The pestle had a rhythm if you let it three turns hard, one turn light, a cadence Walter’s wrist had learned somewhere in the space between his first bruised knuckle and his hundredth and by the fifteenth morning of it, grinding dried comfrey into powder fine enough to pass through Una’s smallest sieve had stopped being work and started being something closer to thinking-space.
His corner of the back-room had accumulated, in a week and a half, the clutter of a place a man has started to actually live in rather than merely occupy: a chipped cup that was now, by unspoken agreement, his and no one else’s; a scatter of dried herb-ends he kept meaning to sweep and never quite got to; a small leather-bound notebook, its first pages full of a slow, careful, deliberately old-fashioned hand recording doses and preparations in language that would mean nothing at all to anyone who happened to glance at it.
He wrote in it only when the shop was empty.
It was, he’d noticed without quite deciding to notice it, becoming the closest thing he had to a private room.
The tea was mint, weak, made from a jar Una had told him he could help himself to so long as he replaced what he used, and he was three sips into a cup of it the small, real pleasure of something hot and familiar-tasting in a week that had otherwise handed him nothing but unfamiliar when the shop bell gave its thin rattle and a woman he didn’t recognize stepped through, and Una wasn’t there to greet her.
Market day again.
Una had gone across the green an hour ago for thread and word of the cousin at Leoch, leaving Walter the counter with the particular vote of confidence that came from not saying anything about it at all, and now here he stood, alone, facing a customer for the first time without a wall of Una’s experience between him and the decision.
“Laudanum,” the woman said.
Older than him by a decade or more, plain dark wool, hands that twisted a fold of her shawl the way hands do when they’ve got nowhere better to put themselves.
“For my mother.
Her joints the damp gets into them something fierce this time of year.”
“How much would you be needing,” Walter asked, already reaching for the shelf, already running the numbers the shop had taught him this fortnight and stopped, hand still on the jar, when she named a dose that had no business going anywhere near an elderly woman’s joints.
Enough, in the wrong body, on the wrong night, to still quite a lot more than that.
He set the jar down without opening it.
“That’s more than I can sell you,” he said, careful, courteous, the words arranging themselves the way Una’s own refusals did when she turned down a request she didn’t like the shape of.
“Not for joint-ache.
I’ll not put that much in anyone’s hands on my own say-so Una least of all would thank me for it.”
Something crossed the woman’s face too fast to name cleanly not anger, not quite grief either, something folded between the two of them the way most true feelings were.
“It’s for my mother,” she said again, sharper this time, as if repeating it might change his arithmetic.
“I believe you.” He did, mostly and the part of him that didn’t quite believe her, the part that had clocked the particular hollowed weariness under her eyes and wondered whose ache this dose was actually meant to answer, he kept behind his teeth, because that wasn’t his to say aloud to a stranger over a counter.
“I can give you a measured half of what you’re asking, with valerian added to it that’ll ease the joints and let her sleep besides, without the risk the full dose carries.
It’s the most I can offer you today, mistress.
I’m sorry it’s not more.”
The silence that followed ran longer than was comfortable.
He held it anyway, the way he’d learned to hold silence with a patient’s family who wanted an answer he didn’t have steady, unhurried, letting the quiet do work that arguing wouldn’t.
“Half, then,” she said at last, tight.
“And the valerian.”
He measured it out with more care than the task strictly required, his hand steadier than his first week here would have managed, and wrapped it in a twist of paper the way he’d watched Una do a dozen times before he’d ever tried it himself. Visit novelping . com for the full chapter.
When he turned to the ledger to record the sale, the quill caught on the page’s first stroke and left a small blot before he corrected it his hand still not fully at home with the nib after a life of keyboards and ballpoints, a fact that would have embarrassed him more if there’d been anyone left in the shop to see it.
He wrote the entry anyway, slow, legible, no flourishes: half-measure, valerian, Janet Cameron, her mark beside it where she signed with a simple cross.
“Janet Cameron,” she said, watching him write it, and something in her had eased by a degree he could actually see.
“I’ll tell my sister ye’re a sensible lad, Master Bryce.
She’s had worse from the last apprentice this shop kept, and worse besides from apothecaries with more schooling and less sense.”
“I’ll take that,” Walter said, and meant it the first endorsement this village had handed him that hadn’t come from a letter nobody trusted or a coin changing hands, but from a woman he’d told no, for her own good, and who’d left the shop thinking better of him for it rather than worse.
She was at the door when she turned back, shawl gathered tight against a wind that had picked up outside while neither of them was watching for it.
“My mother’s joints are bad indeed,” she said, quiet, almost an afterthought, almost not.
“But it’s true what they’ll not have told ye yet about this village, Master Bryce.
Everybody’s carrying something.
Ye’ll learn whose is whose, in time.”
The door swung shut behind her, bell rattling once and settling, and Walter stood alone at the counter with the ledger open and the ink still drying on Janet Cameron’s mark, turning her last sentence over the way he’d turned over Iain’s ye walk queer on the road south not as a worry to carry forward, but as a fact worth having, filed where facts belonged, in the part of him that was starting, slowly, to build a map of this place out of nothing but what people let slip when they thought no one was counting.