It would be wise for me to take it, so the secrets could sink with me to the bottom of the Thames; the words smeared, the pages dissolved, the truth of this place destroyed. In this way, I could protect the women within the register. Yet to protect them was to erase them. These women were not queens and great heiresses. Rather, they were middling women whose names would not be found in gilded lineage charts. My mother’s legacy embodied the brewing of potions to ease maladies, but it also meant preserving the memory of these women in the register—granting them their single, indelible mark on
...more
