Sacrilege

Chapter 7

I decided to call at the apothecary’s shop early the next day, as it was on the road to the weavers’ houses. Though my stomach was much improved—a change I could only attribute to the ale at the Three Tuns—I calculated that the purchase of Fitch’s tonic might be repaid by the garrulous apothecary’s store of local gossip. Plenty of people were abroad in the High Street by the time the cathedral bells were striking the hour of eight, carrying baskets or pushing barrows of goods, and most of the shopfronts had their windows open to passersby, but when I reached Fitch’s shop I found it still shuttered and the door closed fast. A plump girl in a white coif was peering anxiously in through the windows, her hands cupped around her face. A basket covered with a linen cloth sat on the doorstep.

“What time does he open?” I said, by way of conversation.

She jumped at being addressed, looking me up and down with apprehension, but then her eyes flicked nervously to the window again. “Is he expecting you?”

“He told me to come back this morning for a remedy he recommended. But I forgot to ask what time he opened.”

The girl shook her head. Neat white teeth chewed at her bottom lip. I guessed her to be in her late teens, though she had that freckled, pink-and-white English complexion that made her look younger.

“He’s always open before the bells sound for eight. And he especially asked me to stop by good and early as he wanted to send me shopping before I go to work. I do what I can for him since my aunt died last year. Poor Uncle,” she added, with a confidential air. “I used to help in the shop sometimes—he liked to teach me a little of his business—but Mother said it was not fit for a girl to learn, so that was an end of that. Now I have to work on the bread stall for Mistress Blunt.” She made a face that left no doubt as to her opinion of her current employer.

“You must be Rebecca, then,” I said, smiling. “He spoke of you when I was in the shop yesterday.”

The girl blushed and giggled, but the laughter quickly faded on her lips as she turned back to the shuttered windows.

“I hope nothing’s wrong. It’s not like him to be late. I’ve tried knocking, but there’s no reply and I can’t see a thing inside.” She bit her lip again.

I pressed my face to the nearest window, shading my face as she had done. The shutters were old and it was just possible to glimpse the inner room through chinks and splits in the wood, but the shop was so dim I could barely make out the shape of the shelves lining the walls.

“Sometimes he doesn’t hear if he’s in the back room with the stills all boiling and bubbling,” the girl continued, just as something caught my eye inside the shop: a pale shape on the floor. I squinted harder, closing my hands around my face to shut out every slant of daylight, and realised it was a book, lying faceup, its pages spread. It was not the only item on the floor either. Though I could not make out much, it looked as if the contents of the apothecary’s shelves had been scattered carelessly around the shop. Apprehension tightened in my chest.

“Is there another entrance to the shop?” I asked. The words came sharper than I meant and I saw my own anxiety reflected in her face.

“There is a yard, at the back,” she faltered. “It gives on to the back room and my uncle’s lodging above the shop. But why …?”

“I think I should check. You wait here.”

She nodded, her lips set with fear. I found a small alley running down the side of the shop next door; it led to a narrow lane behind the row of buildings on the High Street, their yards hidden by a brick wall perhaps six feet high. A small wooden gate in the wall proved locked from the inside, but it took little effort to climb and I dropped into the apothecary’s yard, one hand on my knife. The door to the back room of the shop was closed, the casements to either side intact. But when I tried the door it opened easily and I saw Fitch sprawled facedown in the room he had used as a distillery, a pool of blood congealed around his head.

I took a deep breath. The room was stiflingly hot, despite the early hour, and ripe with the smell of blood and meat. Flies buzzed purposefully around the body, the sound intrusively loud in the stillness. I crossed the room slowly, absorbing the devastation. My feet crunched across broken glass; there had clearly been a struggle in the room, for the apothecary’s glass bottles were smashed across the floor, sticky patches of liquid visible on the boards where their contents had spilled. Blood was spattered across the walls in places, and smeared on the floorboards, as if Fitch had not simply fallen where he lay, but careened around the room spraying blood from his wound before dropping. An iron poker lay discarded a couple of feet from the body; was this the weapon that had struck him down, or had he tried to defend himself with it?

I looked from the poker to the wide brick fireplace and understood the source of the room’s infernal heat: a few embers were still smoking in the hearth. I picked my way through the mess on the floor to take a look. A blackened pot hung over the fire on an iron spit. I picked up a small bellows that lay in the hearth and squeezed it towards the ashes; a faint red glow coughed into life for a moment before fading in a cloud of grey dust. It had been some hours since this fire was stoked; if the apothecary kept it burning in this room to make his infusions, he must have been killed the night before. I wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve, and shook my head, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of what I had walked into. I had come to investigate one murder and stumbled by chance upon another; now the law would require me to testify as the first finder of the body, and there could be no pretending otherwise, since the girl was waiting outside for me. But who could have wanted to kill the cheerful apothecary? He had not given the impression yesterday that he was a man with anything to fear.

As I stood staring into the empty hearth, trying to decide how I should proceed, I noticed among the ashes a few scraps of burnt paper. Intrigued, I bent closer and realised that under the charred logs was a mass of blackened paper fragments; someone had clearly thrown a bundle of documents onto the fire not long before it was allowed to die. Most were reduced to ash, but one or two had fluttered to the back of the fireplace and escaped the worst of the flames. Pulling up my shirtsleeve, I reached in and hooked out the truant pages. They were badly burned around the edges, but in the centre some of the writing was still legible, through brown patches left by the heat and smoke. One appeared to be a page torn from the great ledger Fitch had used the day before when he recorded my purchase for his accounts. Almost none of the writing was left visible, though I could make out the line “mercury & antimony salts …” and beside it the name “Ezek. Syk …”

The second surviving page was more interesting; I held it towards the window and tried to make sense of the words I read.

“After Paracelsus,” it said, at the top, “according to his Archidoxes.” The next few lines had been rendered obscure by the fire. But beneath, the word “laudanum” stood out clearly, followed by what looked like instructions for a remedy. “Mixed with one part rosemary oil and one part good wine and distilled will bring on the sleep of Morpheus …” Again the writing disappeared, but below whatever had been scorched away I read the word “Belladonna.” Underneath, the author had underlined the following sentence twice, so heavily the quill had pierced the paper: “No more than eight grains diluted while under the influence, though double may be tolerated by… [these next two words were illegible]. Dosis sola facit venenum.”

The dose alone makes the poison. I knew this maxim of Paracelsus, the great Swiss alchemist and physician who had died some forty years earlier; he argued that all substances were potentially beneficial, even those we call toxic, and that the art of medicine was in judging the quantity and exposure that would heal rather than kill. But he argued a lot more besides; in his alchemical studies, Paracelsus had been a student of the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian sage whose wisdom I had studied, though in Paris it had earned me a reputation as a sorcerer. Needless to say, the writings of Paracelsus had been forbidden by my order when I was still a monk and I had risked much to track them down and study them. I recalled paying a substantial sum of money to a black-market bookseller in Naples for a copy of the Archidoxes of Magic, a treatise on medicine and alchemy that drew on the movements of the planets and the secrets of astrology. It was not a work I would have expected to find in the shop of a provincial apothecary, but perhaps there was more to Fitch than had been apparent in his breezy, village-gossip manner.

Nothing more could be made out; I turned the paper over but it offered no further clues. In the silence of the room I could hear the blood pounding in my ears as I struggled to make sense of the fragment. Holding it between my fingers as if it might crumble to dust at any moment, I forced my eyes back to the body on the floor.

There was no need to move Fitch to see that his skull had been staved in, though the face and neck were also badly battered, suggesting his assailant had not felled him with the first blow. His limbs had already stiffened