Nella leaned forward and turned to a page riddled with entries from 1763. She ran her hand over the bottom left corner; at one time, a liquid had doused the parchment, leaving many of the entries unreadable. She pushed a quill and inkwell toward me. At her direction, I lifted the pen and began to copy the faint strokes in the book with fresh ink, tracing the remedies—sorrel, balsam, safflower—as carefully as I traced the names of the customers.

“For many of these women,” Nella whispered, “this may be the only place their names are recorded. The only place they will be remembered. It is a promise I made to my mother, to preserve the existence of these women whose names would otherwise be erased from history. The world is not kind to us... There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark.” I finished tracing an entry, moving on to the next one. “But this register preserves them—their names, their memories, their worth.”

It was a harder task than I imagined, this tracing and darkening. Copying words was not the same as writing words; it required me to move very slowly with the curves of someone else’s hand, and I did not feel as proud of my work as I’d hoped. Yet Nella did not seem to mind, and I let my shoulders relax, which made the task go quicker.

Nella turned to a more recent page of entries made just a few months ago. At some point, the pages must have stuck together, damaging several lines of text. I began to trace the first one, reading as I went. 7 Dec 1790, Mr. Bechem, black hellebore, 12 gr. on behalf of his sister, Ms. Allie Bechem.

I gasped, pointing at the word sister.

“I remember that one well,” Nella said as I darkened the letters. “Ms. Bechem’s brother was a greedy man. She discovered a letter—he meant to kill their father in a week’s time, to inherit a great estate.”

“She killed her brother, so he would not kill their father?”

“Precisely. You understand, Eliza, that no good comes of greed. Certainly, no good came of this... Ms. Bechem felt someone would end up dead. The question, then, was who.”

I traced Ms. Bechem’s first name, Allie, making long downward strokes. The quill moved easily over the rough parchment, as though the pen itself knew the importance of this effort, the importance of preserving Ms. Allie Bechem’s name and what she’d done.

Then my eye caught her name again. Just several days later, on December 11, she’d returned to the shop.

“This time, I sold Ms. Bechem nerve-root for her mother,” Nella explained. “The poor woman had just lost her son, and quite unexpectedly at that. Nerve-root is entirely benign, not harmful in any way. It is meant for hysteria.”

“Poor lady. I do hope it worked.”