James lay still next to me, his breaths slow and even, while I sat in the chair by the head of his hospital bed. The article rested in my lap. After reading it a moment ago, I could only lean forward and put my head in my hands. Though I didn’t know her name—I knew the woman only as the apothecary—her self-chosen death tugged at me, uncomfortable in the way of a slow-building headache.

Of course, she lived two hundred years ago; I’d known from the first moment I learned of her that she was no longer alive. The shock was how she died.

Maybe it was that I’d been to the River Thames, where the woman jumped, and I could picture the whole event in my mind. Or maybe it was that I’d been inside the apothecary’s hidden shop, the discreet and shadowy place where she lived and breathed and mixed her potions, however menacing they were, and so I felt a sense of solitary connection to her.

With my eyes closed, I imagined the events set out in the second article: the family and friends of previous victims—those who died before Lord Clarence—coming forward after seeing the first article, bringing with them their own vials and jars, all of them bearing the same logo of the little bear.

The police understanding, at once, that they were hunting a serial killer.

The mapmakers enlisted late in the night; every instance of B ley in the city turned over, inspected, considered.

The three officers descending on Bear Alley on the eleventh of February, their arrival so abrupt that a woman began to run and did not stop until she was standing at the top of Blackfriars Bridge.

The article mentioned Back Alley, too, albeit briefly. After the woman began to run, the third and most junior officer remained in the area to inspect the door from which he thought the woman had come. It was the door at 3 Back Alley. But upon entering the room, he found only an old storage cellar: a wooden bin of rotted grain and empty shelves at the far end of the room, but little else.

This place, I knew, was the very same in which I’d stood last night—the room with the crumbling shelves at the back. It served as the apothecary’s cover, her facade, akin to the mask one might hold over their face at a masquerade. Meanwhile, behind the room lay the truth: the shop of poisons. And though the two-hundred-year-old article assured the public that police would continue to dig until they uncovered her name and place of work, the untouched space I found last night told me that they never did. The apothecary’s facade had been resolute.