The Lost Apothecary

by Sarah Penner

In the front pages of my register, the ink was soft, written with a lighter hand, void of grief and resistance.

She’d had no need to hide. The tinctures she dispensed were meant only for good: soothing the raw, tender parts of a new mother, or bringing menses upon a barren wife. Thus, she filled her register pages with the most benign of herbal remedies. They would raise no suspicion.

The discomfort in my joints had crawled through my body for years; it had grown so severe, I lived not a waking hour without pain.

Killing and secret-keeping had done this to me. It had begun to rot me from the inside out, and something inside meant to tear me open.

I longed to be a mother—to kiss those tiny, perfect toes and blow raspberries on the round belly of my baby.

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,

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.

“Well, they wrote all about the mudlarkers—those countless souls scrounging about in the river for something old, something valuable. Might get your shoes a bit wet, but there’s no better way to immerse yourself in the past. Tide comes in, tide goes out, overturning something new each time.

I thought again about Charles Dickens, the author’s name echoing in my ears like that of an ex-boyfriend, fondly forgotten; an interesting guy, but not promising enough for the long haul.

He’d always joked that I “book-clubbed” my way through college reading gothic fairy tales late into the night when, according to him, I should have spent more time analyzing academic journals and developing my own theses about historical and political unrest.

Maybe I would have my head stuck in fairy tales, as James liked to joke, but wouldn’t that still be better than the nightmare in which I now found myself?

I’d always valued my husband’s pragmatism and calculated nature. For much of our marriage, I viewed this as James’s way of keeping me grounded, safe. When I ventured a spontaneous idea—anything falling outside of his predetermined goals and desires—he’d quickly bring me back to earth with his outline of the risks, the downside.

He’d been more concerned with return on investment and risk management than he’d been with my own happiness. And what I’d always considered sensible in James seemed, for the first time, something else: stifling and subtly manipulative.

“Valerian,” I told her, “spiced with cinnamon bark. A few sips to warm the body, a few more to brighten and relax the mind.”

Just because a woman has rid herself of one malady—a devious husband, for instance—does not mean she is immune to all other maladies.

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.

“The hint is to let your subconscious find the anomaly. Our brains are meant to identify breaks in a pattern. We evolved that way, many millions of years ago. You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”

When I was only six or seven

Twenty years ago, my mother developed a cough at the start of the week, a fever by midweek, and was dead by Sunday. Gone in the short span of six days.

we spent more time in the companionship of potions than people.

probably once belonging to a person of little significance, someone whose name wasn’t recorded in a textbook, but whose life was fascinating all the same.

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.

This glass object—delicate and yet still intact, somewhat like myself—was proof that I could be brave, adventurous, and do hard things on my own.

The morning of my departure was a tearful, tense one. My father hated to lose two good hands on the farm; my mother hated the separation from her youngest child. “I feel as though I’m slicing off a piece of my heart,” she sobbed, smoothing out the lap quilt she’d just placed into my case. “But I will not let it doom you to a life like mine.”

voice now replaced with exhilaration. “You must begin where life has slotted you,” she said, gripping my knee, “and move upward from there.

“I mean that you can be anything you want in London,” she replied. “Nothing great awaits you in the farm fields. The fences would have kept you in, as they do the pigs and as they’ve done to me. 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.”

materialize on the screen of my phone. It had been a decade since I’d last done this sort of digging, and I couldn’t help the sudden rush of adrenaline in my chest. To think that Gaynor spent day after day in the British Library with full access to archives like this left me nearly writhing in envy.

And what of the line all they wish’d to see at Bear Alley? The author of the note alluded to a maze, implying she knew the way through. And if there was a maze, it seemed only logical that something valuable—or secretive—would be at the end of it.

She handed me the child, telling me that her name was Beatrice. “Bringer of joy,” she said.

Beatrice calmed and locked her gaze on mine like she meant to see into the depths of me, to peek at my secrets and all that made me ache.

If only she could see what rotted within. If only her little heart could understand the heaviness that had plagued me for two decades, kindling the trail of vengeance that now blazed across London and burdened me with a lifetime of other people’s secrets.

pained his new, delicate skin. It is the most distressing thing, Eliza, to issue pain to someone, even when you know it is for the best.”

My mother did not miss a single treatment—she was not so much as a minute late in brushing the honey onto the baby’s skin for three entire days. She treated the boy as though he were her own.” She closed the register. “The pus dried.

The youthful, adventurous Caroline had begun to come alive again. I thought of my unused history degree, my diploma shoved away in a desk drawer. As a student, I’d been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, those whose names weren’t acknowledged and recorded in textbooks.

I could hardly believe it. This woman, surely an heiress to some great estate, shared something in common with me: we both desired the swelling of our bellies, the little kicks in our wombs. And yet, how lucky she was that her time had not yet passed.

My mother founded the apothecary shop at 3 Back Alley to heal and nurture women, and I would preserve this until the day I died.

“This is the fun of it—the longer and harder we search, the more rewarding it is at the end.” As she continued to try new keywords, I considered the dual meaning of her statement. I was searching for a lost apothecary, yes, but a sense of sadness came over me as I acknowledged what else I sought: resolution to my unstable marriage, my desire to be a mother, my choice of career. Surrounded by a thousand broken pieces, a long and hard search stretched ahead of me, one that would require sifting through the pieces I wanted to keep and the ones I didn’t.

As distraught as I’d been in the last few days, I felt more alive in London—enveloped in an old mystery, an old story—than I could remember feeling in years. I resolved to continue digging. To push through the dark and look inside of it all.

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.” I finished tracing an entry, moving on to the next one. “But this register preserves them—their names, their memories, their worth.”

As I’ve said, a woman does not need to hide behind a wall if she has no secrets and does no wrong.”

then we could hold the truth up like a diamond, set it in front of the light and address the real issue.

I considered sharing my feelings with him, but I didn’t view him as an ally in whom I could confide. He remained an adversary, and I felt protective of the truths I had begun to discover on this trip.

No matter how raw he felt, his feelings were the least of my concerns. My own were still terribly bruised.

The youthful, adventurous student in me had begun to resurface. Like the vial I’d dug out of the mud, I had begun to unbury something dormant inside of myself.

If I was honest with myself, I wondered if looking forward to a baby had been a subconscious way of disguising the truth: that not everything in my life was how I imagined it would be, and that I hadn’t lived up to my own potential. And worst of all, I’d been too scared to even try.

what other dreams had been buried and lost? And why had it taken a life crisis to finally ask myself the question?

“I do not wish you a life of goodbyes, as the one I have lived.”

beginning to seem like every person, every place, carried an untold story with long-buried truths resting just beneath the surface.

I was motivated now by more than opening a door to the building; perhaps I’d be opening the door to a new career path, the one I’d envisioned so long ago.

“The curse of magick, they believe, is that for every reward, there is a great loss. For every spell that goes right, there is something else—in the real, natural world—that goes terribly wrong.”