The Lost Apothecary

“I assured myself that the bailiffs would not come tonight, just as they had not come for the last two decades. My shop, like my poisons, was too cleverly disguised. No man would find this place; it was buried deep behind a cupboard wall at the base of a twisted alleyway in the darkest depths of London.”

As Nella prepares for Eliza’s arrival, her self-assurance acts as a supportive pillar, since the nature of her work requires her to live in a constant state of tension. The emotional burden of her secrecy must be cut through by her own mental effort and not the soothing of anyone else, stressing her isolation. This passage also draws a direct parallel between “man” and “bailiff,” speaking to the presence of censorious, antagonistic male threats in the novel. Additionally, though the shop may be too cleverly disguised and physically obscured to be found, Nella’s decision to tend to it demands that she live under that same veil of disguise and commit to that same physical obscurity, perpetuating her own isolation in the name of her work.

“From the moment I wrapped my arms around James’s neck at the end of that pier and whispered yes, my identity as an aspiring historian rusted away, replaced with my identity as his soon-to-be wife. I tossed my graduate school application in the trash and eagerly threw myself into the whirlwind of wedding planning.”

At the Old Tavern on Fleet Street in London, Caroline considers how she exchanged her future as a historian for her commitment to James. Her negative diction with the word “rust” suggests corrosion and the destruction of structures due to outside forces, and James is certainly a corrupting outside force. But to treat him as the only force at play undermines Caroline’s agency by obscuring the role she held in her own life decisions. Caroline’s past decision to choose marriage over graduate school marks a difficult, ambiguous state of things; this state is one that James weaponizes later in the novel, to essentially place all blame on Caroline for the direction her life has taken. But by the end of her narrative, Caroline eliminates James’s corrupting influence from her life and repurposes the autonomy found in this passage, wheeling her fate toward a more fulfilling path.

“I only aided women. My mother had held tight to this principle, instilling in me from an early age the importance of providing a safe haven—a place of healing—for women. London grants little to women in need of tender care; instead, it crawls with gentleman’s doctors, each as unprincipled and corrupt as the next. My mother committed to giving women a place of refuge, a place where they might be vulnerable and forthcoming about their ailments without the lascivious appraisal of a man.”

In Nella’s first conversation with Eliza, where the young girl tells her that Mrs. Amwell identifies her shop as a place for women, Nella confirms this. She also points out that her commitment to women is a link to her mother. The harboring of this principle is something Nella has in common with her mother, but it is not the only thing—her mother founded this shop for women who were betrayed by the medical professionals of their time, who went to gentleman doctors expecting aid and experienced male perversion and abuse instead. Additionally, in a way, Nella’s poison-dealing does still hold true to her mother’s intention that the shop be a place of healing, as these toxins can serve as an emotional balm to those who administer them.

“You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, an absence.”

This is the primary bit of advice that Bachelor Alf gives to Caroline and the rest of the mudlarking group on the River Thames. This line speaks to the importance of identifying the breakdown in patterns. Carolina uses this mindset to find Nella’s shop at Back Alley, and Eliza uses it to find Tom Pepper’s inconspicuous magic shop. But this adage may also be applied to Caroline’s search for the defect in her marriage (the one that she thinks partially influenced James’s infidelity), as their shared unhappiness could not be found in what they had done in their marriage but in what they had not done—an absence more than a presence.

“I mean that you can be anything you want in London. Nothing great awaits you in the farm fields. The fences would have kept you in, as they do the pigs and as they’ve done to me. But in London? Well, in time, if you are clever about it, you can wield your own power like a magician. In a city so grand, even a poor girl can transform into whatever she desires to be.”

As she escorts her young daughter to the servant’s registry office in London, Eliza’s mother reveals the utter lack of social mobility permitted to people in the country’s rural areas, a condition compounded by sexism. She equates the condition of being trapped by circumstance to the penning of pigs, highlighting its dehumanization and implying that the true nature of humanity demands the freedom to roam. She also engenders in Eliza a fascination with the transformative power of magic, much as Nella’s mother instilled in her a commitment to aiding women.

“Then, something changed. A year ago, when the roundness of my face began to fall away and the edge of my bodice grew tight, I could ignore it no longer: the feeling of another gaze, a new one, and the sensation that someone watched me too closely. It was Mr. Amwell, my mistress’s husband. He had, for reasons I could only faintly understand, begun to pay attention to me. And I felt sure my mistress sensed it too.”

Eliza describes how Mr. Amwell’s predatory attentions soured the pleasantness of her tenure at the Amwell estate. This passage characterizes Mr. Amwell as a disembodied, unsettling presence by simply referencing his gaze; the dread he brings comes from the fact that, even though Eliza cannot always see him, she senses his attention. This foreshadows the impact his spirit has on Eliza’s psyche after his death, as she is disturbed by the ghost of him despite his lost corporeal form.

“My fear of spirits was recent, beginning a few months ago when Sally pulled me into the cold, dark cellar and told me a story about a girl named Johanna. I was not so brave after that day, knowing that magick could sour and go bad.” 

After Eliza learns Johanna’s story, she begins to hear her wails in the walls, as well as a thumping sound that Eliza believes to be the baby Johanna lost in childbirth. These experiences further make the Amwell estate, a place once full of pleasant memories, all the more inhospitable to Eliza and her belief in magic. This change, paired with Mr. Amwell’s death, eventually necessitates her departure and constitutes a leg in her coming-of-age character arc. This passage’s use of the conditional “could” leaves room for hope, indicating that “sour magic” is only one of magic’s states, and that it is still able to bring good. Therefore, Eliza’s belief in its positive transformative power is assailed but remains intact.

“From my place on the floor, I pointed to the sofa where we’d been seated together. My eyes settled on the blood-stained cushion upon which we’d been sitting, and all around us, the shadows of the candlelight danced closer, taunting me, Mr. Amwell hiding in every one of them.”

Eliza and Mrs. Amwell are sat by the fireplace when a servant comes down to tell them that Mr. Amwell has stopped breathing. When they rise from the couch, Eliza leaves behind a smear of blood while Mrs. Amwell does not, symbolically heightening the difference between their levels of guilt, as Eliza was the person who administered the poison to Mr. Amwell. What’s more, Mr. Amwell dies before a pastor can arrive to give him his last rites, which, applying a Christian context, means that he died with no absolution for the wrongs he committed or the person he was. This suggests that, for Eliza, he emerges on the other side of the life-death divide as precisely the kind of threat she feared while he lived, stalking her from the shadows and awaiting his chance to attack.

“The best apothecary was one who knows intimately the despair felt by her patient, whether in body or heart. And though I could not relate to this woman’s place in society—for there were no gatehouses or footmen to be seen in Back Alley—I knew, firsthand, her inner turmoil. Heartache is shared by all, and favors no rank.”

Despite her initial misgivings about Lady Clarence’s first note, wherein she requests a fatal aphrodisiac, Nella decides to make the desired poison. This passage starts off by emphasizing Nella’s apothecary shop, particularly its selling of cures for women’s maladies, as an essential locale since it is impossible for male doctors of the day to truly empathize with some of the health conditions that afflict women. Nella goes on to typify the heartache that women suffer at the hands of men as an experience that touches all social classes, unifying all these women in ways that their other lived experiences cannot and undermining the rigid financial hierarchy of the day.

“Mr. Amwell’s spirit haunts me. I fear that if I remain at the house without Mrs. Amwell, he will harm me more than he has already.”

After Mr. Amwell’s death and Mrs. Amwell’s departure to Norwich, Eliza attempts to stay at Nella’s shop, since she fears Mr. Amwell’s spirit awaits her at the estate. In this passage Eliza refers to Mr. Amwell’s death using the “he” pronoun and speaks about her own trauma in the present tense, heightening the immediacy and intensity of this experience. Though Nella initially sees Eliza’s fear of Mr. Amwell’s spirit as product of her overactive imagination, Mr. Amwell’s abiding presence is all too real for the girl. This demonstrates how trauma is an extremely personal experience for each survivor. The passage also uses Nella, a patently empathetic character, to reveal that empathy, though powerful, can only go so far.

“I do not believe in ghosts, if that is what you’re asking of me. […] But I do believe that sometimes, we feel remnants of those who lived before. These are not spirits, but rather creations of our own desperation imaginations.”

In her discussion about spirits with Eliza, Nella understands what Eliza takes to be spirits as “creations of our own desperate imaginations.” From Nella’s point of view, this phrase suggests that the mind can create impressions of those one desperately wants to see again. However, it may also describe a mind desperate to heal itself and the way it may use memories of things or people lost to do so, frantically attempting to achieve clarity to reach recovery. This falls directly in line with Nella’s experiences of loss and the events that forced her mind to constantly sift through vivid mental pictures of her own grief: the evaporation of the person she thought Frederick was, the fracturing of her peace of mind after his betrayal, and the death of her baby.

“Over the preceding two decades, I had been asked several times to dispense a poison that would be administered to another woman, but I had refused these customers without question. No matter the underlying betrayal, no woman would suffer at my hands. My mother founded the apothecary shop at 3 Back Alley to heal and nurture women, and I would preserve this until the day I died.”

Nella’s initial refusal of Lady Clarence’s request is adamant, as she attempts to preserve the nature of her mother’s shop. This further establishes Nella as a paradox in and of herself, as an agent of both change, in the case of her poison-selling, and preservation, in the case of her stewardship of this value. This paradox in Nella’s character replicates itself by the end of both narratives, as Caroline’s point of view implies that Nella left the shop with all its elements intact even as she changed and found a new path.

“And yet you’re a murderer. How can you talk about helping or healing anything, man or woman? Do you even care to know who she is, this insect? She is his mistress, his whore—”

After Nella refuses to make the toxic aphrodisiac for Lady Clarence, Lady Clarence expresses her outrage. Her accusation of Nella being a murderer reflects how Nella’s work is extremely susceptible to an unnuanced view, paralleling the treatment of the unknown “apothecary killer” in the eyes of the law and revealing how the technical truth can be quite misleading without context. Lady Clarence’s rapid switch in tone from entreaty to indignation also reveals the twofold nature of Nella’s work, as it may be viewed in a positive light by her clients when it benefits them, but it can just as quickly be viewed in a negative light when their desired end is not reached. Further, this passage gives some insight into the contradictions in Lady Clarence’s character; though she identifies her husband’s mistress as an “insect,” implying that Miss Berkwell is inhuman and inferior, Lady Clarence still finds her threatening enough to eliminate.

“If you do not have the powders ready for me as I’ve asked, then you best gather your things and make haste, for I will go straight to the authorities and tell them all about your little shop, full of cobwebs and rat poison. And when I speak to them, I’ll make special note to proceed through the storage room and check behind the wall at the back. Every secret within this squalid hole will come to light.”

This passage, wherein Lady Clarence threatens to reveal Nella’s shop if the woman does not perform as ordered, further develops the insecure and changeable nature of secrecy. It speaks to how secrets may render the holders of confidential information vulnerable. This underscores the tremendous personal cost that Nella undertakes to service the women who come to her requesting poison, revealing that the very manifestation of her grief and loss—the selling of toxins—is in constant danger of causing her to lose even more: the shop (which is all she has left of her mother), the safety of her former clients, and her own life.

“I was searching for a lost apothecary, yes, but a sense of sadness came over me as I acknowledged what else I sought: resolution to my unstable marriage, my desire to be a mother, my choice of career. Surrounded by a thousand broken pieces, a long and hard search stretched ahead of me, one that would require sifting through the pieces I wanted to keep and the ones I didn’t.”

As Caroline researches the lost apothecary at the British Library with Gaynor, she describes the alteration of the life she once knew as a splintering, indicating that these rifts have allowed her to see her life’s constituent pieces more clearly. This speaks to how personal upheaval can enable a radical reimagining of what a person once thought possible. Even so, this passage acknowledges that such an undertaking can involve sadness, as reimagining a new life for oneself often requires leaving certain elements behind, elements that, though not always positive, may be comforting in their familiarity.

“I was well accustomed to doing another person’s dishonorable work. Whether it meant writing lies in letters for Mrs. Amwell or crushing poisonous beetles for Nella, I was no tattle. I could be trusted.”

Eliza is eager to remain in Nella’s shop, away from the Amwell estate she believes to be haunted, and attempts to do so by offering to fetch the beetles Nella needs to remake Lady Clarence’s toxic aphrodisiac. Eliza’s willingness illuminates the desire to please that is at the very core of her character, but it also reveals her inclination to put herself in potential jeopardy for the sake of others, foreshadowing her jump from Blackfriars’ Bridge. Additionally, though Eliza characterizes both Mrs. Amwell’s lies and Nella’s making of this toxic aphrodisiac as “dishonorable,” she willingly aids in both, indicating that Eliza is willing to take on the wrongs of her loved ones to help or protect them. This plants the seed for her eventual assumption of Nella’s guilt once Eliza jumps into the Thames.

“For many of these women, this [register] may be the only place their names are recorded. The only place they will be remembered. […] The world is not kind to us. There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark.”

Nella expresses to Eliza the significance of her register as the young girl retraces the faded entries for her. Nella identifies remembrance as a kindness, one that her world does not offer to women of her social station or lower, indicating that memory, for her, signifies affection and tenderness. This further characterizes her shop as a memorial to her mother, one imbued with a love that has withstood even her mother’s death. This also indicates that her register, in addition to preserving the names of these women, is also intended as a work of kindness.

“First, there was trust. Then, there was betrayal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be betrayed by someone you do not trust.”

Nella and Eliza take refuge in a stable as they await the morning coaches after a long night collecting beetles for Lady Clarence’s poison, allowing for one of the only moments in the novel where Nella verbalizes the pain that Frederick’s betrayal caused her. This confession to Eliza marks a significant spurt of growth in their friendship, and the fact that Nella allows Eliza to help her with this poison indicates a budding trust. Additionally, Nella’s words suggest that trust and betrayal are a duality, and they are a constant risk when cultivating intimacy with another person, indicating that her decision to confide in and rely on Eliza in this way is a thoughtful one.

“Why did we go to such lengths to protect the fragile mines of children? We only robbed them of the truth—and the chance to grow numb to it before it arrived with a hard knock on the door.”

Nella comforts Eliza when the girl bursts into tears after learning of her mistake with the jar, reflecting the inhibitory consequence of preserving children’s innocence by withholding painful information. This suggests that attempting to maintain a child’s innocence by hiding information that might cause pain is its own deception, as it falsely configures a world that is wholly pleasant. Additionally, the personification of the truth as a figure that arrives “with a hard knock on the door,” no matter what, establishes it as a confrontational notion that ultimately defies our attempts to avoid it.

“[T]he irony [was] not lost on me; while I came to London because I was hurt by someone else’s secrets, now I was the one hiding things.”

In a cafe near her hotel, Caroline’s decision to withhold the truth of the apothecary shop from Gaynor speaks to the dynamic relationship several of the characters have with secrecy. While Caroline was once a casualty of secrecy, she is now its originator, distancing herself from a friend and weakening the fledgling trust between her and Gaynor. This marks yet another step in Caroline’s reflective development, but it also implies that she is still somewhat protective of James, as this reflection elides the fact that James held his secret for far longer than Caroline holds hers, as well as the fact that he attempted to lie to her face when confronted with the truth.

“My eyes fell on the line that Eliza had drawn in the soot on her first visit and the clean, unblemished stone underneath the filth. My breath caught. From the moment of her arrival, this child had unwittingly begun to unravel me, to expose something inside of me.”

In Eliza’s absence, Nella realizes that the girl’s positive impact on her is mirrored in her physical space. The juxtaposition of “soot” and “clean, unblemished stone” suggests that the taint Nella has always assumed her work leaves on her is removable and has no bearing on her true character. Additionally, the unravelling and exposure she references speak to both Eliza’s hand in bringing her work to the authorities’ attention, and Eliza’s hand in exhuming the humor, playfulness, and capacity for intimacy long since buried under Nella’s numerous losses.

“It’s okay to change, but it’s not okay to hide, to bury parts of ourselves.”

James, freshly recovered from the worst of his poisoning, attempts to win back Caroline, a bid she rejects in light of her discovery that her marriage was repressing portions of her identity. This signals significant character development for Caroline; while she was tremendously troubled by the prospect of even necessary change at the beginning of the novel, she embraces it by the end of her arc. Additionally, she speaks of the repression of identity in terms of hiding and burying, suggesting that though elements of one’s self may be obscured, they exist beneath the surface all the same, awaiting excavation.

“A child scurried by, laughing, nearly tangling herself in my skirts. She spun about me once, twice, playing a game of my senses, reminding me of the baby that fell from my belly. She ran off as quickly as she’d appeared. As my vision blurred with tears, her face seemed to melt away, obscure and indistinct, a phantom. I began to feel a fool for doubting Eliza’s claim that ghosts resided all around her. Perhaps I’d been wrong when I told her these spirits were only remnants of memories, creations of an invigorated imagination. They all seemed so vibrant, so corporeal.”

Nella believes herself to be on the brink of death as she arrives at the Amwell estate, a belief heightened by her sighting of a child that reminds her of the daughter she lost. The sensory imagery of sound, movement, and sight turns this interaction into a distinctly emotionally visceral one, as Nella is forced to confront a still-tender past. Additionally, Nella’s declaration that Eliza was right all along about the nature of ghosts connotes a shift in her worldview that, while disorienting and alarming for her, closes some of the distance between these two characters that was created by their radically different understandings of how the past touches the present. Ironically, this intimacy happens in Eliza’s absence.