Hemlock Page 7

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Cousins doesn’t agree.” Dorothea gave me an apprehensive glance. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you how unsettling this is, China. If I were charged with theft, that would be the end of my career.”

  “They can’t charge you without evidence,” I said firmly, and not entirely truthfully. I’ve seen plenty of charges based on easily challenged evidence.

  “But even the suspicion of theft . . .” She bit her lip. “If the sheriff doesn’t manage to find out who did this, the suspicion will linger.”

  “We won’t let that happen.” It’s a lawyer’s standard reassurance of an apprehensive client, and while I put the usual confidence behind it, I wasn’t so sure. There were too many unknowns, too many players. There was very little security, as far as I could see. Anybody who knew that the Herbal was here could have walked in and taken it.

  I pushed my dessert dish away and leaned my forearms on the table. “What are we talking about here? How much is the Herbal worth?”

  “An auction estimate would probably come in at a hundred thousand dollars,” Dorothea said. “Christie’s and Sotheby’s both have offered a couple of two-volume sets in the last two years. One went for forty thousand, the other for sixty. Of course, with interested bidders, this one would go for more, since it’s Elizabeth’s presentation copy to Sir Hans Sloane.”

  “Or the thief could take out the colored plates and sell them separately,” Jenna reminded her. To me, she added, “I’ve seen those colored plates online for as high as three or four hundred dollars apiece, which means that there’s probably a hundred and eighty or two hundred thousand dollars in the plates. It would be safer for the thief to sell it that way,” she added glumly. “Once the plates have been removed, there’s no way to tell which edition they came from.”

  I nodded, remembering that Michael Blanding’s map thief had worked that way: slicing maps out of rare books and selling the single pages for thousands of dollars to eager collectors who never bothered to ask for provenance—where the plates had come from. And I, too, had seen colored plates from Elizabeth’s Herbal, matted and framed, for sale on the internet. For the thief, this could be a low-risk, high-payoff enterprise.

  “Where did Miss Carswell acquire the Herbal?” I asked. “How long had she had it?”

  Dorothea and Jenna exchanged looks. At last, Dorothea shook her head. “We don’t know. She traveled to England several years ago, and we’ve found receipts for some things she bought at that time. But not the Herbal. We’ve asked Jed Conway, but he says he doesn’t know.” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “That’s still a mystery to be solved.”

  “I read a couple of online biographies about Elizabeth,” I said. “It appears that she’s pretty much a mystery, as well. Which is strange, because her Herbal seems quite exceptional. I read that this is the only English herbal, in any era, that was written, illustrated, engraved on copper plate, and colored—by a woman.”

  “That’s true,” Dorothea said. “The male herbalists get all the attention. Nicholas Culpeper, for instance. And John Gerard. Everybody knows about them. Nobody remembers Elizabeth Blackwell.”

  Jenna spoke with a barely restrained passion. “And given the kind of pressure she was under—well, it’s a wonder the work got done at all! Her husband had gotten himself thrown into debtor’s prison. His own stupid fault, really. He was an arrogant fellow who thought he could do exactly as he pleased and get away with it.” She shook her head. “If Elizabeth hadn’t spent three whole years of her life producing the Herbal and selling it, he might have spent the rest of his life locked up in Newgate. It was her persistence that bought his freedom. Plus her smarts. Not to mention her stubbornness. That woman just didn’t know when she was beaten.”

  I had to smile at Jenna’s intensity. This was obviously something she cared about. I said, “I read a nineteenth-century biographer who described the Herbal as Elizabeth’s ‘most touching and admirable monument of female devotion’ to her husband, But I understand that Alexander only lived another ten years or so after she bailed him out. And wasn’t there something . . . unusual about the way he died?”

  Jenna and Dorothea exchanged eyebrow-arched glances. “You might say so, yes,” Jenna said.

  “He was executed.” Dorothea said.

  “They lopped off his head,” Jenna said.

  “In Sweden,” Dorothea added.

  “For treason,” Jenna said, with a disgusted look. “If you ask me, he deserved it. That man was always trying to be somebody he wasn’t. There aren’t many details, but it seems that he was passing himself off as a physician to the Swedish king when he managed to get embroiled in some sort of palace conspiracy. And he plagiarized somebody’s book, as well.” She made a face. “That’s Alexander for you. Always wanting to be a big-time player—and never quite understanding the game he was in. This time, though, Elizabeth wasn’t there to bail him out. She had washed her hands of him. At least, that’s what I think.”

  “Jenna doesn’t believe that Elizabeth Blackwell was motivated by ‘female devotion,’” Dorothea said matter-of-factly. “Her novel tells a different story.”

  “I’ve only read the first section,” I said, “but I got that idea.” I turned to Jenna. “The novel is part of your master’s thesis?”

  Jenna nodded. “Yes, along with an analysis of the printing history of the Herbal. I considered writing the usual biography. But I’ve dug up all this amazing stuff about eighteenth-century London and the apothecaries—the pharmacists of their day—and the way books were printed and sold. I think I’ve pieced together how Elizabeth got involved with the Physic Garden and how she produced the book, in spite of all the obstacles. I’ve begun to feel close to her, as if I know her. Know her personally, I mean. As a friend. So I didn’t want to write just a biography. I wanted to get closer.”

  Dorothea put out a hand. “Jenna,” she said gently, “you’re on your soapbox again. China doesn’t want to hear—”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  But Jenna barely heard us. “And she’s an incredible woman, really. Her husband had squandered her dowry and gone to prison and there she was, homeless, with two young children.” She gave me an indignant glance. “Really, China. Don’t you think she must have been just totally disgusted with Alexander? If he were my husband, I would have been ready to kiss him off.” She made an impatient noise. “Female devotion, my foot.”

  “So what you wrote—that Elizabeth and her children had nowhere to go—that was really true? In real life, I mean.”

  “Oh, you bet. He had managed to lose their printing business and their house on the Strand. He was in prison and she had no money. Her parents had cut her off, his mother and stuck-up brother wouldn’t have anything to do with them, and Alexander had squandered her dowry on his printing business, even though he didn’t meet the seven-year-apprenticeship requirement. That man was always pretending to be somebody he wasn’t. Of course, Elizabeth—”

  “Jenna,” Dorothea said more loudly. But Jenna was going on.

  “Of course, Elizabeth and the children could have moved into Newgate with him. Lots of women did. Or she could have sponged off friends. She and Alexander were both Scottish, and there was a big group of expat Scots in London. They looked out for one another. That’s why Dr. Stuart was willing to give her a job and a place to live. But Elizabeth didn’t go that route. Instead, she rolled up her sleeves and—”

  She stopped herself, glancing from Dorothea to me. “Oops, sorry,” she muttered. “I let myself get carried away sometimes. I can be a bore, chattering on about a story that mostly interests just me.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, admiring her passion. And her energy. “If you’re writing a novel, I suppose you have to get carried away—or get carried into it—or you can’t write.”

  “And you’re never a bore,” Dorothea said comfortingly. “I’ve alrea
dy learned so much about the Herbal from you. And about Elizabeth, too.”

  A rueful smile hovered on Jenna’s lips. “Of course, she lived almost three hundred years ago, and a lot of her life really is a mystery. It’s like a tangled skein that begs to be unraveled—the mystery of who she was.”

  “I loved the beginning and I’m ready for more,” I said. “When can you send another chapter or two?” I wasn’t just handing out an empty compliment. In her enthusiasm, Jenna had made me curious about Elizabeth Blackwell and that husband of hers. I doubted that knowing more about the author of the stolen book would take me further toward the thief, but you never know.

  “How about tonight?” Jenna asked with a little laugh. “That is, as long as you don’t mind reading a draft. This is very much a work in progress.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “I have my tablet with me. You could email the sections. Or put them on a thumb drive.”

  Dorothea got up and began to clear the table. “Why don’t you do that while I put the dishes in the dishwasher, Jenna. And don’t forget the list you were making for China. The names of visitors to Hemlock House.”

  “I’ll help with the cleanup,” I volunteered.

  The kitchen chores were almost finished by the time Jenna got back to the kitchen. “I’ve emailed parts two and three of the novel,” she said. “And here’s the list.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, taking the printout. “Bedtime reading.”

  I had gotten up early that morning in Texas, so I said thank you and goodnight and excused myself. I took the back stairs—the circular staircase—to the second floor, wishing for better lighting and being careful where I put my feet. As I came to the landing, I was tempted to go up and have a look around on the third floor, where Sunny Carswell was said to have died. And where her ghost presumably hung out, if indeed there was one. But I had no good reason to go where I hadn’t been invited, and I was looking forward to my reading.

  I was just opening the door to my room when Jenna caught up with me.

  “I hope you noticed how worried Dorothea is about this thing,” she said in a low voice. “This theft is really hard on her—the loss itself, of course, but also Mrs. Cousins’ disapproval and the sheriff’s suspicion. She doesn’t believe that the police will find the Herbal, and I’m afraid I agree.” She put her hand on my arm. Her eyes were intent, her voice taut, pleading. “Dorothea didn’t steal it, China. I didn’t, either. You do believe us, don’t you?”

  I hesitated. I did, didn’t I? I had thought that Dorothea couldn’t possibly be guilty of stealing a valuable book. But why did Jenna think she had to urge me to believe in her innocence? And how well did I know the woman, really? Money was obviously an issue for her. Was it possible that—

  “You’re our best hope, China,” Jenna said urgently. “You’ve got to find it. Please don’t fail us. Please.”

  “I’ll do what I can” was all I could come up with, and it didn’t sound any too convincing, even to me. But I couldn’t promise to find something that might be on its way to the shelves of some collector’s private library—or a worktable, where it could be hacked to pieces by an enterprising thief with an X-Acto knife.

  I liked Jenna, but I was glad to step into my room and close the door behind me. And I wasn’t too tired to enjoy my lovely room. I opened the casement window and was rewarded by the inquiring who-who-whooo? of an owl in one of the nearby hemlocks and a whiff of April air, sweet with the scent of rich forest soil and new green leaves. I changed into McQuaid’s old black T-shirt, two sizes too large and the most comfortable sleeping shirt I’ve ever worn. Then I stacked up the pillows, crawled into bed with my tablet, and logged into the eighteenth-century world of Elizabeth Blackwell’s London.

  What Jenna had emailed me began where her first section had left off, with Elizabeth on her way up Holbourn Hill and into some sort of new adventure. I plunged in eagerly. Jenna’s story might be fiction, but it seemed entirely plausible to me. It was fascinating.

  And if the ghost of Sunny Carswell dropped in to read over my shoulder, I was too deeply engrossed to notice.

  * * *

  *You can see the British Museum’s copy at http://www.bl.uk/turning-the-pages/. It originally came from the library of King George III, who was an advocate of the study of botany.

  The Curious Tale of Elizabeth Blackwell

  Part Two

  January 4, 1735

  Holbourn Street and Castle Lane London

  Street art provided something of a living for chalk artists, who perfected a method of portraiture not unlike caricature that amused and entertained many. Some of these street artists went on to employment in the studios of artists who copied old masters, for which there was a popular market. Or they painted inexpensive landscapes and portraits for the burgeoning merchant class.

  Susan Blake, London Artistry, 1700–1750

  As Elizabeth began to climb steep Holbourn Hill, the wind blew away the clouds and a pale wintry sun brightened the grimy old buildings—most of them very old, because they had escaped the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed almost everything from the Tower on the east to Whitehall on the west and from the Thames to the city wall.

  Started by a careless baker on Pudding Lane (or so it was said), the fire had disastrously incinerated over thirteen thousand homes, eighty-seven churches, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. The medieval city of narrow cobbled alleys winding among rat-infested wood-and-thatch tenements was destroyed. In the rebuilding, wooden structures and overhanging gables were forbidden and the use of brick or stone was mandatory. London was cleaner now, and with definite improvements in fire safety. Many streets had been widened and paved and open sewers abolished, creating more room for horses and wagons and people on foot.

  But the fire had run into stiff winds and was halted before it could reach Holbourn. Here, the timbered buildings along the street were more medieval than modern, leaning forward over the cobbles so that their upper stories nearly touched. The smell of mold and damp timber, rotting rubbish, animal dung, and human sewage hung in the air, and women were well-advised to mind the hems of their skirts. Chick Lane, the next street to the north, was populated (as Elizabeth had recently read in the Penny London Post) by miscreants, street robbers, thieves, pickpockets, housebreakers, shoplifters, prostitutes, streetwalkers, and other monsters of wickedness, drinking and carousing in a most intemperate manner. It was altogether a dismal neighborhood.

  The gloom of the scene so accentuated Elizabeth’s despair about Alexander’s plight that it took a drayman’s sharp cry to rouse her. She had to step swiftly aside and out of the way of a draft horse laboring to pull a brewer’s wagon up the steep hill to the summit. There, back in the day of King Henry VIII, was located the city’s toll gate, Holbourn Bar. The Bar marked the northwestern boundary of the city, where a toll of a penny or tuppence was demanded of non-freemen driving carts or coaches into the city.

  But the toll gate was gone. Now, across the way from the medieval stone towers of St. Andrew’s, Elizabeth saw a cluster of people, jostling one another to get a better view of something on the pavement. Curious, she worked her way to the front of the crowd.

  In front of her, on the pavement stones, was a gallery of drawings executed in colored chalks, while on hands and knees to one side of his work was the artist himself, a shabby young man with his brown hair tied neatly at the collar of his green jacket. As Elizabeth watched, he blew chalk-dust from the stern likeness of a man, softened the blush on a woman’s pretty cheek with a scrap of leather, and with a stub of charcoal added an exuberant curlicue to the caption below his work: “Portrait Commissions humbly sought. Inquire of the Artist.”

  Beside the gallery was placed, hopefully, an upside-down hat. In it were several halfpence. As she watched, a man in a gray coat with a black velvet collar, a gold-headed walking stick tucked into the crook of his elbow, pitched a coin into
the hat, then proffered a card to the artist. “Stop in at my office and ask for me,” he said. “I should like a portrait.”

  The moment before, Elizabeth’s attention had been fixed on her desperate need of money. Now, startled, she eyed the man with the walking stick and the young artist at work on his pavement.

  Portrait commissions, she thought, I could paint portraits, couldn’t I? I could sell portraits. She measured the boy’s work with a critical eye, noting that some of the lines were not firm and that the likenesses rather tended to caricature. I could make portraits at least as well as this fellow, she thought. No, I could do better. I know I could.

  And as she left the artist and his admiring audience and made her way to the top of Holbourn Hill, she considered this possibility with a growing excitement.

  Her father had insisted that each of his daughters ought to have a firm grounding in the fine arts, so Elizabeth and her sisters had dutifully attended music classes, embroidery classes, and even dancing classes. But duty had nothing to do with her enjoyment of the art classes taught by a series of Scottish artists. She had studied drawing, landscape painting, portraiture, and (because one of the artists was also a printmaker) etching and engraving. She had proved to be an eager pupil with a considerable degree of skill. She had spent many happy hours sketching the plants in her mother’s garden, then turning the sketches into engravings and then into prints.

  Portraits, she thought now. She bent into the wind, making her way past Staples Inn, where a coach-and-four was waiting for passengers. Yes, I could paint portraits. Portraits were not her favorite form of art but she was certainly as competent as that fellow on his hands and knees. Of course, there was the difficulty of purchasing supplies—canvas, brushes, oils, watercolors were all expensive. And the challenge of getting commissions, unless she wanted to be a street artist, for which only chalk and an empty hat were needed but which seemed to her to present unacceptable dangers for a woman. And could she earn enough? After all, there were only a few ha’pennies in that hopeful hat.