Chapter 9 — Beatrice
Sage
BEATRICE
Two months into her stay, I open the still room to her on a Tuesday, and I tell myself this is simply a matter of necessity.
The crisis tincture is running low — three drops under the tongue, the kind of preparation that must always be in ready supply, because the women who need it rarely have the luxury of waiting a week while I brew a fresh batch — and the work is more than I can comfortably manage alone this week, with the spring cuttings also demanding attention and a letter from Vivienne promising a visit within the fortnight that will require the house to be in a state I have not yet achieved.
I need another pair of hands. Eliza has been asking, in the careful way she asks for things, whether there is anything useful she might do besides sit in the greenhouse in the evenings.
This is, I tell myself, simply an efficient solution to two separate problems.
I do not examine this reasoning any further than that. I have found, over the past several weeks, that certain reasoning is better left unexamined.
The still room is smaller than the greenhouse, and warmer, and considerably more private — I have shown it, in ten years, to perhaps a dozen people outside my own household, and every one of those visits was strictly professional, a matter of the society’s business rather than anything resembling company.
Eliza stands in the doorway for a moment when I bring her in, taking in the shelves of dried herbs, the mortar and pestle worn smooth with use, the small locked cabinet in the corner that she has clearly noticed before, from the corridor, and never asked about.
“This is where the real work happens,” I tell her, which is truer than I mean it to sound.
The room smells different from the greenhouse — sharper, drier, the green growing scent of living things replaced by something closer to a chemist’s shop, resin and crushed root and the particular bitterness of valerian that never quite leaves a person’s hands once they have worked with it for long enough.
I have grown used to it. I forget, until I watch Eliza’s face when she first breathes it in, that it is not a smell most people find pleasant.
“You don’t mind it,” I say, watching her.
“I don’t mind anything that means something,” she says, which is not quite an answer to what I asked, and which I find myself thinking about for longer than the remark seems to warrant.
She is, as I expected her to be, a quick study.
I walk her through the crisis tincture first — valerian, skullcap, a careful proportion of passionflower, reduced slowly over a low flame until it reaches the particular clouded amber that tells me it is ready.
I explain what each component does and why the proportions matter, and she listens with the same total attention she has given everything since she arrived, asking questions only when a question will actually move her understanding forward, never simply to fill a silence.
“And this one,” I say, moving to a second preparation already begun, “is the fever tincture. It mimics the symptoms closely enough that a doctor examining the patient will find exactly what he expects to find — the heat, the particular pallor, a pulse that runs faster than it ought to. It buys a woman time. A doctor’s certificate saying she cannot travel, cannot receive visitors, cannot be closely examined by anyone sent to establish that she is fit to sign away her own inheritance.
It has moved more women out of dangerous households than any other single preparation I make. ”
“And the calming compound,” Eliza says. “The one you mentioned, that night in the library.”
“Steadies the hands,” I say. “Enough that a woman can sign a document under enormous pressure without her signature betraying how afraid she is. I have watched a solicitor’s clerk study a signature for evidence of duress.
A steady hand tells him nothing is wrong, whatever is actually happening in the room. ”
“Who is it for?” Eliza asks. “This batch.”
I do not usually answer that question. I answer it now.
“A Mrs. Radley, in Hampshire. Her husband’s brother has spent four months persuading a physician that she is not competent to manage the annuity her father left her, and he has very nearly succeeded.
She sits down with a solicitor on the twenty-second.
She has asked for enough that her hands will not shake in front of him and nothing further — she was quite specific about the nothing further. ”
“Will she know it came from you?”
“She will be told a preparation arrived. That is the whole of the arrangement.” I set the bottle down. “It is the part of the work I have never found a way to explain to anyone who has not needed it.”
Eliza is quiet for a moment. “She asked for the smallest possible thing,” she says.
“They almost always do.”
I show her the dosing, the small graduated glass I use to measure it precisely enough that the effect is reliable without being so strong as to cloud a woman’s judgment when she most needs it clear.
Too little, and the hands still shake. Too much, and the mind goes soft along with them, and a soft mind can be talked into signing something it should not.
The measure has to be exact. I have spent years arriving at it, adjusting by the smallest fractions, testing on myself more than once in the early days before I trusted it enough to send it out into the world in someone else’s hands.
“You tested it on yourself,” Eliza says. It is not quite a question.
“Someone had to,” I say. “I was not going to ask it of anyone whose hands I had not already trusted my own life to.”
She looks at me for a moment in a way that tells me she has understood exactly what I have not said outright — that there was no one else, in those early years, whose hands I trusted at all, myself included, most days.
She is quiet for a moment, turning a jar of dried skullcap over in her hands, reading the label though she cannot yet fully understand the notation. “The letter,” she says. “The white bryony. You said the name was used incorrectly.”
“Bryonia dioica,” I say. “White bryony. It is not a remedy of any kind — it is a poison, violent and fast enough that no one who has ever handled it would mistake it for something gentle. Whoever wrote that letter used the phrase syrup of white bryony, arranged for remedy as though it were an ordinary household preparation.”
“Why does the error matter so much? Beyond telling you he isn’t a botanist.”
It is a good question, and I find myself glad she has asked it rather than simply accepting the conclusion I already gave her.
“Because it tells us where his information came from,” I say.
“A solicitor investigating the society would have access to certain things — estate accounts, apothecary records, perhaps intercepted correspondence. If he encountered a code term for one of our preparations somewhere in those records, and repeated it in his own letter, he would have repeated it exactly as he found it, unless he tried to sound more knowledgeable than he actually is. This error is the second kind. Someone tried to elaborate on what he had, and elaborated wrong. That tells me he is filling gaps in his knowledge with guesses, not with genuine understanding — which means the actual sum of what he knows is very likely smaller than the letter makes it appear.”
She considers this, and I watch her consider it, the particular stillness that comes over her when she is turning a piece of information over from every side before she accepts it.
“So he is more dangerous for what he might convince others he knows,” she says slowly, “than for what he actually knows himself.”
I did not put it in quite those words, even to myself, though I recognize immediately that she is correct, more precisely correct than my own explanation had managed to be. “Yes,” I say. “That is exactly it.”
She asks one more question — a technical one, about how long the crisis tincture keeps once bottled — and then she is quiet, watching me work the last of the mixture through a fine cloth, and the still room is warm enough, and small enough, that I am aware of her in a way I do not entirely have a name for: the particular rhythm of her breathing, quickening slightly when she is working something out in her head, slowing again once she has settled it.
I have never noticed anyone’s breathing before.
I am not certain when I began noticing hers, only that I have apparently been doing it for some time now, the way one notices a clock ticking in a room only once someone points it out, and then can never quite stop hearing it again.
Vivienne’s letter is somewhere upstairs on my desk, promising a visit within the fortnight, and I ought to be thinking about what state the house needs to be in for it, what accounts need settling, what the decoy letter’s progress requires me to report.
I find, instead, that I am thinking about the particular set of Eliza’s shoulders when she concentrates, and the small furrow that appears between her brows when a question has not yet resolved itself to her satisfaction, and I have to remind myself, twice, what I was in the middle of measuring.
I catalog this fact, the way I catalog everything, and I set it aside to be examined later, at some point I do not specify even to myself, when I am prepared to look at it directly.
I am beginning to understand, working beside her in this small warm room that I have shown to almost no one in ten years, that teaching has always been the nearest thing I have to intimacy — the transfer of what I know, offered plainly, without performance, to someone I trust enough to get it right.
I have not offered this to anyone in a very long time.
I am not at all certain what it means that I am offering it now, so readily, to a woman who arrived at my door with a trunk and a letter less than two months ago.
I tell myself it is simply efficient. I have told myself a great many things lately that do not survive close inspection, and I am beginning to suspect this is one of them.
When the last bottle is filled and labeled and set on the shelf to cool, Eliza helps me clean the worktable without being asked, wiping down the marble surface with the particular care she brings to everything, and I find myself watching her hands rather than the table, and thinking that I have shown a great many people how this work is done, and taught almost none of them anything that mattered beyond the mechanics of it.
I have shown her both, in a single afternoon, without quite deciding to, and I do not know yet what that is going to cost either of us.