opinions and he found himself pulling back against his guide. Who only gripped him tighter, towing him like a small horse pulling a boat along a towpath.
The house was utterly silent. They crossed a large, beamed kitchen, where the outline of a sleeping cat showed beside the banked fire. The dwarf let go of Charles to open a door and soft light spilled across the worn stone floor of the kitchen.
“In here.”
“After you.”
“What do you think I am going to do, my dear young man, lock you in?”
Thinking exactly that, Charles waited out of reach. With a shrug, the little man disappeared through the door. Charles followed cautiously and found himself in a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling, perhaps a storeroom when the old house was built. Candles burned on a low wooden table and flickered in sconces, picking out the signs of the zodiac painted on the windowless plastered walls. The apothecary was an alchemist, then, which probably explained the stink of sulfur. It was a common enough combining of crafts. The dwarf tied an apron over his black jerkin and breeches and glanced into a trio of crucibles bubbling on trivets in the small fireplace. He blew more life into the coals with a pair of bellows and plucked a pair of spectacles from the littered the table.
“So talk to me,” he said.
“What poisons do you sell?”
“The ones everyone sells. Look for yourself.”
As though his visitor no longer concerned him, the dwarf blew out the candles on the table and picked up a small clay pot. Charles started slowly around the room, looking for aconite. Between the zodiacal paintings, wooden shelves overflowed with brown, green, and clear glass bottles and beakers, stoppered clay pots, and brightly glazed jars. The contents of the jars were written in their glazes. “Aethiopis Mineralis,” Charles read on a yellow and green one, and remembered his mother telling him it was black sulphide of mercury, good for constipation, toothache, melancholy, and childbirth. Another jar held “Laudanum,” opium in wine, God’s gift for easing pain. There was “Elixir Salutis,” a stomach purge, as he knew to his sorrow. And “Ens of Venus,” “Salt of Sylvie,” “Crocus Saturn,” “Bezoar Orientalis,” “Aqua Tofani.” He stopped. “Aqua Tofani,” arsenious oxide, was an Italian poison. Infallibly deadly, as of course it would be, since-as everyone knew-Italians were the world’s arch-poisoners.
“You sell Aqua Tofani?” Charles said.
The dwarf looked up from whatever he was doing to a sliver of wood. The narrow circles of horn that held the lenses of his spectacles made him look like an irritated owl.
“A little of something, that’s medicine. Too much, that’s poison.”
“And what would you sell ‘a little’ Aqua Tofani for?” Charles said acidly.
“A little rat.”
“Of course.” Charles bent to peer at a squat round jar of clear glass with muslin tied over its top and stepped quickly back. Leeches. He stared in frustration at a blue glazed jar with “Vanilla” blazoned on it, thinking that if he tried to read every label, he would be here till morning. Following his gaze, the dwarf said, “Oh, now I see. You want a love potion and are too embarrassed to say so.”
Charles’s eyebrows rose. “Vanilla?”
“A fine aphrodisiac, yes. Very popular with priests.”
“I am not yet a priest,” Charles said dryly. And thought, I definitely do not need an aphrodisiac. The contrary, if anything.
He finished his circuit of the room, past a stack of firewood, a huddle of small unlabeled barrels standing oddly in the middle of the room, and a tier of shelves crammed with books, including the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s Sphinx Mystagoga, in Latin with Egyptian hieroglyphs. He came back to the little fireplace.
“When I was here before,” he began, but a brilliant flash of light and a harsh stink of sulfur sent him cowering back against the wall.
“When you were here before, what?” the dwarf said, as though nothing had happened.
“What in the name of all hell’s devils did you just do?” Fear made Charles’s words sharp with anger.
The apothecary turned, holding up another sliver of wood. “You see this common match,” he said, assuming a lecturer’s tone. “A piece of wood with a little sulfur on the end to make it light when you hold it to a flame.” He held up a piece of paper. “On this paper, I have smeared phosphorus. From that jar. An Englishman has found that this phosphorus burns as soon as it touches sulfur, so that the match lights instantly. And burns brighter. If I draw the unlit sulphur-tipped match through the phosphorus-treated paper-”
He did and produced another small burst of fire. He extinguished the burning sliver in a bucket of water beside the table and tipped the jar toward Charles. It was full of an eerie white light that made Charles hurriedly cross himself.
“Phosphorus, not demons,” the dwarf laughed. “I made the stuff myself.”
“How?” Charles said, fascinated in spite of himself, but still unsettled by the glow. “Is it poison?”
“It looks like it should be, doesn’t it? Would you believe I made it from piss? An ungodly lot of piss, you have no idea. Long, nasty process. My books say piss will eventually produce gold. They’re wrong, it produces fire. Think about that the next time you’re watering a wall.”
“Monsieur-” Charles walked around the table and faced the apothecary. He suddenly realized he didn’t know the man’s name. “What are you called?”
“Called? I am called Monsieur Riviere.”
“Well, Monsieur Riviere, a man died this afternoon at the college of Louis le Grand. I think he died from poison you sold. The day I came asking about sugar, a woman came in as I left. A young woman. She wore a black veil and gown, but with a rose-colored petticoat under it. You greeted her as though you knew her. Who is she?”
The dwarf was carefully examining his pieces of wood and sorting them by size. “Do I remember everyone who comes through my door? And their petticoats?”
“You are required by law to keep a register, with the names of all who buy poison and the reason they give for buying it. You are also required to sell poison only to people you know.”
“And why should you think this rose-petticoated woman bought poison? Are you certain you do not wish a love potion, my beautiful cleric?”
“Are you certain you do not want me to return with Lieutenant-General La Reynie?”
The apothecary sighed and took off his spectacles. “Always such a fuss about death,” he murmured, rubbing his eyes. “So much death, always, and no one gets used to it. Isn’t death the only way to your heaven? You’d think-”
Your heaven? Charles decided he didn’t have time for whatever that meant. “I heard you greet her, monsieur, you know her. Give me her name.” He stepped closer, forcing the little man to crane his neck back and look nearly straight up. “If you can’t remember, go and get your register. If you keep a register.”
The dwarf moved away and rubbed his neck. “I think you mean Mademoiselle La Salle.” His deep brown eyes were full of the sadness Charles remembered from his first visit. “She is a servant in the Place Royale.”
“The Place Royale? You’re sure?”
“The silly chit brags about it. She makes it sound as though the close stools are solid gold and her mistress shits rubies. She goes on about how high and great and rich the woman is, and says that soon she will be rich, too.”
“Who is her mistress? Which house is it?”
The apothecary shrugged. “She told me once that she watched a duel in the Place from her window. But I suppose you could do that from any of those houses.”
“Did she buy aconite?”
“She often buys it. Her mistress uses it to make a salve to ease backache, the girl says. I make the same salve myself, it’s a perfectly good reason for buying aconite. Dangerous to handle, but I tell them how to be careful. Now may I see you out and get back to my work?”
Charles’s inheld anger flared like the phosphorus match. “By all means, monsieur. And as you get on with your work, pray for the soul of Maitre Doissin. Dead from your aconite. Which wasn’t even meant for him. Mademoiselle La Salle meant it for an eight-year-old child.”
He left the dwarf standing there and felt his way through the dark house. Behind him, the dwarf’s voice rose in a strange, minor-keyed lament, sad enough to mourn all the world’s dead, past and to come. Charles shivered as
