The Pharmacist's Wife by Vanessa Tait

Author:Vanessa Tait
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Rebecca folded up the note and pushed it into her pocket. ‘Tell Evangeline – the woman who sent you to me – I am coming.’ Then she flung on her cloak and snatched up her keys. As soon as she got onto the street she realized she had caught up two sets of keys in her haste, they clanked together in her reticule, but there was no time to return them. If Alexander should notice … But he would not; no matter.

She had also forgotten to clip on her pocket watch, but she arrived at South Bridge certainly less than half an hour after she’d got Eva’s note. There was Mr Carraway’s, with its boxes of tea, and there was the cordwainer’s, its sign shining out from its dingy brick surround, the thumbs of a hundred men had rubbed it to a shine.

No sign of Eva, not yet.

Rebecca must walk or else explode. Someone had up-tipped a cart of sprouts. Someone else had been selling bloaters. At the turn in the road a woman screamed – and now there would be crying. Rebecca turned back towards the cordwainer’s – she could not bear to hear it. But there was not crying, only a man’s voice, low and pleading. Rebecca put her hand on her chest and tried to breathe; she longed again for her medicine. Not having it made her start to sweat, although the night was chilly.

She did not hear Eva come up; her voice at her shoulder made her jump. ‘Rebecca? Are you ready?’

She turned. Eva’s face was the colour of distemper, her eyes were ringed with dark circles. Her lips were dry, cracked; she chewed on them.

Rebecca tried to smile. ‘Ready? I don’t know! This is not how I expected to spend my evening!’ She had meant it lightly, as a kind of joke, to ease the strangeness of it all, but Eva grimaced.

‘Let us go in.’ Eva grasped the knocker, which Rebecca now saw was too heavy and ornate for a usual shoemaker’s; it was some kind of snouted animal with wide-open eyes. Eva brought the nose of it down on the plate twice, then twice again.

One minute passed. Two. Then came the sound of footsteps shuffling towards the door. Slowly, slowly … the maid must be very ancient.

Rebecca had lived and died before the door, at last, creaked open.

But she was not ancient, this girl, she was young. She wore a man’s black cap and a high black collar, and a man’s britches, but her mouth gleamed with gold, like a pirate’s, and her hand rested on the silver bulb of a walking cane. Rebecca had heard such women whispered about, but she’d never seen one for herself. Did she go about as a boy in the daylight too? Rebecca must have seen them without knowing, walking in the street, say, looking as if they were young men yet to shave.

How Alexander would hate them if he knew!

The boy – the girl dressed as a boy – gave them a nod and a gleam of her teeth.

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