All that I’d lost, or all that I hadn’t?

Eliza jumped in my place. A final offering to me, her last breath an effort to fool the authorities and implicate herself as poisoner. How could I possibly throw her gift back into the water to sink alongside her?

As I stood on the bridge and looked east over the River Thames, another person came to mind: Mrs. Amwell, Eliza’s beloved mistress. She would return to her estate in coming days, only to find Eliza...gone. Disappeared. No matter the pretense and feigned grief Mrs. Amwell displayed now at the loss of her husband, once she discovered Eliza missing, the grief would no longer be a ruse. It might haunt her for a lifetime, this belief that the child had abandoned her.

I must tell Mrs. Amwell the truth. I must tell her that Eliza had died. And I must comfort this woman the only way I knew how: a tincture of scutellaria, or skullcap, which would ease the piercing ache of her heart when she learned that little Eliza would write her letters no more.

And so, I turned away from the railing of the bridge, willing the sob in my throat to delay until I was alone—until I was back in my shop of poisons, which I had meant never to see again.

Twenty-two hours had passed since the moment Eliza jumped—an entire night and day, during which I’d prepared and bottled the skullcap I meant to deliver to the Amwell estate—and yet still my hands felt the chill of the empty air as I reached for her. Still I heard the plunge of her body, the sucking of the water as it took her in.

After I left the bridge and returned to 3 Back Alley, I could smell traces of the constable in the storage room—the sweaty, filthy scent of a man snaking about the room, looking for something he would not find. He had not found, either, the new letter in the barley bin. It must have been left only recently, perhaps when I went to the market and Eliza busied herself with her tincture.

I held the letter now in my hands. No scent of lavender or rose wafted up from the paper. The hand was not particularly fine or neat. The woman gave little detail, identifying herself only as a housewife, betrayed by her husband.

This final request, hardly different than the first.

The preparation would be uncomplicated. Indeed, a glass bottle of prussic acid sat within my arm’s reach; I could dispense it with minimal effort in less than a minute’s time. And perhaps this final poison, this last one, would finally grant me the peace I’d sought since my baby fell from my belly at the hand of Frederick.

Healing by way of vengeance.