Chapter 3 #3
He walked out. Gwen sat back on the bed and closed her eyes as tears of humiliation burned her cheeks.
The tincture had given Miss Rosewood music, and Mr Rosewood artistic visions.
Yet all it had done for Gwen was show her the staleness of her marriage.
She listened to Archibald clattering below in the bedroom.
Soon he grew quiet. He’d be saying his prayers, which were always longer and considerably more devout than Gwen’s.
Then came the sound of springs as he climbed into bed.
She loitered for another ten minutes before joining him, by which time he was asleep.
She lay beside him, unable to sleep as each of his snores drilled into her head and when the soft chimes of one o’clock struck, she climbed out of bed and went to the kitchen.
She lit a stub of candle, sat at the table and looked around the kitchen, trying to work out what she had done differently.
She closed her eyes, reliving the making, step by step.
The careful weighing of opium and cocaine, the filtering of the liquid.
If she had been sitting at the workbench in the pharmacy, she would have ground the powder in the pestle and mortar there, but being in the kitchen she had used the kitchen one.
She cried out in delight.
She’d been preparing Christmas cakes on the day in question, using her mother’s recipe, and had used the pestle and mortar that she’d been grinding spices in. She knew the recipe off by heart, having helped make it since childhood. She’d used cloves and ginger, nutmeg and allspice.
She consulted the pharmacopeia that lived on the shelf in the pharmacy, then went up to the attic and cross-referenced it with Nain Bevan’s book.
Both the nutmeg and cloves were likely culprits.
On their own, each might have been benign, but together, and combined with the coca leaf and opium, it seemed she had created something quite remarkable.
On Sunday morning Gwen excused herself from attending the morning service, pleading a headache, and Archibald went happily to the church alone.
Once he was safely gone, Gwen gathered the ingredients and attempted to replicate her efforts.
The resulting light brown liquid smelled and looked the same as the first bottle.
Satisfied, she poured it into the green glass bottle and sealed the top with wax.
It was tempting to try a spoonful to see if she had done what she hoped, but she resisted, not wanting to subject herself to another bout of unrequited ardour.
She put the bottle on the shelf in the kitchen along with her baking ingredients, where it could remain until Miss Rosewood could try it.
Archibald returned from the service crotchety and complaining of a headache himself.
He snapped at Gwen when she presented him with a cup of tea, criticising its strength.
She turned to fetch the milk jug and caught sight of the small bottle nestled beside her jars of sugar and vanilla essence.
A daring idea struck her, but it was unethical and she pushed it away.
‘Hurry with the milk, otherwise this will be too cold to warrant drinking even without,’ Archibald snapped. ‘I’ve had to tolerate a bad head while you have lazed around at home.’
Gwen narrowed her eyes and dismissed the little voice of her conscience.
She took a breath and turned back to him with a sweet smile on her lips.
‘You do sound ill, my dear. Let me fetch you a glass of water and a spoonful of headache syrup. You should probably go back to bed rather than attending Evensong.’
She could see him wavering. Archibald attended every church service possible, unlike Gwen, who cared less about worshipping in church. To her mind, God could listen to her wherever she happened to be – if he was minded to listen at all, which she doubted.
‘Please, Archibald. You have such a lot on your mind. One day won’t matter and we can pray together here. It’s such a cold day.’
‘Yes, you’re right. A day of rest will do me good.’
Stealthily, Gwen took down the bottle, relying on Archibald’s poor eyes to make her actions pass unnoticed.
She unsealed the wax and dropped the dose of tincture into his glass before handing it to him.
Sure enough, before too long his face took on a hazy smile and he appeared fascinated by the patterns of ice on the window, tilting his head back and forth to catch the shades of blue and white shining through the fronds and swirls on what was a rare, clear day.
‘Quite beautiful,’ he murmured. ‘What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen. That’s a sonnet, you know. What would the Bard have thought of the marvels of chemistry?’
A thrill raced through Gwen. Her sensible husband quoting Shakespeare! Who would have thought that! Truly the new tincture was a marvel. Before too long, Archibald grew tired of looking at the patterns. He rubbed his fingertips across his eyes and forehead.
‘I do believe my head is feeling a little foggy.’
‘Perhaps a short nap in your armchair?’ Gwen suggested.
Archibald nodded compliantly and made his way to the chair by the fire. He was soon snoring gently. It appeared from his reaction to the frost and his unexpected poetry recital that Gwen had indeed been successful in recreating the tincture.
Elated, she poured herself another cup of tea and sat at the table, staring at the bottle. She had some thinking to do.