‘Mrs Fowler. If you follow me or my sister again, I will bring down the heavens upon your head.’
‘My goodness. Are you threatening me, Mrs Fitzgerald?’
‘Are you threatening me, Mrs Fowler?’
This has gone wrong. Clovis had intended to use their shared secrets to strike up a conversation – not to threaten or be threatened. Her desire is to cultivate an acquaintanceship with the wealthy widows. Her miscalculation be damned; she must salvage it.
‘I apologize wholeheartedly.’ Clovis lowers her eyes as if she is hurt. ‘I have no intention of revealing your secret. I followed you only to seek a moment to speak to you without raising suspicion at your home, or mine.’
‘Mrs Fowler, if you are as innocent as you say, why must you “not raise suspicion”, as you put it?’
Clovis hesitates, annoyed that this has not gone her way.
‘I will not trouble you further.’
Clovis makes a sweeping turn and saunters off, her skirts brushing against the tombstones. She holds her head high and curses under her breath.
Dettu niður dauður gömul kona.
Drop dead, old woman.
The midwife covers the expectant mother’s eyes against the light of the Aurora to ease the pain of birth. Every fire in the settlement is lit to discourage supernatural interference. The midwife carries two delivery stones, wrapped in the hair of a virgin, to guarantee good health to mother and child.
His arrival is met with great joy and great sadness.
The law that requires the baby to be baptized in a church within seven days of birth is broken. This baby, born under a shroud of secrecy from the loins of the mother who has been changed, is taken to the Watcher before his journey across the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1832
The tollhouse on the Commercial Road bulges today with the dock hauliers’ heavy carts that form ruts in the setts on the street. The taverns heave with freemasons, press gangs and lonely sailors, all hungry for gossip and a game of backgammon. Yet within this Sailortown, on this edge of the river where men seem so dominant a fixture, a remarkable number of women are found in a variety of trades. Nuzzled securely in this coterie of middling sort of women, Nora Mockett pins her focus outside the apothecary with a keen eye trained on the shop’s window.
Her husband has recently refilled the great, bulbous show globes with his mercurial solutions. Shaped like giant eggs, they hang from brass chains emitting their chemical glow. One displays the colour of a dark, glistening emerald, the other is filled with deep-red liquid, as rich in hue as a claret. There can be no better announcement, and few newcomers to the neighbourhood would doubt that Mockett’s Apothecary is a modern and fully stocked establishment.
With finger to her chin, Mrs Mockett contemplates adding one or two potion bottles, or perhaps a collection of blue-and-white Faience novelties to tempt the ladies. She is stirred from her musings when she spots in the distance what is possibly the figure of Clovis Fowler and that of her servant, the odd young girl with the restless eyes – though her own eyes may be deceiving her. Nora strains and squints with a distance vision that is annoyingly blurred.
It is very simple. Nora Mockett does not trust Mrs Fowler. More than that, she loses her focus in the young woman’s presence. She cannot think what to say, or what to do, and her hard-won confidence evaporates like the smoke of her husband’s experiments. She fumbles with the door, rattles it, pounds on it until Owen Mockett comes running to help her.
‘What is it?’ He is just a bit impatient.
‘The door sticks, tell the boy to repair it. We mustn’t fall, Owen. We mustn’t fall. And Clovis Fowler walks this way. There is something strange in her appearance.’
‘All right, all right. Do calm yourself.’
Nora tidies the rows of opium pills she had helped prepare earlier this morning for the Saturday evening crowds who will lay down their money and receive the boxes without uttering a word. It really is a miracle cure for all the most common ailments. And oh heavens – the profit.
The shop’s porcelain jars and glass bottles are completely free of dust, yet while Mrs Mockett waits for Mrs Fowler to arrive she runs a cloth down a line of vessels with nervous anticipation. Nora recalls her father’s prejudices of ginger-haired people, especially women. His belief that the reds possess character faults was biblical. ‘Poison,’ he’d said.
When the door finally opens and Clovis Fowler enters the apothecary, Nora understands why Mrs Fowler’s figure appeared foreign from a distance. She digs her nails into her fists. Faced once again with what she has been denied, she will remember this day and the precise hour when her path turns sour and wrong, when what begins as a small, hurtful jealousy grows into an appalling cancer. Poison.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Fowler.’ Nora composes herself even as the words stick in her throat.
Upon witnessing the utter surprise on Nora Mockett’s face, it is not difficult for Clovis to summon the contented smile of a luxuriating cat.
The condition that must be concealed as long as possible has been visited upon Mrs Fowler. Nora quickly calculates that Clovis must be at least six months gone, for no woman could be absolutely certain for the first five months. This she knows too well. How brazen of the Fowler woman to appear in public like this. Whatever can she be thinking? This is it you see, Nora thinks, this is where the foreigner in her comes to the fore. Uncouth.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Mockett.’ Clovis makes no further effort at conversation, but instead waits to be served.
‘How may I help you today?’ Nora manages.
‘Ah. Well. You may very well ask!’ Another smile. ‘I will require several
