June 14, 1605 London, England
Beatrix snatches a bird-pecked apple from a fruit cart trundling across St. Paul’s yard and conceals it beneath her cloak. Her stomach growls. She might not starve, but the gnawing pain of an empty stomach hollows her out the same as anyone. Some days, that is reason enough to go hungry.
The cathedral doesn’t look nearly as imposing as it did the first time she laid eyes on it.
It has lost its spire since that night, struck by lightning some forty years ago.
An act of God, they said, proof the people of London needed to mend their ways.
No one has mended anything, as far as Beatrix can tell.
She weaves her way through men selling books she cannot read and scurries up the wide stone steps past beggars she can’t afford to help. She slips through the cathedral’s arched wooden door and pulls the hood of her cloak down, grateful to be out of the damp.
A raucous wave of voices greets her: laughter and curses, shouts and whispers, all tumbling over each other in languages foreign and familiar. The whole place hums with it, like the world’s largest, crudest hive of bees.
Merchants hawk their wares up and down the long central aisle—as if the grandest church Beatrix has ever seen is merely another market—and gossip is traded freely.
News from near and far, lewd jokes, and whispered deals are all exchanged beneath the stone arches edging the walk, and sometimes the men pick up more than gossip from the cathedral hall.
It is the least holy thing Beatrix has ever seen, and her favorite place in all of London.
She takes a bite of her apple and strolls down the aisle, admiring the stained-glass window at the east end of the walk.
The night she first saw it, she couldn’t tear her eyes away.
She thought it looked like a marigold blooming in her mother’s summer garden, except this flower was made of thousands of pieces of colored glass, painstakingly fitted together to make an intricate, perfect whole.
It is the one thing she never tires of seeing.
Unsuspecting Londoners pass her by without a second glance—or even a first—talking and laughing and conducting their business. She assesses their value, tallying a list of marks. With a bit of luck and the coins from last night, she might just get her own bed at the inn tonight.
“Do you seek to save your mortal soul?” A man’s voice echoes off the vaulted ceiling, as if his words were a proclamation from the heavens.
It raises goose bumps across Beatrix’s skin, even in this decidedly unchurch-like church.
She follows the words, finds their speaker tucked beneath an arch at the far end of the walk.
He looks nothing like his booming voice would suggest: a slight, balding man with stooped shoulders and splotched skin.
He stands on an overturned crate, an island in a sea of people paying him no mind.
He gestures grandly to the miniature green glass bottle resting in his palm. “One sip of my elixir will protect your soul from the evils of the world.”
Beatrix chokes on her apple.
“Ah! Might we have a skeptic in our midst?”
She makes the mistake of meeting the man’s shrewd gaze. He straightens as best he can, a predator who has found his prey. She hopes she isn’t that obvious when she spots a mark.
“What’s in your potion?” She leans against a fluted column crowned by carved stone leaves and tries to appear disinterested. She’s sure the man is a liar. Her heartbeat quickens anyway.
He launches eagerly into his speech. “I have crafted this tincture personally from a recipe that was handed down from my great-great-great-grandmother. She used it to protect her family from the unearthly happenings in her village long ago. Tell me, have you heard about the power of iron?”
Beatrix rolls her eyes. Every house in Lancaut had a horseshoe over its door, even hers. Especially hers. “I’m aware.”
“Excellent! That is the first ingredient: three iron horseshoes, forged on Midsummer Eve.”
She brushes her thumb along the smooth edge of the narrow band that sits on her left hand.
It’s nothing like the ring it replaced. It has no oak leaves or acorns engraved on the outside, no Latin inscription on the inside, no sentiment attached to it at all except maybe resentment.
She’s sure the smith thought her mad, to ask for an iron ring in exchange for her gold one.
He weighed her wedding band in his hand, convinced she was trying to cheat him.
He clamped it between his teeth, scrutinized it in the bright morning light with squinting eyes until he was satisfied she wasn’t a crook, only an idiot.
She shoves her hand in her pocket. Horseshoes and iron have proven useless to her, the stuff of old wives’ tales. She turns her attention back to the walk and her potential marks.
The man continues. “Then I soak them in the southerly flow of the River Wye and filter the infusion under the light of a full moon.”
Beatrix tenses, as if she’s bracing for a blow. “The Wye?”
The man smiles at her, oily and gap-toothed, sure he’s caught her now. “Ah, yes, I have traveled far and wide in my efforts.”
She turns back to him. “Where on the Wye?”
He waves a bony hand, dismissing the question like a bothersome fly. “It doesn’t matter. All of it is equally potent.”
“But—”
The man pushes on. “I then add Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow flowers that have been carefully harvested from hallowed ground by the nuns of a nearby abbey.”
“Tintern?”
He continues, louder than before. “And last, but not least, I add a single petal of the rarest of flowers, one that will only bloom where a faerie has breathed their last.”
He pauses, waits for Beatrix to be suitably impressed and hand over her money.
She frowns. Iron and southerly flowing water, Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow flowers, are no cure. Neither are blessings, offerings, or walking any which way around churches of every shape and size and denomination.
The man holds the bottle out to her. The green glass shines almost black in the shadows of the alcove. “What say you, my dear?”
Beatrix has never heard of a flower that only blooms where a faerie has died.
Has never heard of a faerie dying at all.
He probably made it up, along with every word about the Wye and the abbey.
But somewhere inside her, hope has already sparked, has already set her heart racing.
“The flower you collected, you say a faerie died where it grew?”
“Indeed,” the man says gravely.
Beatrix steps closer. The rest of his audience has gone, filtered away now that she is in his grasp. He stinks of smoke and sweat. “How?”
“That, I do not know,” he says. “I have never witnessed it.”
She knew it was too good to be true, but she can’t let the idea go. That is the problem with hope. You cling to it like a raft in a storm, never realizing it is the thing that is drowning you. “Then how did you discover the flower?”
“An inordinate amount of luck,” the man replies. She hates how patronizing he sounds. “And my great-great-great-grandmother’s sketches.”
He has an answer for everything, just not the one Beatrix is searching for. “How does a faerie die?” she presses. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
The man sneers at her. “I’m certain there are lots of things you have never heard of.”
His words glance off her. She has been called far worse than ignorant.
“What about Lancaut? Do you know it?” Had he collected his water from the same bank where she used to stare at her reflection?
Did the nuns from the abbey she was condemned to enter collect his herbs?
Was she the unearthly thing his family needed protection from?
The man shakes his head.
“That’s all right. No one does.” But his words have planted a seed that has already taken root, twisting through her thoughts like a noxious vine.
When Beatrix closes her eyes, she sees Lancaut just as it was the night she fled it.
But time changes things. Takes things. Takes everything, in the end.
Her parents and her sisters, William and their daughter—everyone is buried in the walled cemetery around St. James’s.
It has never occurred to her that St. James’s might be gone, too.
The man’s voice softens, and so does his expression.
“My poor dear, I can see you are most concerned about the welfare of your soul. I notice you even wear a ring of protection. But if your ring was warding off the evils of the world, you wouldn’t be here.
” He says it like he’s solved some great riddle.
In truth, there is only one reason Beatrix still wears the useless ring.
“I’m here to get out of the rain,” she says flatly.
The man steps down from his overturned crate. “You seek an answer. A salve for the sickness in your soul. And I have just the remedy.” He offers her the bottle.
Beatrix folds her arms across her chest. “You’re lying.”
The man flashes her a slick grin. “Am I?”
He must be. But that spark of hope has grown into a flame that refuses to be extinguished by logic, a what-if that has sunk its claws deep and won’t let her go. “How much?”
The man looks into her mismatched eyes, weighs her means against her desperation. “For sixpence, it’s yours.”
Beatrix scoffs. “That’s outrageous. You’ll be drinking your glorified river water yourself if you expect that much.”
The man isn’t deterred. “It’s not outrageous if you’ll pay. It’s business.”
“And what makes you think I’ll pay?” Beatrix asks.
The man smiles. “Because you haven’t left yet.”
He’s right. She has to know. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out all but one of her coins. She hands the man her money. He gives her the tiny green bottle that has dared to make her heart hope.