Placing my hands in my lap, I shook my head. “Little Eliza, let me make it very clear—this is not magick. These are not spells and incantations. These are earthly things, as real as the smudge of dust there on your cheek.” I licked the pad of my thumb, bent forward and ran it across her cheek. Satisfied, I sat back in my chair. “Magick and disguise may achieve the same end, but I assure you, they are very different things.” A look of confusion crossed her face. “Do you know the meaning of disguise?” I added.

She shook her head, shrugged one shoulder.

I motioned to the hidden door through which Eliza had come. “When you came into the storage room this morning on the other side of where we sit now, did you know that I watched you from a tiny hole set into the wall?” I pointed to the entrance of my hidden room.

“No,” she said. “I had no idea you were back here. When I first came in and found it empty, I thought you would come in off the alley, behind me. I would very much like one of these hidden rooms in a house someday.”

I tilted my head toward her. “Well, if you have something to hide, you very well might need to build yourself a hidden room.”

“Has it been here always?”

“No. When I was a child and worked here with my mother, there was no need for this room. We did not have poisons back then.”

The girl frowned. “You have not always sold poisons?”

“Not always, no.” Though there was little sense in sharing the details with young Eliza, the admission unfurled a painful memory.

Twenty years ago, my mother developed a cough at the start of the week, a fever by midweek, and was dead by Sunday. Gone in the short span of six days. At the age of twenty-one, I had lost my only family, my only friend, my great teacher. My mother’s work had become my work, and our tinctures were all I knew about the world. I wished, at the time, that I had died with her.

I could hardly keep the shop afloat, such was the sea of grief pulling me under. I couldn’t call on my father, having never known him. Decades ago, as a boatman, he’d lived in London several months—just long enough to seduce my mother—before his crew set sail again. I had no siblings, few friends to speak of. The life of an apothecary is a strange, solitary one. The very nature of my mother’s business meant we spent more time in the companionship of potions than people. After she left me, I believed my heart had fractured, and I feared my mother’s legacy—and the shop—would also meet their demise.