In truth, I saw much of my own childhood self in her—the wide-eyed curiosity about something novel, something that most other children don’t get to experience—though that part of me felt a thousand years dead. The difference was that I had first seen the contents of this shop—the vials and scales and stone weights—at a much younger age than twelve. My mother introduced them to me as soon as I had the ability to lift and sort objects, to distinguish one from another, to order and rearrange.

When I was only six or seven and my attention span was fleeting, my mother taught me simple, easy things, like colors: the vials of blue and black oil must stay on this shelf, and the red and yellow on that shelf. As I entered adolescence and became more skilled, more discerning, the tasks grew in difficulty. She might, for instance, dump an entire jar of hops onto the table, spread out the dry, bitter cones and ask me to rearrange them according to complexion. As I worked, my mother would toil beside me with her tinctures and brews, explaining to me the difference between scruples and drachms, gallipots and cauldrons.

These were my playthings. Whereas other children amused themselves with blocks and sticks and cards in muddy alleyways, I spent my entire childhood in this very room. I came to know the color, consistency and flavor of hundreds of ingredients. I studied the great herbalists and memorized the Latin names within the pharmacopoeias. Indeed, there existed little doubt that someday, I would preserve my mother’s shop and carry on her legacy of goodwill to women.

I never intended to stain that legacy—to leave it twisted and tarnished.

“Eggs,” Eliza whispered, jolting me from my reverie. She looked up at me, confused. “You have a chicken that lays poisonous eggs?”

Despite the seriousness of my meeting with Eliza, I could not help but laugh. It was a perfectly logical thing for a child to say, and I leaned back in my chair. “No, not quite.” I lifted one of the eggs, showed it to her and returned it to the dish. “You see here, if we look at these four eggs together, can you tell me which two are the largest?”

Eliza furrowed her brow, bent down until the table was level with her eyes and studied the eggs for several seconds. Then abruptly she sat up, a proud look on her face, and pointed. “These two,” she declared.

“Good.” I nodded. “The larger two. You must remember that. The larger two, they are the poisonous ones.”

“The large ones,” she repeated. She took a sip of her tea. “But how?”