Eliza shrugged, and by all appearances was unconcerned. She didn’t even try to see what I was doing. Either she knew I wasn’t going to do it, or she knew she could easily get more. Or I supposed she might be bluffing. Perhaps it ran in the family. I hesitated. Or maybe Harry was right and the foul-smelling stuff was inconsequential. Hmmm. So many possibilities. There might be a way to tell.

I returned to Eliza and stood before her again. Her eyes were tilted skyward once more, and they did not come down to meet me. “Herbal stuff. Folk medicine, huh? Then I bet it doesn’t have anything more interesting in it than saw palmetto and mud. Maybe I’ll just take a drink of it myself.”

That got her attention, but she didn’t seem sure how to react. She was reluctant to give too much away; she refused to struggle against the bonds or try to call out, but she clearly had something on her mind. She brought her eyes off the ceiling and looked at me again.

“Well?” I held my breath and put the bottle to my lips.

“Urngh—” she grunted. “Urngh urgh.”

I stopped, and pulled the gag out of her mouth with two careful fingers. The rag was soaked with drool and I didn’t want to touch it. “Yes?”

She didn’t start screaming again, which was a relief; in fact, she didn’t say anything at all.

“Well?” I waggled the bottle before her. She blinked, but kept quiet. I’m not sure what I wanted her to say, but whatever my expectations, she disappointed them. “All right then, bottoms up.”

She gasped as I poured a mouthful of the stuff past my teeth.

I would have gasped too if it wouldn’t have meant spewing the brew all over the place. Eliza’s herbal medicine tasted as vile as it smelled. I swallowed with force so quick that it made my throat hurt—but the pain was more tolerable than the taste so I couldn’t complain. The stuff burned going down, boiling all the way to my stomach where it simmered and stewed.

“What on earth is in this shit?” I asked, more as a rhetorical statement than a genuine question.

Despite the limited progress I’d made in Eliza’s interrogation, Harry was not happy. “You shouldn’t have done that. She probably doesn’t know what’s in it any more than I do, and it might be . . . bad for you.”

“Oh, please,” I wiped my tongue around my molars, trying to scrape away the fetid flavor. “Anything a woman her age regularly drinks can’t possibly be that harmful. See? No ill effects. It’s disgusting, but I’m sure it’s harmless.” For emphasis, I threw my head back and took another deep, hearty swallow—this time taking care to plug my nose to dull the assault on my taste buds. To my surprise, this second swill left the bottle close to empty. Hard to believe I’d ingested so much of it. Hard to believe anybody could.