Death at Apothecaries' Hall by Deryn Lake

Author:Deryn Lake [Deryn Lake]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

He spent the morning being brisk about his shop, dealing with customers, including the most petulant and grumpy in town, or so it seemed to John, then rushing out to help a child in the street with a piece of apple caught in its throat. Nicholas came with him and watched with admiration as the Apothecary swung the girl upside down, then hit her on the back hard until the apple dislodged and fell out on the cobbles. The mother, duly grateful, wept copiously, her voice combining with that of her wailing daughter.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked the Muscovite, astonished. ‘Your child is no longer choking. Mr Rawlings saved her.’

‘It’s the thought of what might have happened,’ the woman answered, and pressed a very small coin into John’s hand, which he took to maintain her dignity.

As they went back inside, the Apothecary turned to his apprentice. ‘She’s right you know. I have heard of a child choking to death on a piece of apple. It’s not always possible to remove it.’

‘You struck her very hard.’

‘My Master told me that you cannot be hard enough, the situation is so dangerous.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

The rest of the hours they spent together were not nearly as dramatic, but for all that very concentrated. Physicks and pills were compounded, and John spent a considerable time with his new machine for making suppositories, an excellent invention, recently arrived from the manufacturer. Finally, and with some regret, the Apothecary handed over his prize acquisition to Nicholas, panting to have a try at rolling and pressing, and set off for Bow Street. The court was still in session, and every seat being taken, John stood at the back and watched justice being administered by the famous Magistrate.

It was partly the fact of John Fielding’s blindness that drew the beau monde to the court in droves – this, coupled with the widespread belief that the man could recognise over three thousand villains just by hearing them speak. Such legendary behaviour, to say nothing of the Blind Beak’s dramatic entrances into and exits from the courtroom, a switch twitching before him to guide his path, had led the Principal Magistrate to become one of the main attractions of town. Vowing to get to court early one day in order to obtain a seat, John resigned himself to standing for the rest of the session.

Today the Beak was in a sombre mood, listening carefully and questioning down to the last detail before delivering sentence. The Apothecary wondered whether this had anything to do with the fact that Mr Fielding was himself currently being pursued through the courts. Earlier in the year he had committed a young man named William Barnard to prison simply on a verbal charge made by the Duke of Marlborough, namely that Barnard had made a nuisance of himself to the Duke’s household. This sentence had so incensed the boy’s father that he had laid an information against the Blind Beak for committing his son without due evidence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.