Tomorrow would come soon enough, and then I would find a way to try my hand at this thing they called magick. I tucked the book beneath my head and used it as a makeshift pillow. And as I fell asleep, I could not help but fall into an easy dream of the boy who’d given it to me.

23

Nella

February 11, 1791

If the poisons I dispensed, and the deaths they subsequently caused, were indeed rotting me from the inside out, then I felt sure the death of Lord Clarence hastened the decay. Was it possible the consequence upon me increased with the renown of the victim?

It was of only some significance that the Lady Clarence returned the damnable jar, for the immediate crisis of the gallows was averted, but the slow rotting within me did not cease. A thick, bloody trickle in my throat had plagued me the last day, and while I would have liked to blame it on the late nights in the beetle field, I feared something worse: that whatever plagued my bones and skull had moved into my lungs.

Oh, how I cursed the day that Lady Clarence dropped her rose-scented letter into the barley bin! And how maddening that none of my own concoctions could resolve this. I hadn’t the name of the disease, much less the remedy for it.

I could not sit in my shop another moment, turning to stone, and I needed a block of lard besides. And although I had not the heart to send Eliza away immediately after Lady Clarence’s visit, the next morning I had no choice. As I prepared to depart for the market, I told Eliza, once and for all, that it was time for her to leave.

She asked me how long I planned to be gone. “No more than an hour,” I said, and she begged me to let her rest another thirty minutes, claiming a deep ache in her head on account of yesterday’s anxieties. Admittedly, I suffered a bad headache myself, and so I gave her an oil of herb prunella to rub into her temples and told her she could rest her eyes just a few minutes more. We said goodbye, and she assured me she would be gone by the time I returned.