“Nella, listen to me,” I pleaded. “You cannot stay. Remember the night when you helped me with the beetles? Somehow, you drew together your strength. Do it now, please!” Then I was struck by an idea. “We can go to the Amwells’ until we determine what to do next. It is the perfect place. No one will bother us there.” So long as Nella was with me, I felt I could stand to be inside the home while waiting for the tincture to finish curing. Mr. Amwell’s spirit would not harm me with her so close, would it?

“Easy, child,” Nella replied, putting a handful of resin pills into her mouth. “I do not intend to stay here.” She pushed the jar of frankincense aside. “I know where I am going, and I was about to leave, anyhow. But you mustn’t come with me. I will go alone.”

If my agreement was what she needed, she had it. I smiled at her and helped her with her coat. As I did so, I was reminded of my first visit to the shop, only a week before. How much had happened in recent days, and none of it good. I remembered sitting at the chair across from her, hesitant to drink the valerian hot brew, while Mr. Amwell and Lord Clarence were still alive and ignorant of the plans laid out before them. I remembered, too, my second visit—pleased with the success of the poisoned eggs but plagued with a new terror and crouching forward in pain as my belly bled.

At once, a memory struck me. “Nella, after we harvested the beetles and you told me about Frederick, you said that if you’d bled again, you might have stopped this long ago.”

Nella looked sharply away, as though my question had just struck the side of her face. “Yes,” she said between clenched teeth. “Perhaps I would have. But you are too young to understand what I meant, so you may forget I said it at all.”

“When will I be old enough to understand?”

“There is no set age,” she said, checking the buttons on her coat. “When your womb is ready to carry a baby, you will begin to bleed, once each month as the moon makes her route across the sky. It is a passage, child. Into maturity.”

I frowned. As the moon makes her route across the sky. Didn’t Mrs. Amwell say something similar on the night I began to bleed, the night we killed her husband? “How long does the bleeding last?” I asked.

Nella looked at me strangely, her eyes narrowed, as though reconsidering me. “Three or four days, sometimes more.” She lowered her voice. “Did your mother, or Mrs. Amwell, never tell you any of this?”

I shook my head.

“Are you bleeding now, child?” she asked.