Chapter 7
I decided to call at the apothecarys shop early the next day, as it was on the road to the weavers houses. Though my stomach was much improveda change I could only attribute to the ale at the Three TunsI calculated that the purchase of Fitchs tonic might be repaid by the garrulous apothecarys store of local gossip. Plenty of people were abroad in the High Street by the time the cathedral bells were striking the hour of eight, carrying baskets or pushing barrows of goods, and most of the shopfronts had their windows open to passersby, but when I reached Fitchs shop I found it still shuttered and the door closed fast. A plump girl in a white coif was peering anxiously in through the windows, her hands cupped around her face. A basket covered with a linen cloth sat on the doorstep.
What time does he open? I said, by way of conversation.
She jumped at being addressed, looking me up and down with apprehension, but then her eyes flicked nervously to the window again. Is he expecting you?
He told me to come back this morning for a remedy he recommended. But I forgot to ask what time he opened.
The girl shook her head. Neat white teeth chewed at her bottom lip. I guessed her to be in her late teens, though she had that freckled, pink-and-white English complexion that made her look younger.
Hes always open before the bells sound for eight. And he especially asked me to stop by good and early as he wanted to send me shopping before I go to work. I do what I can for him since my aunt died last year. Poor Uncle, she added, with a confidential air. I used to help in the shop sometimeshe liked to teach me a little of his businessbut Mother said it was not fit for a girl to learn, so that was an end of that. Now I have to work on the bread stall for Mistress Blunt. She made a face that left no doubt as to her opinion of her current employer.
You must be Rebecca, then, I said, smiling. He spoke of you when I was in the shop yesterday.
The girl blushed and giggled, but the laughter quickly faded on her lips as she turned back to the shuttered windows.
I hope nothings wrong. Its not like him to be late. Ive tried knocking, but theres no reply and I cant see a thing inside. She bit her lip again.
I pressed my face to the nearest window, shading my face as she had done. The shutters were old and it was just possible to glimpse the inner room through chinks and splits in the wood, but the shop was so dim I could barely make out the shape of the shelves lining the walls.
Sometimes he doesnt hear if hes in the back room with the stills all boiling and bubbling, the girl continued, just as something caught my eye inside the shop: a pale shape on the floor. I squinted harder, closing my hands around my face to shut out every slant of daylight, and realised it was a book, lying faceup, its pages spread. It was not the only item on the floor either. Though I could not make out much, it looked as if the contents of the apothecarys shelves had been scattered carelessly around the shop. Apprehension tightened in my chest.
Is there another entrance to the shop? I asked. The words came sharper than I meant and I saw my own anxiety reflected in her face.
There is a yard, at the back, she faltered. It gives on to the back room and my uncles lodging above the shop. But why ?
I think I should check. You wait here.
She nodded, her lips set with fear. I found a small alley running down the side of the shop next door; it led to a narrow lane behind the row of buildings on the High Street, their yards hidden by a brick wall perhaps six feet high. A small wooden gate in the wall proved locked from the inside, but it took little effort to climb and I dropped into the apothecarys yard, one hand on my knife. The door to the back room of the shop was closed, the casements to either side intact. But when I tried the door it opened easily and I saw Fitch sprawled facedown in the room he had used as a distillery, a pool of blood congealed around his head.
I took a deep breath. The room was stiflingly hot, despite the early hour, and ripe with the smell of blood and meat. Flies buzzed purposefully around the body, the sound intrusively loud in the stillness. I crossed the room slowly, absorbing the devastation. My feet crunched across broken glass; there had clearly been a struggle in the room, for the apothecarys glass bottles were smashed across the floor, sticky patches of liquid visible on the boards where their contents had spilled. Blood was spattered across the walls in places, and smeared on the floorboards, as if Fitch had not simply fallen where he lay, but careened around the room spraying blood from his wound before dropping. An iron poker lay discarded a couple of feet from the body; was this the weapon that had struck him down, or had he tried to defend himself with it?
I looked from the poker to the wide brick fireplace and understood the source of the rooms infernal heat: a few embers were still smoking in the hearth. I picked my way through the mess on the floor to take a look. A blackened pot hung over the fire on an iron spit. I picked up a small bellows that lay in the hearth and squeezed it towards the ashes; a faint red glow coughed into life for a moment before fading in a cloud of grey dust. It had been some hours since this fire was stoked; if the apothecary kept it burning in this room to make his infusions, he must have been killed the night before. I wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve, and shook my head, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what I had walked into. I had come to investigate one murder and stumbled by chance upon another; now the law would require me to testify as the first finder of the body, and there could be no pretending otherwise, since the girl was waiting outside for me. But who could have wanted to kill the cheerful apothecary? He had not given the impression yesterday that he was a man with anything to fear.
As I stood staring into the empty hearth, trying to decide how I should proceed, I noticed among the ashes a few scraps of burnt paper. Intrigued, I bent closer and realised that under the charred logs was a mass of blackened paper fragments; someone had clearly thrown a bundle of documents onto the fire not long before it was allowed to die. Most were reduced to ash, but one or two had fluttered to the back of the fireplace and escaped the worst of the flames. Pulling up my shirtsleeve, I reached in and hooked out the truant pages. They were badly burned around the edges, but in the centre some of the writing was still legible, through brown patches left by the heat and smoke. One appeared to be a page torn from the great ledger Fitch had used the day before when he recorded my purchase for his accounts. Almost none of the writing was left visible, though I could make out the line mercury & antimony salts and beside it the name Ezek. Syk
The second surviving page was more interesting; I held it towards the window and tried to make sense of the words I read.
After Paracelsus, it said, at the top, according to his Archidoxes. The next few lines had been rendered obscure by the fire. But beneath, the word laudanum stood out clearly, followed by what looked like instructions for a remedy. Mixed with one part rosemary oil and one part good wine and distilled will bring on the sleep of Morpheus Again the writing disappeared, but below whatever had been scorched away I read the word Belladonna. Underneath, the author had underlined the following sentence twice, so heavily the quill had pierced the paper: No more than eight grains diluted while under the influence, though double may be tolerated by [these next two words were illegible]. Dosis sola facit venenum.
The dose alone makes the poison. I knew this maxim of Paracelsus, the great Swiss alchemist and physician who had died some forty years earlier; he argued that all substances were potentially beneficial, even those we call toxic, and that the art of medicine was in judging the quantity and exposure that would heal rather than kill. But he argued a lot more besides; in his alchemical studies, Paracelsus had been a student of the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian sage whose wisdom I had studied, though in Paris it had earned me a reputation as a sorcerer. Needless to say, the writings of Paracelsus had been forbidden by my order when I was still a monk and I had risked much to track them down and study them. I recalled paying a substantial sum of money to a black-market bookseller in Naples for a copy of the Archidoxes of Magic, a treatise on medicine and alchemy that drew on the movements of the planets and the secrets of astrology. It was not a work I would have expected to find in the shop of a provincial apothecary, but perhaps there was more to Fitch than had been apparent in his breezy, village-gossip manner.
Nothing more could be made out; I turned the paper over but it offered no further clues. In the silence of the room I could hear the blood pounding in my ears as I struggled to make sense of the fragment. Holding it between my fingers as if it might crumble to dust at any moment, I forced my eyes back to the body on the floor.
There was no need to move Fitch to see that his skull had been staved in, though the face and neck were also badly battered, suggesting his assailant had not felled him with the first blow. His limbs had already stiffened into grotesque contortions, one arm thrown forward next to the face. Crouching beside him, I closed my eyes for a moment and laid my fingertips on the sleeve of his shirt, hard and crusted with dried blood, as a mark of respect, trying to imagine the scene that must have ensued not long after I had bid him goodbye with a promise to return in the morning for his tonic. The killing seemed the frenzied work of a madmanFitch must have been chased around his distillery, desperately trying to fight off his attackerbut the burnt pages in the fireplace suggested something different. Who had thrown them into the flames? Fitch, to prevent someone from seeing them, or whoever had struck him down?
My thoughts were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. I had forgotten the girl, Rebecca, waiting outside. Now I stepped carefully around the dead apothecary and through the narrow doorway into the shop. This room too was in a state of chaos, as I had seen through the shutters; books had been pulled from shelves and lay scattered about, and an earthenware jar, knocked to the ground, had broken to spill its contentsa pungent yellow powderacross the reeds that covered the stone floor. Empty spaces gaped on a number of the shelves where objects had evidently been hastily removed and not replaced.
The knock came again and I heard the girl calling, Hello? Crossing to the front door, I found it locked, with the key still in the keyhole. Whoever had killed Fitch must have left through the back, then. But the door had not been forced; the apothecary must have opened it to his attacker. As I turned the key, my hand froze and my breath caught in my throat as I recalled the physician Sykes in his absurd plague mask, thundering in and demanding that Fitch lock up the shop to give him private audience.
Uncle William? the girl asked from the other side of the door, her voice doubtful. I pulled it open just a fraction; as soon as she saw me, her lip trembled. Where is he?
You must go for a constable right away, I said, keeping my voice low. A couple of goodwives with covered baskets had stopped in the street behind the girl and were watching the door with lively curiosity. Dont stop to speak to anyonejust bring him as fast as you can. Do you know where to find one?
I want to see my uncle! What has happened? She planted herself stubbornly on the threshold, her voice loud enough to attract further attention from passersby. I motioned with a finger against my lip.
Im afraid your uncle has met with an accident.
Oh, God! She pressed her hands to her cheeks and set up a wail that threatened to rouse the whole street.
Pleaseyou must fetch a constable. Perhaps the urgency in my voice lent it some authority; she stopped her noise abruptly, looked at me uncertainly for a moment, and nodded. Bring him around the back, I added, giving one sharp look to the staring women before closing the shop door and locking it again. Nothing draws a crowd like a violent death, and I felt the dead man deserved better than to be made into a spectacle for gawping market-goers.
In the gloom, I bent to look at one of the books that had been thrown onto the floor. It was a volume of A New Herbal by William Turner, dog-eared and clearly well-used by a reader who had meticulously annotated and illustrated the margins of almost every page. Squinting, I held up the fragment of paper I had rescued from the embers against the book; the hand was the same as that of the notes scribbled on the pages, which it seemed reasonable to assume was that of Fitch himself. So the papers in the fire, with their curious reference to Paracelsus, had been written by the apothecarybut why had they been thrown into the flames? Without quite knowing why, I folded the charred paper and tucked it into the purse I carried at my belt.
The smell of dead meat by now was almost overpowering; I decided to wait for the constable outside the back door. Still I found it hard to tear my eyes from the corpse. I had looked on violent death many times in my life, especially in the past couple of years, yet it never ceased to chill me, the fragility of our bodies, the way a life can be snuffed out quicker than a candle. Presently the sound of brisk footsteps interrupted this reverie, followed by a rap at the gate in the back wall. I hurried to open the latch and found myself face-to-face with the ginger-haired man whom I had noticed in the marketplace by the cathedral gate the previous evening. He narrowed his eyes as if trying to place me, stroking his pointed beard, then waved me aside.
Carey Edmonton, constable of this parish. An accident, the girl said?
I didnt want to alarm her. This was no accidentthe apothecary has been murdered in his distillery.
The constable simply stared, as if he had not understood.
Murder? How do you know?
Take a look.
He continued to regard me a moment longer, as if he was not certain whether to believe me, before asserting himself by brushing past and in through the open doorway, where he stopped abruptly as if slapped, gagging on the smell.
What in Gods name has happened here? he whispered, almost to himself, his words muffled by the sleeve he pressed to his mouth. He took a step back and turned to me again, as if expecting me to make sense of the sight before him.
He was beaten to death, but it seems he put up a brave fight before he was felled. The street door was locked from the inside, but this back door was open, though the gate from the yard to the alleyway was padlocked from the inside.
Edmonton took his hand slowly from his mouth and stepped back into the yard, frowning as if noticing me properly for the first time.
How did you get in, then? And who the Devil are you to be poking around?
My name is Filippo Savolino. I came as a customeryesterday Master Fitch had promised me a remedy. I found the girl outside, anxious because she could get no reply, so I offered to see what was wrong. When I couldnt open the gate, I climbed the wall.