidden deep in the cold, dark earth, a seed can be nearly immortal. Even after so many years, if exposed once more to the light and air and rain, there is a chance some long-forgotten plant of great power may yet reveal itself.”

I had meant only to tease, but instead I seem to have stirred Father’s anger, for he kept muttering furiously to himself: “But what of it? Any discovery I make will be useless, unless I can learn the specimen’s properties, its uses, its dangers….”

“No one knows more about plants than you do, Father,” I said, to calm him.

He climbed to his feet, dirt clinging to his knees.

All at once he was shouting. “Compared to the monks I know nothing! I dig blindly to rediscover what they took as common sense. The formulae all burned, the wisdom of centuries in ashes…. To kill such knowledge is itself murder—it is worse than murder—”

Father raged on. I stopped listening and let his voice turn to a wordless buzz, a hornet floating near my ear. All I could think was,
But how could a puny seed be immortal, when it was so easy for Mama to die?

Wait, I hear someone at the door—it must be Father home at last—

I
TRY TO BUSY MYSELF
with chores. I practice sketching, though I can find nothing of interest to sketch: a kettle, a chair, a ball of yarn.

After lunch I can stand it no longer. The fire is still in embers, so I am quickly able to rekindle it and put on a kettle of water for tea. As soon as the tea is ready, I set it on a tray and proceed to Father’s study.

Before I knock, I peer through the keyhole. What I see only fills me with more questions. Father paces around the room and mutters like a wild thing, grabbing volumes from the shelves and throwing them down again. His heavy leather-bound book of formulas, the one he keeps locked in a drawer, lies open on his desk. Now and then he comes back to the book and leafs through the pages, looking for something that he clearly cannot find.

I take a deep breath to calm myself and knock on the great wooden door.

“Father? I brought you some tea.”

Silence. Then:

“I did not ask for tea, Jessamine.”

“I want to speak to you.”

A thud, as of a large book slammed shut. The bang of a drawer closing, the click of a lock. Father opens the door, the small gold key still in his hand.

“Speak, then. I am busy; I am sure you can deduce that from the state of my desk.” He looks down at the tray. “What type of tea is it?”

“Lemon balm. Made with leaves that I saved from last summer and dried in the storeroom.” I lift the tray higher, so he can catch the scent. “It is very soothing.”

“Lemon balm tea,” he echoes as I make my way past him and place the tray on his desk. The dark wood is pocked and crisscrossed with grooves from a few centuries’ worth of scribbling pens. “Such a simple, harmless drink. Made by your own sweet hands, I presume?”

“Of course.” I hand him the cup. Lemon-scented
steam rises between us. As he sips I gather my courage to ask, “where were you, Father?”

“In my study, obviously. I have been in here all day.”

“I mean yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that.”

He turns away. “I was where my services were required; that is all you need to know.”

“That is not an answer.” I too can be stubbor–I am my father’s daughter, after all. “I was left here alone for three days. surely it is only fair that I know why.”