There was something poignant, too, about young Eliza’s involvement. Shrouded in mystery was the role she played in the apothecary’s life and death; she’d only revealed to the papers that she’d risked her life for a special friend, one who still counseled her to that day. Did this mean the apothecary lived another decade and had left London to join Eliza in Brighton? Or had Eliza been referring to something else—the apothecary’s ghost, perhaps?

I would never know.

Perhaps I would glean more information about these missing details, someday, when I began my research work and returned to the shop with a proper light and a team of historians or other academics. Undoubtedly, a wealth of unexplored possibility existed inside that tiny room. But these sorts of questions—especially those about the subtle, mysterious interactions between two women—would likely not be found in old newspapers or documents. History doesn’t record the intricacies of women’s relationships with one another; they’re not to be uncovered.

As I sat underneath the elm tree, the soft twitter of larks somewhere above me, I mused on the fact that after learning the truth about Eliza, I hadn’t gone back upstairs to tell Gaynor. I hadn’t told her the name of the person who really jumped from the bridge on February 11, 1791, and lived to see another day. To Gaynor’s knowledge, it was the apothecary who jumped from the bridge and committed suicide.

It wasn’t that I felt the need to hide this fact from Gaynor, so much as I felt a protectiveness over Eliza’s story. And even though I meant to further explore the apothecary’s shop and her lifetime of work, I intended to keep Eliza to myself—my lone secret.

Sharing the truth—that Eliza, not the apothecary, jumped from the bridge—could very likely catapult my dissertation work to the front page of academic journals, but I didn’t want the renown. Eliza had been only a child, but like me, she’d found herself at a turning point in her life. And like me, she’d gripped the light blue vial between her fingers, hovered above the frigid, unwelcome depths...and then she’d jumped.