“Both Tom and I owe our very lives to the magick arts,” she told the reporters, before explaining that long ago, in London, her very own magick blend saved her life. “I was only a child. It was my first tincture, but I risked my life for a special friend, one who still encourages and counsels me to this very day.” Mrs. Pepper then added, “Maybe my youth was to blame, but I had not an ounce of fear when the moment of death presented itself. Indeed, I found the little blue vial of magick to be feverish against my skin, and after swallowing the tincture, the heat of it was so powerful that the frigid depths were a welcome respite.”

The article stated that the reporters questioned her further about this last bit. “The ‘frigid depths’? Do explain, Mrs. Pepper,” one of the men asked. But Eliza only thanked the men for their time and insisted she was needed back inside.

She then reached out her arms on either side of her, taking the hands of her two young children—a boy and a girl, twins, aged four—and disappeared with them into her late husband’s store, the Blackfriars Shoppe of Magick Books & Baubles.

I left the British Library less than an hour after I arrived. The afternoon sun shone hot and bright above me. I bought a bottle of water from a street vendor and settled on a bench in the shade of an elm tree, considering how best to spend the rest of the day. I’d intended to spend the entire afternoon at the library, but I’d found what I was looking for in almost no time at all.

I understood, now, that the apothecary was not the one who jumped from the bridge. It was her young friend, Eliza Fanning. This explained how the apothecary made an entry in the register on the twelfth of February. It was because, contrary to what police believed, the apothecary was not dead. But neither was Eliza; whether on account of her tincture or sheer luck, the girl survived her fall.

But the article about Eliza didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain why the ingredients of the tincture were unknown to the apothecary, or whether the police ever knew of Eliza’s existence. The article didn’t state whether the apothecary subscribed to Eliza’s same beliefs about the efficacy of magic, nor did it expand on the nature of Eliza’s relationship with the apothecary.

And still, I did not know the apothecary’s name.