The Lost Apothecary

by Sarah Penner

A decade ago, in college, I’d graduated with a degree in British history. I’d passed my coursework with decent grades, but I’d always been most interested in what lay outside the textbooks. The dry, formulaic chapters simply didn’t interest me as much as the musty, antiquated albums stored in the archives of old buildings, or the digitized images of faded ephemera—playbills, census records, passenger manifest lists—I found online. I could lose myself for hours in these seemingly meaningless documents, while my classmates met at coffee shops to study. I couldn’t attribute my unconventional interests to anything specific, I only knew that classroom debates about civil revolution and power-hungry world leaders left me yawning. To me, the allure of history lay in the minutiae of life long ago, the untold secrets of ordinary people.

My mother had held tight to this principle, instilling in me from an early age the importance of providing a safe haven—a place of healing—for women.

Indeed, there existed little doubt that someday, I would preserve my mother’s shop and carry on her legacy of goodwill to women.

This was precisely what I found so enchanting about history: centuries might separate me from whomever last held the vial, but we shared in the exact sensation of its cool glass between our fingers. It felt as though the universe, in her strange and nonsensical way, meant to reach out to me, to remind me of the enthusiasm I once had for the trifling bits of bygone eras, if only I could look beneath the dirt that had accumulated over time.

But in London? Well, in time, if you are clever about it, you can wield your own power like a magician. In a city so grand, even a poor girl can transform into whatever she desires to be.”

She then pointed at several of the shorter words—she, cart, plum—and explained how each letter made its own sound, and how words strung together on paper could convey an idea, a story. Like magick, I thought. It was everywhere, if only one knew to look.

As I said it, I could have cried out; my womb had never felt so hollow, so void. I wished I could have said the same thing to my own lost child—that her mother and father loved her very much—but

“This is the fun of it—the longer and harder we search, the more rewarding it is at the end.”

“For many of these women,” Nella whispered, “this may be the only place their names are recorded. The only place they will be remembered. It is a promise I made to my mother, to preserve the existence of these women whose names would otherwise be erased from history. The world is not kind to us... There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark.”

“First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.”

Everything placed unto the body removes something from it, calls it forth or represses it.

But these sorts of questions—especially those about the subtle, mysterious interactions between two women—would likely not be found in old newspapers or documents. History doesn’t record the intricacies of women’s relationships with one another; they’re not to be uncovered.