I wonder where Father has gone, this time. Someone must be very ill to keep him away from home so long. Father is not a doctor, nor is he a “butcher” (that is what he calls the surgeons). But high born or low, when the people of Northumberland are sick, they send for Thomas Luxton. On the rare times when Father has let me go to market day and walk through the crowds, with my cloak pulled close around my face (he does not wish me to speak to anyone, for he says they will try to trick me into revealing secrets about his work), I hear the things they say:

“You’re better off with Luxton than those university-trained doctors, with their ointments that blister the flesh, and their buckets to fill with your blood.”

“Doctors! Tell ‘em you’ve got a sore toe and they’ll take a hacksaw to your leg!”

“Luxton may be an odd duck, but at least he doesn’t burn you and bleed you and stick you all over with leeches. Luxton follows the old ways, the lost ways…”

“… the witches ways” some of them might add in a fearful whisper.

But Father would scorn the very notion of witchcraft. People call him an apothecary, but he considers himself a man of science, and a “humble gardener,” as he likes to say. By that he means that he grows all the plants he needs to make his medicines right here, in the garden beds that surround our stone cottage. He grows other plants, too, in a separate walled garden behind a tall, black iron gate. The gate is held shut by a heavy chain, fastened with a lock that is bigger than my fist.

When I was small, Father warned me morning and evening never to approach the locked garden, until I was so afraid I couldn’t sleep without dreaming of snakes chasing me. The snakes’ bodies were links of thick metal chain, and their gaping jaws clicked open and shut like a lock, catching at my heels no matter how fast I ran. Finally I asked Father: “Why would anyone grow bad plants that have to be locked up behind walls? Why not only grow the good ones, and let the bad ones wither and die?”

“Plants are part of nature; they are neither good nor bad,” he replied, drawing me to his knee. “It is the purpose we put them to that matters. The same plant that can sicken and kill an innocent girl like you can, if mixed in the right proportions, make a medicine that saves a young man from typhoid or cures a baby of the measles.”

“But why do you keep some plants apart, then?” I demanded to know.