The Apothecary's Daughter Page 38

Quietly, she admitted, “I was thinking about Mary.”

  He nodded, his features pinched as if in sudden pain. “You must despise me, Miss Haswell. For I know I disappointed your friend.”

  He picked up a handful of chalk and pebbles in one hand, and with the other, tossed them as far as he could—not far at all. “I suppose I am a coward. But the thought of becoming attached to any woman, dear though she may be, who might succumb at any moment . . . I could not do it.”

  Do any of us know the number of our days? Lilly thought, but refrained from saying so. She watched as he dusted his hands, unaware that he had gotten chalk on his usually immaculate coat. “I believe I understand, Mr. Shuttleworth, and I know Mary did. But for my part, I would give anything to have a little more time with her, no matter the cost or risk.”

  He looked at her, then away again toward the village. He inhaled a long breath. “You were great friends.”

  “More than friends. Sisters.”

  He lifted his chin. “Ah. I heard the tale, but was not certain I was supposed to know.”

  “I am glad you know. Did you not once tell us we could be sisters?”

  “Yes, angels the both of you. Sisters in spirit.”

  He was right in a sense. She and Mary had been like sisters even before they knew they were related by blood.

  “She was an excellent girl. Truly. I regret I did not tell her so more often.”

  Tears brightened his dark eyes, and Lilly felt answering tears fill her own. Impulsively, she reached over and squeezed his hand. “So do I.”

  He looked down at their clasped hands, then turned his gaze to the canal below. “I should tell you I am leaving Bedsley Priors.”

  Lilly slowly shook her head. Must everybody leave? “I cannot say I am surprised, but I am sorry to hear it.”

  “Are you? Then perhaps you ought to come with me. See more of the world, as you once longed to do. I feel the sea calling to me and must visit her again. Why not come along? There is less to keep you here now, is there not?”

  An incredulous laugh escaped her. “Mr. Shuttleworth! I know you have never concerned yourself with the rules of polite society, but even you must see the impropriety of such a suggestion.”

  He grinned ruefully, and she smiled in return.

  “I do enjoy your company, Mr. Shuttleworth, and will miss it more than you know. But . . .” She sighed. “This is my home. I am at last content here. I wonder,” she asked kindly, “if you shall ever be content anywhere?”

  She spoke from genuine concern and was relieved when he seemed to take no offense.

  “I wonder that as well.” He looked out to the horizon. “But I cannot help thinking I will find it. Someday, somewhere, beyond that hill, or the next. In the next county or the next port. . . .”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “For my part, I would not wish to live always on the move, a few years here and there. Perhaps once, but no longer. I have become quite attached to Bedsley Priors since my London days.”

  “Yes, sometimes we must lose something . . . someone . . . before we realize its worth.”

  She remembered Francis once saying something similar. They were silent several moments, each one thinking of his own losses. Finally she asked, “How soon do you leave?”

  “As soon as I can manage it. I’ve received an offer from the advertisement I placed in the Times. If all goes as planned, I shall be selling out and moving on in no more than a fortnight.”

  She groaned inwardly. Another new medical man to get used to.

  “I daresay your replacement will not realize how fortunate he is with so much less competition now that Haswell’s and Dr. Graves have gone.”

  “Has your father no plans to reopen?”

  “None he will admit to. He is, however, expanding the physic garden. He likes the idea of making a tidy profit on his famous Haswell herbs.”

  Mr. Shuttleworth chuckled. “Perhaps he ought to stay on as a chemist, then.”

  “I think not. Haswells are apothecaries the way we are English. One cannot simply change citizenship at will.”

  Again he chuckled and nodded his understanding.

  For several minutes they stood without speaking. Down on the canal, a narrowboat was slowly making its way under the Honeystreet Bridge. “I remember when I first arrived here and saw you standing on that bridge,” Mr. Shuttleworth said. “One of the three lovely enticements to settle here.”

  She nodded at the memory.

  “Do you know if Miss Robbins enjoys the sea?”

  “Mr. Shuttleworth!” Lilly was incredulous and amused both. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not?”

  “She is daughter of a boat builder,” Lilly allowed.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Lilly thought about Francis. “Mr. Baylor seemed to think a lot of her as well.”

  “Do you think so? He was attentive to her, I own. But nothing to the attention he paid you. In any event, he departed, leaving the field open for me.”

  She shook her head, grinning in spite of herself.

  “You judge me fickle, Miss Haswell? I protest your censure. I have always been completely loyal to whichever one of the three of you I could convince to fall madly in love with me—and did not tend toward seasickness.”

  Nor sickness of any kind, she thought sadly, but did not say so.

  “Now . . .” He rubbed his hands together comically, looking down toward Mill House and the barge yard. “I wonder if Miss Robbins is in the mood for adventure.”

  Still shaking her head, Lilly watched him go.

  Realizing she had lingered far too long, Lilly trotted down the damp, windswept hill to help Mrs. Mimpurse and Jane serve supper. She was enjoying helping at the coffeehouse. For all Mary’s teasing, Lilly had learned to convert from her ingrained apothecaries’ measurements to the standard with less trouble than she would have imagined. Still, many was the time Maude found her bent over the worktable with a frayed quill and scrap of paper, checking her sums. Lilly was still no great cook, but was steadily improving. She took to baking more naturally. She liked the careful measurements required, the level teaspoonfuls of leavening or pounds of fat. Not the “pinch of this and handful of that” mode Mrs. Mimpurse used to throw together stews, soups, and other dishes with such easy flair.

  When she stood in Mary’s place at the old worn worktable, Lilly felt closer to her sister-friend. She took pleasure and comfort in mixing, in kneading, in shaping dough. Not so different from mixing and cutting pills, really.

  Still, she found herself unexpectedly missing the shop. She hadn’t realized how much she had enjoyed knowing how to help people and doing so as confidently as Maude whipped up a suet pudding or pasty. Francis had been right. Lilly even missed the feel of the mortar and pestle in her hands, and when she brought a small one from the shop to use in mixing spices, she saw Maude bite her lip, but the dear woman had not protested.

  Now, as Lilly rounded the corner of the vicarage, she slowed her pace according to long habit. When she reached the coffeehouse and opened its door, she paused as she usually did to inhale deeply of the sweet, familiar aromas. Freshly ground coffee beans, cinnamon, nutmegs, ginger, and cloves.

  Smells like home . . .

  She did not miss the alligator.

  LOVAGE

  A known and much praised remedy.

  —CULPEPER’S COMPLETE HERBAL

  CHAPTER 50

  Lilly remembered it clearly, although it was years ago now. For she remembered everything.

  LShe remembered the day Francis arrived by narrowboat more than seven years before, as a seasick apprentice. She had been standing on the Honeystreet Bridge, as she often did, searching for her mother on every narrowboat that passed by on the canal.

  She stood there now on a warm springtime evening, a fortnight after her meeting with Mr. Shuttleworth atop Grey’s Hill. One last time, she told herself. Once more searching—searching God’s will for the future, searching her memory for ever
y moment spent with Francis Baylor, Mary Mimpurse, her mother—even Roger Bromley and Dr. Graves. Dear ones lost to her. Any day now, Mr. Shuttleworth would join that list.

  She watched as a barge approached from the east, followed by a narrowboat.

  She had given up standing there all those months she had tried to manage her father’s shop. She hadn’t the time for it then. Now it seemed she had a great deal of time.

  Or do I? she wondered. She once thought she had all the time in the world to see the world, enjoy the world. Now she understood what far wiser people had long known—no one is promised the world, nor even the morrow.

  Lilly used to long for travel and adventure far from Bedsley Priors. But death and loss had narrowed her sights. Her telescope no longer focused on the horizon, but rather on what was nearest and dearest to her heart. The rest was just so much water boiled away and gone—it might steam the glass and cloud one’s view for a time, but in the end it vanished, leaving only the purest essence of life behind. Family. Faith. Friends and neighbors. Health. Things Mary would have given her last breath for, and perhaps had.

  Lilly told herself all this, and yet she knew. She knew her heart had never gotten over the loss, the missing of one gone away from her. Should she return to London and begin a new search? No. She must let go. Again.

  The barge passed under the Honeystreet Bridge, its load of coal sinking the vessel low in the canal’s waters. A crewman lifted his hat to Lilly, and she dipped her head in acknowledgment. She knew she should be getting back. Her father and Mrs. Mimpurse were having a few neighbors in for whist and tea—an unofficial end to their mourning—and they were expecting Lilly to join them.

  The narrowboat approached then, painted in shades of muted gold by the slanting rays of sunlight. Lilly saw two figures on its tiller deck. One hand rising in salute.

  She felt a flicker of recognition. Strained forward to better see in the fading light.

  It cannot be. . . .

  But it was.

  Finally, finally, Lilly saw that cherished face, the much-missed and loved person.

  The hand waved. The well-known voice called, “Lilly!”

  Her heart leapt within her.

  It was Francis, coming back to Bedsley Priors.

  Before the boat was even lashed to its moorings, Francis jumped from the deck and scrambled up the bank with no thought to his fine suit of clothes. At the end of the bridge, he stopped and looked at her, his earnest gaze reflecting all the longing she felt.

  Lilly stood there, feeling stunned and oddly rooted where she was, some fifteen or so feet away from him.

  “You can have no idea how much I have missed you,” he said, the angles of his face more defined than ever, his brown eyes large and intense.

  Lilly swallowed. “Have you?”

  “I’ve thought of you every day. Why do you think I wanted so badly to succeed?”

  Breathless, she could only stare at him.

  “I have passed the examinations, Lilly,” he said. “I am a certified apothecary.”

  Her throat was suddenly dry. “Congratulations,” she managed.

  “I am taking over Shuttleworth’s. Did he mention it? He’s let me have it for exceedingly generous terms.”

  “Shuttleworth’s?” Lilly asked, feeling slow-witted. “You’re the new apothecary?”

  Francis nodded. “Though I do not plan to call it Shuttleworth’s any longer. I was thinking . . .” He took a step forward. “That is . . . How does Baylor and Haswell sound?”

  Lilly’s heart, already beating at an alarming rate, felt as though it had taken a shock from the electricity machine. Dragging in a deep, shaky breath, she feigned a casual shrug. “Or Haswell and Baylor.”

  He grinned and opened his arms.

  Lilly ran.

  Francis caught her mid-air and held her tightly against his chest. Slowly, he let her slip down until her feet returned to the bridge. He released her only to cradle her face in his hands. Lilly looked up at him with all the love she felt, and his warm, chocolate eyes seemed to melt into hers. He leaned down as she reached up, and their lips finally met. She leaned into his embrace and together they stood, with no thought to passersby, nor to the canal, nor to a single boat upon it.

  EPILOGUE

  I walked, as I often did, to the churchyard. My brother, Charlie, was not there this time. He was likely off working in the gardens at Marlow House, counting weeds as he plucked them, or ladybird beetles, or emmets crawling about their hill. And I knew he was content in his own way.

  I stood before a headstone, still new, not yet cankered by time and wind and lichen. But in my mind’s eye, I was standing before another grave. Her grave.

  Uncle Elliott had finally sent the letter I had once longed for: We have found your mother. Upon reading those words, I remember thinking that we ought to go to her quickly, before she moved again— again out of reach.

  But Rosamond Haswell was not going anywhere. Ever again.

  When the Elliotts took me “to her,” they took me to a London cemetery. To a plot bearing a temporary cross marker with the name R. H. Wells inscribed.

  Her searching, and mine, was over.

  She died in hospital of consumption, her secrets with her. A scrap of paper with Jonathan Elliott’s name and address was found among her things, and the hospital had sent a message—hoping, no doubt, for payment. Uncle Elliott had been away traveling, but upon his return he had paid what was due and located the gravesite, leaving the temporary marker until he might confer with me.

  I could not protest that she was not buried here in the Bedsley Priors churchyard, when she had so long wanted to escape our village. But I agreed with the Elliotts’ plan to purchase a headstone and have it engraved with her legal name. Rosamond Haswell had disappeared, and Rosamond Haswell had been found. If Rosa Wells wished a pauper’s grave, we would not oblige her. Cemeteries and headstones are for the living, after all. The ones who need a place to mourn and visit and remember.

  We held a brief funeral in London. The service was sparsely attended. Jonathan and Ruth Elliott, Charles and Charlie Haswell, Maude Mimpurse, Francis and I. A small announcement ran in the Times, but no unfamiliar men—men named Quinn or Wells or Dugan—appeared. In the end, it boiled down to blood and love.

  It always did.

  After the funeral, Uncle Elliott led me into the library, pressed something into my palm, and closed my fingers around it, saying only, “I found it among your mother’s things.” When he left me, I opened my hand. My heart lurched at the sight of my name written in a familiar though shaky hand, on a thrice-folded scrap of paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been torn from the corner of a larger piece. The smeared ink words it bore swam before my eyes.

  It is too late to undo what I have done.

  Too late to plead forgiveness, or tell you I love you.

  But I beg you, do not follow my course.

  And please, tell Charlie I am sorry I never returned as I told him I would.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I clutched the paper to my breastbone, and held it there. Only when I held the note aloft once more, tears magnifying my vision, did I recognize the paper itself—the thick, creased paper the color of a tea stain. The curve of a sphere. Torn away . . .

  To think I used to covet her adventurous life. Even wished she had taken me with her. How foolish I had been.

  The memory of my mother’s grave receded, and I focused on the one there before me in the Bedsley Priors churchyard. The large headstone my father had paid a dear sum to purchase and a dearer sum yet to have engraved. So many words and flowers and embellishments have not graced a headstone since the first Lady Marlow’s. We had feared Mrs. Mimpurse might mind our involvement. But she, dear woman, seemed to understand my need to claim kinship and Father’s need for atonement—for though kind to Mary, he had never publicly acknowledged her during her lifetime.

  Now I traced gloved fingers along the grooves of the carved-out dates of my sister’s
life. 1795 to 1815. Far, far too brief. I sank to my knees before the sun-warmed stone. Tears streamed down my face as I again read the words that ushered in such a bittersweet torrent of pain and pleasure and release.

  Here lies

  Mary Helen Mimpurse,

  The Apothecary’s Daughter

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. Francis had come. He offered me his hand and helped me to my feet. In his dear brown eyes I saw love and empathy. He kissed me tenderly and then wrapped his arms around me. For a moment, we stood there, simply remembering. Then together we walked hand in hand back to our shop, back to the endless duties and joys of an apothecary, and his wife.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While most people visit the London Eye or Buckingham Palace, I dragged my long-suffering husband to less-visited places like the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and a museum of pharmacy.

  While other tourists snapped pictures of the changing of the guard, he tirelessly photographed ancient mortars and leech jars. I appreciate his help very much. We did not visit Bedsley Priors, for the village exists only in my imagination, near the real places of Honeystreet and Alton Barnes, Wiltshire.

  I am indebted to John Williams, Beadle of the Apothecaries’ Hall, for his gallant and informative tour and for sharing a history of which he is justifiably proud. He even donned his ceremonial gown covered with golden tassels, which represent the posies that beadles of old pinned on to ward off the odors of the plague years. For fictional purposes, I took a few liberties with the information he gave us. I certainly hope Mr. Williams won’t come after me wearing that gown.

  I am also grateful to Julie Wakefield, Assistant Keeper of the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, who gave us a detailed, fascinating tour through the changing medical treatments from early to modern times. She also took pity on my “poor soldier” husband, offering him a soft chair and a cool drink while I continued my barrage of questions.

  I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends at Bethany House, especially Ann Parrish, Charlene Patterson, Jennifer Parker, and my editors, Karen Schurrer and Jolene Steffer. Deepest thanks to author Beverly Lewis, for her friendship and prayers.