The Poison Diaries Read online

  BY Maryrose Wood

  BASED ON A CONCEPT BY

  THE Duchess of Northumberland

  For Jane

  and her wonderful gardens

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  15th March

  Gray skies; the rain came and went all morning. A cold wind blew in gusts, worsening as the day went on, until the lowest branch of the great chestnut tree in the courtyard splintered down the middle and crashed to the ground. If I had been standing underneath, I would have been crushed.

  Spun wool after breakfast. Read for a short while, but my eyes ached too much from sewing to continue long. Changed the soaking water for the belladonna seeds.

  Father is still not home; it has been two days.

  THE BERRIES OF THE BELLADONNA PLANT are beautiful. I have always thought so. I would string the plump black pearls on silk thread and wear them around my neck if they were not so deadly.

  The seeds are nearly as poisonous as the berries; Father has warned me a thousand times. But I am careful. First I tie the seeds in clean muslin bags and drop them in a pail of cold water. Before they can be planted they must soak for at least two weeks, and I must change the water every day. That is how Mother Nature would do it: The snow would fall and melt and then fall again. And it would be too risky to leave the seeds in the ground during the cold months; they might get eaten by birds and carried away to grow in some distant field, where they could wreak their mischief without warning. Instead I make-believe a winter for them, to trick them into growing only when and where I wish.

  Even after all that care, only a few seeds will sprout, and of those half will soon shrivel back into the dirt. Are you so in love with death, lovely lady? I call you lovely lady, for that is what “belladonna” means. You are curiously reluctant to be born. Is our world not beautiful enough for you? Or perhaps there is another, more perfect realm in which you prefer to dwell?

  I laugh at myself now; what foolish imaginings! But when Father is away I must make do with whatever companions I can find: a sparrow on the windowsill, a shadow on the wall, or even a tiny, dangerous seed. We have lived alone here among the ruins for so long, Father and I, and he is away so much, and is so silent and lost in his own thoughts even when he is here, I sometimes worry I might lose my speaking voice completely from lack of use.

  Let me test it.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello?”

  Feh! I sound a frog. A tincture of lemon balm and anise would cure this broken voice of mine.

  Or someone to talk to. That would do it, too.

  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.

  “Because of you, Jessamine. Because you are only a child. Until you are older, and have the wisdom to know what you may touch and taste and what you may not, I keep the most powerful plants behind the locked gate, where they cannot harm you.”

  “You don’t have to lock the ‘pothecary garden, Father.” I pouted like the baby I was at the time. “If you tell me not to go in I surely will not.”

  “If you surely will not,” he said with a smile, “then the existence of the lock should not trouble you in the slightest.”

  I have never won an argument with Father, but it is not for lack of trying.

  I add more coal to the fire, and light a fresh candle to sew by. It is midafternoon, but the sky is thickly blanketed with clouds. The day feels dim as dusk.

  Father must be working hard, wherever he is. I hope it is not a child who is ill. Not that I am squeamish about sick people. In fact, I prefer to go with Father when he pays his visits. I like to watch how men thrash about as they battle against terrible fevers, or how women moan and grunt as they labor to bring their babes forth, while Father mixes just the right medicines to help ease their pains.

  But there is so much work to do at the cottage, especially with spring coming. Now that I am old enough to mind the house and care for the gardens myself, Father usually insists that I stay home.

  So here I remain, with only my sewing basket and the wet seed babies of my lovely lady for company. A damp, shaded spot near the stone wall suits the belladonna plant best. Or so Father tells me. I have never seen it growing there myself, for I am still not permitted to enter the apothecary garden. It is too dangerous; I am too young, I do not know enough—Father is stubborn as stone and will not change his mind. Yet I want to learn. For now I content myself with leafing through Father’s books and examining the specimens he brings home.

  That is how I came to know the belladonna berries. Every autumn Father collects the lush, ink black fruits and preserves them in a glass jar, which he keeps on a high shelf in his study. In late winter he removes a few and delicately slits them open to harvest the seed.

  This is the first year he has entrusted the seeds to me to prepare for planting. “Remember, Jessamine,” Father warned, “you will be raising a litter of assassins.”

  That was Father’s idea of a
joke, but I knew to heed the warning. When I change the soaking water, I wear gloves and remember not to touch my fingers to my lips or eyes. After I finish, I wash my hands twice with lye soap and throw the gloves in a bucket of bleach. I place a lid over the pail that holds the seeds and the fresh water, tie it fast with strong twine, and mark it POISON.

  I do this even when I am alone, as I am no–one never knows when a vagrant might wander by in search of a cool drink. Even those who cannot read will know the sign for poison. If they ignore it, they do so at their peril.

  Then I carry the discarded soaking water far from the cottage and drain it into a swampy, overgrown ditch. I choose one so thickly surrounded by bramble and gorse bushes that the duke’s sheep and cattle would never try to drink from it, nor any human, either.

  Last week I found a dead cat by the ditch. But I think it had died of something else. Even so, when I told Father, he dug a hole and buried the body right away, and Father is no particular friend to cats.

  It was a deep hole, deep enough for a man’s grave. The cat was small, with soft orange fur. I know it was soft because I petted it to say good-bye, but the body was cold and stiff and Father told me not to touch.

  I said a silent prayer, too, as Father shoveled the dirt back into the hole. Soon the last glimpse of orange had disappeared; a slight depression in the muddy earth was all that marked the place. Within a fortnight that would grow over with brambles, too.

  “It is a rare beast that gets such a funeral,” Father remarked, sweating and leaning on his spade. “Lucky cat.”

  Personally I think the cat would have been luckier had it lived. Then again, life for a stray, unwanted thing is not always pleasant, so perhaps Father was right after all.

  And of course, we have other ways of keeping the mice away from our cottage.

  Father laughs when I call Hulne Abbey “our cottage.”

  “It is a ruin, a wreck, a pile of weathered, mosscovered rocks,” he always corrects me. But this is the only home I have ever known, and who can feel at home in a ruin? Anyway, Father exaggerates; where we live is no mere pile of rocks, though it is centuries old. It is not large, but it has a feeling of spaciousness; even, if you ask me, of grace.

  That is no surprise. Father says our house used to be the chapel, in the long-ago days when the old monastery still stood on these lands. For miles around, the buildings and farms of the abbey stretched up through the hills until the distant spot where the planting fields end and the line of the forest begins. For five hundred years these fertile acres teemed with people and animals and life. No more, though. Now Father and I live in the chapel; the rest of the monastery is rubble, and all the Catholics are in Ireland and France.

  Sometimes, when the weather is fair, I lie on my back in the grass of a nearby field. I close my eyes and try to imagine that last, terrible day, in the hours before it was all laid waste. But even the grandfather of the oldest person in the town of Alnwick was not alive to see it. There is no one who can tell me what it was like to hide at the edge of the forest, as I imagine I would have done, watching in terror and fascination as the king’s soldiers smashed the ancient buildings to bits and then hunted down the fleeing monks like so many helpless rabbits.

  Father often says he wishes they had torn down the chapel and left the monk’s library standing instead, but I like our home just as it is, a long, rectangular structure made of rough-hewn blocks of stone. Long ago Father divided the interior into rooms. My bedchamber is small and up a long flight of stairs, in the old bell tower. On the main floor is a bedchamber for Father, a study in which he does his work, and a front parlor where we take our meals. It is where I write my garden diary, too, at the end of each day’s labors.

  Of all these rooms, the parlor is the largest, and the one that still looks most like a church. There is a high, vaulted ceiling, and tall arched windows that Father says once had stained-glass pictures in them. Now they are filled with thick, plain glass that is divided into many small panes. On sunny days the light slants through the panes and makes narrow, glowing path ways across the dark wood planks of the floor.

  I used to play hopscotch with those paths of light when I was small—if I leap over the light without touching it, Mama will live, I would say to myself. But if my foot touches the light she will die.

  My foot never, ever touched the light—to this day I will swear it—but Mama died anyway.

  Oh, how I wept! I was only four, so perhaps the outburst can be forgiven. But I remember how Father’s voice stayed calm.

  “That is the way of things,” he explained to me at the time. “All creatures die when their time comes. No matter what we do, or how we may feel about it, nature always gets her prize in the end.”

  Father is always so strong and wise. Sometimes I wish I were more like him. I wish I could accept that the way fate has arranged things is both right and good, and that living here alone with him, sewing and cooking and tending the garden, and perhaps, when I am old enough—perhaps, in my mind I can hear him say it!—learning to help him with his work, as I am beginning to do now with the belladonna seeds, is exactly the way my life was intended to be.

  But, other times, the scent of bread baking, a remembered, loving smile, or an especially lonely winter night, with no one to sing me to sleep, leaves me weeping in secret for Mama, and filled with a kind of fury I cannot name.

  It happens less often as the years go by, though.

  2

  16th March

  The weather continues damp and cold; I built a strong fire in the morning and still could not get warm. Peeled potatoes and parsnips for soup. Cleaned and oiled all the boots. Changed the soaking water for the belladonna seeds.

  Still no word from Father.

  FROM THE TOWER WINDOW in my bedchamber I can see quite a distance: over the crumbling stone wall that encloses the courtyard and cottage, past the quilt pattern of farmers’ fields marked by hedgerows, to the narrow path that snakes through the hills to the main crossroads where the four directions meet.

  Down the road to the south is the town of Alnwick, where the duke’s castle stands guard over Northumberland. To the north, the Cheviot Hills and Scotland. The westbound road will carry travelers to Newcastle, if they are not murdered by highwaymen along the way. To the east lies the sea.

  If I happen to be looking out of my window when Father returns, I will be able to see him coming two miles away, a lone, stoop-shouldered figure walking from the crossroads down the winding footpath that cuts across the sheep fields.

  Even when the need for his services is urgent, Father prefers to walk. He likes to stop and examine whatever grows by the side of the road. There he might find a rare type of wildflower that he covets for our garden beds, or some creeping plant whose properties are unfamiliar to him, or a strange mushroom growing on the back of a rotted stump.

  Many times he will return home from a journey with his satchel full of specimens. I always offer to sketch them for his plant notebooks. These notebooks fill many shelves in his study, but none of them contain the formulas for his medicines. That information is secret. The recipes for making his tinctures and tisanes, oils and ointments, smudge pots and poultices are recorded in a leather-bound volume he keeps in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. I have only seen it once, years ago, and then only because I walked in on him while he was writing in it—a mistake I have not made since—

  I burst in without knocking and stood in the doorway to his study, a breathless, saucer-eyed girl with mudspattered legs and a five-legged frog cupped in my hand.

  “Look, Father! I found it in a puddle at the foot of the wall, that great stone wall that hides the ‘pothecary garden! I ran straight back to show you. Have you ever seen such a freakish creature? Will it live? Should it live?”

  As soon as he saw me he shoved the book away, locked the drawer, and pocketed the key.

  “Set it free, Jessamine.” His eyes stayed fixed on his desk as if they would bore two holes in it. “
The frog’s destiny is no business of yours.”

  Now there are two men in the distance, but neither of them is Father. One is too short, and the other is too fat. They are the Wesleyan preachers, a loudmouthed pair from one of the nonconformist sects. They used to come to the door now and then, in their long coats and strange hats, saying, “The end of the world is nigh!”

  I find them funny, to be truthful. “The end of the world”—what a notion! As if there were anything to be done about that. Surely it would be better not to know.

  I do not think the preachers will pay a call today, though. The last time they came, Father spoke to them very harshly. “That it will someday be the year eighteen hundred, rather than seventeen what-you-please, is a simple mathematical fact of the Gregorian calendar. It is a new century, not a harbinger of doom!” he bellowed. “Take your superstitions, and be gone!”

  They have not knocked on our door since.

  I watch through the window as the two figures disappear into the valley at the foot of one hill and reappear a short time later, as the path rises over the slope of the next. But there is no Father, not yet.

  I awaken in Father’s chair, the one in the parlor nearest the hearth. I had not meant to fall asleep, but an hour’s sewing made me close my eyes to rest them. Now the cloud-veiled sun is low in the sky, and the skirt with the torn hem that I was in the midst of mending has slipped from my lap to the dirty floor.

  Father is not home. Could some misfortune have befallen him? It makes my chest tighten to think of it, like a heavy rope has been coiled around my body and pulled hard, until I can barely breathe.

  If something happened to Father, then I would truly be alone.

  I would be alone with the cottage that once was a chapel, and the gardens, and the ruins, and whatever ghosts of dead monks still wander the fields. I might never have cause to speak aloud again.