“Well, as you might suspect, I was not with child for much longer. It happens often, little Eliza, but that does not make it any less terrible. I hope that you never have to experience it.” She pulled her legs up closer to her body and crossed her arms, as though protecting herself from what she was to say next. “It happened very late at night. Frederick meant to leave the city for a week to visit family, so we’d spent the entire evening together. He fixed us supper, helped with the repair of several shelves, read me a poem he’d written...a perfect evening, or so I thought. He left me with a long kiss, promising to return the next week.” Nella shuddered and was silent a moment. “Hours later, the cramping began, and I lost my child. No words can describe the pain. Afterward, I needed nothing so much as the comfort of Frederick’s embrace. In bedridden agony, I waited for the week to pass, repressing my grief until he returned and could help me with the burden of it. But he did not show—not after the second week, nor the third. I began to suspect something terrible, and I thought it very strange that the night I fell ill—the night I lost our girl—was the last night he’d shown his face.

“Frederick was familiar with many of the shelves and drawers at my shop. And as I said, even the most benign remedies may be deadly in great quantity. I checked several bottles against my register, and to my horror, I saw that the motherwort was not at its recorded level. Frederick knew of its properties, since I had dispensed it to his sister, Rissa. I realized, then, that he had used my own tinctures against me. Against our child. We had spent so much time together, and it was not out of the realm of possibility that he had somehow disguised it and tricked me into ingesting it during supper. I felt sure, as the days passed, that the motherwort—meant to remove melancholy and bring joy to a new mother’s soul—had taken the child right from my womb.”

The back of my throat burned and tightened as Nella spoke. I wanted to ask how Frederick managed to deceive her—how he could have rooted through her things, slipped a single drop into her food or drink without her noticing—but I did not want to turn this against her, to make her feel any worse about it than she must already.

“Little Eliza, at last, there was a knock on my door. And who do you think it was that had come to see me?”

“Frederick,” I said, leaning forward.

“No. His sister, Rissa. Except...she was not his sister. She told me, without hesitation, that she was his wife.”