The Midwife's Tale(86)

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Standing here waiting for Richard Baker to return,” I said. “And don’t whisper. It will make passersby suspicious.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“Mr. Hodgson,” Martha said, “may I borrow your dagger? One good turn ought to do it.”

Will looked behind him, still unsure exactly what was happening. Nevertheless, he slipped his dagger out of his belt and handed it to Martha. A moment later, Martha proved as good as her word, and the door to Penrose’s shop swung open. Martha entered first, enjoying the puzzled look on Will’s face. Will and I followed, closing the door behind us. Will drew the curtains lest Cawton or any of Penrose’s other neighbors saw us inside, and we began our search.

Will went into the back room, while Martha and I searched the shop itself. Richard’s neat work made our search mercifully quick. He had carefully labeled every drawer, shelf, bottle, and envelope. We found everything in exactly the right place. Will finished his search and returned, shaking his head.

“What did you find?” I asked.

“The cleanest workshop you’ll ever see. Nothing is out of place, and nothing to help us find out who bought the ratsbane. I did find a locked cabinet—did you say that’s where Penrose kept the poisons?”

“That’s what Richard told us. Martha, could you have a look?”

“Yes, my lady.”

She disappeared into the back room, and we followed her. Martha made short work of the lock on the cabinet, and we crowded around as she opened the doors. Not surprisingly, the poisons were as organized as the more benign substances. I noticed mercury, henbane, ratsbane, arsenic, and opium, but there was no book of sales that might tell us who had bought the poison.

“Shall we look upstairs?” Will asked.

“We’re already felons for breaking in.” I sighed. “We’ve no reason to stop now.”

We climbed the stairs to the living quarters and found ourselves in a hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back. Through one door we found a room that had to be Penrose’s bedchamber. Clothes were strewn across the room, clearly left wherever he had dropped them after a long night at the Black Swan. The sheets themselves stank of sweat, and the smell emanating from one corner of the room told me that he had vomited into one of his chamber pots.

We looked in the second bedchamber and knew in a moment it was Richard’s. The room was as orderly as the shop and completely spotless. Richard had attached a small shelf to the wall and begun to fill it with books. The two largest were the Bible and a collection of recipes for making medicines called The Charitable Physician with the Charitable Apothecary. I opened the book and found that he had made notes in the margins, changing the amounts of different ingredients and even substituting some recipes of his own invention. Alongside these books, Richard kept a mix of cheaper pamphlets, including a book of prayers and a jest book called The Friar and the Boy. However modest it might have been, Richard was assembling a library. He seemed to be the ideal apprentice, and I lamented the suffering he had endured at Penrose’s hands. I hoped that Richard would take me up on my offer for a loan. I would happily bring my business to him in the future.

Will’s voice pulled me back to the present. “I’ve found something. It looks like the apprentice kept records of the shop’s stock.” He was leaning over a small table, peering at a ledger.

I crossed the room and looked over his shoulder. Richard had laid the book out in neat columns, the first listing all the ingredients in the shop and other columns tracking how much of each item he had bought, sold, or used. As Will scanned the ledger, I picked up a commonplace book that lay on the table. On the book’s first pages, Richard had written down more recipes for medicines and, as he had in the printed book, noted changes as he learned what worked best. I continued leafing through the book and found that in fact it was two books. At one end of the book he wrote his recipes and at the other he made more private entries. The first date was January 1st, and I was not surprised that his main concerns were the difficulty of his apprenticeship. His description of Penrose’s beatings broke my heart, and I wondered at his patience in the face of such abuse.

“I found it,” announced Will. I closed the commonplace book and looked up. “He purchased ratsbane a few months ago, but doesn’t appear to have used any since. If Penrose sold the ratsbane, he did it without Richard’s knowledge.”

“Well, that’s that.” I sighed. “Put things where you found them, and let’s go.”