The Devlin Diary (9 page)

The books in the Earl of Barclay’s collection were marked by a crest of castle and lynx, easily distinguished from Sir Henry Puckering’s
escutcheon of clarion and crow. Claire spent nearly an hour searching before she found the correct folio. One had to proceed slowly with old books to keep from damaging them. Some libraries required the protocol of white cotton gloves (which they provided), but most simply expected clean hands and gentle, professional treatment. Inside the bay, a square oak table designed by Christopher Wren featured a built-in, four-sided revolving book stand in its center. Quite ingenious, Claire thought as she propped the folio upon it.

The folio wasn’t a published book but a collection of letters, mounted on sheets of thick, yellowing paper, much like a scrapbook. Unfortunately there was no mention of whether the letters had been collected contemporaneously or if they’d been assembled much later. Most of the letters seemed to come from the last two decades of the seventeenth century and were composed in a variety of hands. Claire supposed they must be related in some way, but there was no explanation of how. A collection of family letters, no doubt. About two-thirds of the way through, she found the epistle from the court painter.

It was evidence of a working, income-earning female artist, but hardly enough to base a paper on. Claire looked through the remainder of the folio without finding another letter from the painter or any other mention of her. She stood up, returned it to the stacks, and looked around, feeling overwhelmed. So many books, so little time. She hardly knew where to begin. It was tempting to start on one side and methodically work her way around through every single
bookshelf, but even taking a cursory glance at each volume would take days. She could simply choose books at random, she thought, or make a game of it by choosing one book from every shelf. She had to face it: without a comprehensive catalog, there were no shortcuts. She decided to examine the first book on the left side of each shelf, a methodology that would make it easier to begin again exactly where she finished.

The first was an illustrated tome from the Puckering collection:
The royall game of chesse-play: sometimes the recreation of the late King, with many of the nobility,
published in London and written by Gioachino Greco in 1656. The second came from the Barclay:
Recherches anatomiques et physiologiques sur la structure intime des animaux et des vegetaux, et sur leur motilite,
Paris, René Henri Dutrochet, 1684. The third, Barclay again:
Experimental philosophy in three books: containing new experiments, microscopical, mercurial, magnetical. With some deductions, and probable hypotheses, raised from them,
London, Theophilus Ravenscroft, FRS, 1670. And again, Barclay, this time a seventeenth-century work on surgery:
Chirugia spagyrica / Petri loan-nis Fabri doctoris medici Monspeliensis. In qua de morbis cutaneis omnibus spagyrice & methodice agitur, & curatio eorum cita, tuta, & iucunda tractatur,
Toulouse, Pierre-Jean Fabre, 1626. The next book, from the Puckering collection, had a long, explicatory title typical of the era:
The mysteries of opium reveal’d / by Dr. John Jones,…who I. Gives an account of the name, make, choice, effects, &c. of opium. II. Proves all former opinions of its operation to be meer chimera’s. III. Demonstrates what its true cause is…IV. Shews its noxious principle, and how to separate it; thereby rendering it a safe and noble panacea; whereof, V. He shews the palliative and curative use,
London, John Jones, 1701. The following book was another medicinal work:
Organon salutis. An instrument to cleanse the stomach, as also divers new experiments of the virtue of tobacco and coffee: how much they conduce to preserve human health,
London, Walter Rumsey, 1657.

To reach the highest shelf, Claire stood on one of the bay’s four small benches and stretched her hand up as far as it could go. Even so, her fingers could just barely touch the desired volume. She felt a bit like
Alice in Wonderland, struggling to grasp a key off a tabletop that was steadily rising higher and higher. She slowly and very carefully eased the book out of its tight, confined space. But as she gently coaxed it into her hand, she dislodged the volume next to it, which landed on the floor below with a muffled, dust-rising thud. Claire froze and held her breath, waiting for the sound of Mr. Pilford’s footsteps.

When it was clear that the librarian hadn’t heard the unfortunate result of her overreaching ambition, Claire stepped down from the bench and picked the book off the floor. It was a volume about three-quarters of an inch thick and approximately five by seven inches in size, bound in plain, honey-colored leather, unmarked except by the scars and blemishes of age. A book so unprepossessing that she imagined at first it was a schoolboy’s workbook. Claire opened the cover to find the first page with nothing upon it but a date, handwritten in English and faded with time:
November 1672.

She sat down at the oak table to look through this mysterious volume more carefully, propping it up on the book stand. Every page after the first was a puzzle, handwritten in a language she’d never encountered before. It wasn’t Latin, it wasn’t Greek, it wasn’t Hebrew, and it certainly wasn’t English. It looked more like a set of alchemical symbols or algebraic characters, but it clearly wasn’t mathematical. There were no sets or subsets of equations, just a series of strange, singular characters written in neat straight lines that marched smartly across each page.

It must be some sort of code. In Venice, she’d discovered encrypted letters written by Alessandra Rossetti, and she, along with Andrew Kent, had deciphered them. Ever since, Claire had had an interest in codes and ciphers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documents were frequently encrypted. Everyone—ambassadors, kings, merchants, mistresses—used codes in their communiqués, and often in their private papers and ledgers as well. It was the only way to keep one’s secrets secret. But even that didn’t always work, as code breakers were as common as code makers.

But this didn’t look like a ledger. It was something private and
personal, a journal or a diary, perhaps. The pages were not numbered, but the journal appeared to be about sixty to seventy pages long. She carefully turned the yellowing sheets; about halfway through she discovered a second page bearing the date December 1672. It was written in the same delicate, elegant script. A woman’s diary? Instinctively, Claire felt it was a woman’s. Had anyone else ever deciphered it? Or had it sat here for hundreds of years, a voice immured inside this library for centuries, waiting for someone to discover it? Waiting for her, in fact?

Hmmmm…what if she wrote a paper on encryption in the seventeenth century? A big subject, to be sure, but perhaps this discovery would provide a special insight or a new slant. That was if she could break the code and uncover its meaning, of course.

Claire settled in for the long process of copying it by hand. She couldn’t take it out of the library, and she didn’t want to have it photocopied. Not because she was afraid it would be damaged—Mr. Pilford and his associates were accustomed to working with old, fragile materials—but because she didn’t want to subject it to such cold public scrutiny. She realized she already had proprietary feelings about it. It took a while to get the hang of the letterforms, if that’s what they were, but after a couple of hours it began to feel like second nature, and she was working at such a steady pace that she anticipated copying half the diary by closing time. Certain characters were repeated often enough for Claire to be sure that it was some sort of code. But what it meant was completely beyond her.

“Dr. Donovan.”

Claire nearly jumped off the bench. The librarian stood in the open gateway. “Mr. Pilford.” She restrained a desire to shield the book and her notebook from his sight.

“Didn’t you hear the closing chime, Dr. Donovan?”

“No,” Claire admitted. “Is it six o’clock already?”

“Indeed it is. The library is closed. Not to mention that it’s time for my tea.”

“Of course, Mr. Pilford.”

“Please put the books back exactly where you found them.”

“Yes, Mr. Pilford.” The librarian looked harmless enough, but there was enough starch in his manner for Claire to get the message that disobedience would not be tolerated. With some reluctance, she closed the diary and placed it back on its high shelf. Then she left the library, taking the path around the back of the Wren and walking in to New Court through the west gateway.

Derek Goodman was on his way out. “Dr. Donovan,” he said with obvious pleasure at seeing her again.

“Dr. Goodman.” Claire had been in the library for hours without a break, and she felt unguarded, as if he’d just caught her waking up from a nap. She hoped she hadn’t been twisting her hair into knots, as she sometimes did while she was concentrating.

“How are you getting along?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Really?” His eyes narrowed as he studied her face. “I’m not sure I believe you. You look like you haven’t seen a ray of sunshine or had a bit of fun since you got here. I’m afraid you’ve discovered that Cambridge is not always the friendliest place in the world.”

“No, it’s been great,” she said with as much sincerity as she could muster.

“Are you busy tonight?”

Claire had hoped that Andrew Kent had called her sometime during the day, but this was hardly the time to check her cell phone, no matter how badly she wanted to. What were the chances he’d actually called? Based on recent experience, they were pretty slim, she decided. “No, actually, I’m not.”

“You’re a beautiful woman, it’s Friday night, and you’re all alone. You mean to tell me that you’re having a good time?”

“Well, I’ve been working all day in the Wren Library—”

Derek laughed. “That’s what you call fun? You know what they say about all work and no play.”

Claire nodded. “Makes for a very dull—,” she began.

“Swot, git, and a boffin,” Derek finished for her.

“A what?”

“I’ll be happy to explain each of these colorful expressions to you if you’ll join me for a beer in the pub.”

“Now?”

“Do you have something better to do?” Derek smiled and Claire felt that odd weakness in her knees again.

No, she certainly didn’t.

5 November 1672

T
HE FIRST SOUNDS
of the morning are indistinct, transformed by sleep into dream metaphors: angry bees buzzing, waves crashing, trees felled by bolts of lightning. Eventually the sounds reach deep into her slumbering consciousness and Hannah raises her head from her desk. She fell asleep just before dawn with her face resting on her open journal, apparently in the act of writing. Directly downstairs the argument continues, and even though she can’t hear the exact words, she can distinguish her mother’s elevated, insistent voice and Mrs. Wills’s deeper, patient response. Hannah already suspects how it will end, and she remains still for the short time necessary for her hunch to be proven correct: her mother lets loose with a flurry of words, her bedroom door slams, and the key turns in the lock. Mrs. Wills stands outside on the landing, pointlessly jiggling the doorknob while muttering under her breath the most scathing oaths her conscience will allow.

These sounds of discord and unhappiness have woken Hannah, but they have not surprised her; she hears them too often. She picks up a dressing gown from her untouched bed and wraps it around her night shift. Even in her attic bedroom, receptacle of all the heat that rises from the basement kitchen and the half dozen fireplaces down
stairs, November mornings are cold. She briefly looks in the small mirror next to the armoire. Her hair is wild and she has a smudge of black ink on her cheek. She moistens a fingertip and rubs at it, to little avail. Without further effort she leaves the room, stopping on her way to the kitchen and knocking on her mother’s door, one floor below.

“Go away,” her mother shouts.

Hannah’s shoulders sag and she momentarily stands mute, unsure of what to do. “Mother, it’s me, Hannah.”

“I’m not receiving any visitors this morning.”

I’m not a visitor, I’m your daughter,
she wants to shout in reply but doesn’t, partly from embarrassment—they might hear her downstairs—and partly from sheer futility. Her mother seldom recognizes her anymore. Charlotte D’urfey Briscoe came from a well-to-do family in Montpellier. She grew up headstrong and spoiled, so that her desire for knowledge—and for the young English physician studying at Montpellier’s renowned university—was indulged, even approved, in the manner of parents too old or too tired to protest. After they married, she moved with Hannah’s father to Paris, where his practice included members of the exiled English court. Once Charlotte was a physician as skilled as Dr. Briscoe, even though, like Hannah, she had no legal sanction to practice. Hannah remembers their years in France as happy ones, but it’s a child’s perspective: she knows now it couldn’t have been easy. Charlotte gave birth to three children after Hannah, none of whom survived past the cradle, and the subsequent move to London was difficult for her. In contrast to Paris, it was polluted, crowded, and unsafe. Then came the Plague and the Fire. After 1666, both Hannah and her father noticed that Charlotte was often confused and forgetful. Her sickness of mind progressively grew worse, and after Hannah’s father was killed, Charlotte deteriorated further. She had sudden changes of humor and could be unreasonable, even violent. At other times she was as sweet as a kitten, happy to putter in her room upstairs, drawing pictures or arranging flowers. Sometimes she escaped their vigilance and left the house to roam the streets. Kind neighbors would find her at the markets or at an apothecary’s, befuddled and lost, and bring her home. Londoners’ hatred of the
French and of Catholics meant that it was never entirely safe for a Frenchwoman, especially one not in full possession of her senses, to wander around alone.

The only person whose company Charlotte truly enjoys is Lucy Harsnett’s, their youngest maid. As Hannah groggily makes her way downstairs, past the second floor with Mrs. Wills’s and Hester’s rooms, then past the ground floor parlor, she wonders why Lucy is not upstairs with her mother. When she reaches the kitchen she discovers the reason: there is some sort of row going on. She can feel the stormy aftermath in the air, can see it in their faces. Mrs. Wills looks pinched, as if she’s still mentally muttering curses; Lucy and Hester Pinney, the other maidservant, sit on the bench at the kitchen table and pick sourly at their breakfast of cheese, bread, and herrings.

Hannah spies a tray with an untouched plate of food on it. “Has my mother refused her breakfast again?”

“Even Lucy couldn’t tempt her,” Mrs. Wills replies with a curt nod. “Lucy told Mrs. Briscoe we didn’t have any hen’s eggs this morning and your mother became much distressed. Then I went upstairs to try to smooth things over, but she got even angrier and then”—Mrs. Wills looks darkly at the two girls—“she locked me out, because someone left the key to her door inside her room.”

On closer inspection, Hannah notices that Lucy’s blue eyes are swollen from crying and the pale residue of tears streaks her peaches-and-cream complexion. She’s a pretty, sweet-tempered girl, whom Hannah’s mother dotes on. Charlotte would be content to brush Lucy’s long golden hair for hours, if Lucy would allow it, and frequently seems calmed just by gazing upon Lucy’s perfect English-rose beauty. Lucy is often troubled when Charlotte is too unreasonable to be soothed by her presence, but apparently something more than that is causing her unhappiness today.

“I’m not the one who left it there,” Lucy sniffs.

“I didn’t leave it there, either,” Hester adds vehemently.

“You
must
have been the one who left it there,” Lucy says. “I know better than to let her have the key.”

“But I’m not the one who’s always in her room, you are.”

“You did it on purpose,” Lucy says, indignant. “You’re trying to get me into trouble, just because you’re jealous.”

“Jealous of you? Why would I be jealous of someone who’s too stupid to remember what she’s done?”

“Girls, that’s enough,” Hannah orders. Why could she not be the mistress of a congenial household, as her mother was when she was able?

The maidservants fall into an uneasy silence. Hester’s a year older than Lucy, but at sixteen she’s still scrawny and gangly, with dark ginger hair and freckled skin. She’ll never be a beauty like Lucy, to whom it is her misfortune to be continually compared. As the girls have gotten older—they’ve both been in Hannah’s service for six years—Hester has grown increasingly resentful. Hannah isn’t sure that Hester is aware of it as such, but she sometimes overhears her saying unkind things to Lucy, and of the two Hester is more often in need of reprimand for leaving the washing out, or neglecting to turn the beds, or staying out too long on errands. Often Hannah thinks that having the two girls in her house is like living with a benevolent spirit and an angry one. But they won’t be with her forever. The parents of both girls are deceased, and, as their employer and guardian, she’ll have to begin thinking about dowries for them soon. She glances at Hester, who lowers her smoldering eyes to her plate. That’s if anyone will have her.

“I’m beyond caring which of you did it,” Mrs. Wills says. “Finish your breakfast, pick open the lock on Mrs. Briscoe’s door, distract her, and get the key back, or else neither of you will be allowed out to the market this morning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girls answer dutifully.

Although she’s finished scolding the girls, Mrs. Wills is still angry; Hannah can tell just by the way she stirs the simmering pot on the stove. Hannah is also fairly certain she knows why the goodwife is seething, and she attempts to curtail Mrs. Wills’s upcoming lecture with a diversion. “We should get another key made. I’ll keep it in a secret place, so if she locks herself in again we’ll be able to open the door. Why don’t you summon the locksmith today?”

“I thought we didn’t have the money.”

“We do now.”

Mrs. Wills taps the wooden spoon on the rim of the stew pot and sets it aside. She turns to Hannah, who instantly realizes that her best effort has failed. “And where were you all night, without so much as a note to keep me from worry?”

Mrs. Wills is an excellent, though somewhat stern, goodwife who’s been with Hannah’s family since they moved to London, but Hannah wishes that she would remember that Hannah isn’t twelve anymore, and that she is de facto mistress of the house. “I went to see young Matthew, Mr. Polk’s apprentice.”

“You were there all night?”

“I stayed with him until he died.”

Mrs. Wills frowns. Lucy and Hester exchange a troubled look. “He died of the smallpox,” Hannah explains. “We’ve all had it. There’s no danger to any one of us.”

“And what of the danger to a woman who insists on walking about at all hours of the night?”

“I keep to the lighted streets and I carry a knife.”

“So does everyone else. Just last week a curate was found dead at the Inns of Court. He’d been robbed of every stitch on his person and had his throat cut from ear to ear.”

“Mrs. Wills, please, the girls—”

The goodwife looks somewhat chastened but holds her ground. “Keeping the truth from them won’t make them safe, it will just make them foolish. Doesn’t a day go by in this city without somebody getting robbed or killed. Your father should have known better, and so should you.”

“I was merely trying to comfort the poor boy.”

“You have more to think about than just your patients,” Mrs. Wills adds needlessly.

“Yes, I know.” Hannah stands over the gurgling pot, inhaling its savory aroma. “Is that beef in there?”

“We got a good price for it,” Mrs. Wills says defensively. Their budget doesn’t always include money for meat.

“It smells divine.” Hannah has learned from long experience that
the best way to get on the good side of Mrs. Wills is to compliment her cooking.

“It’s for dinner,” she says. She brusquely waves Hannah away from the stove, but she has a raised brow and a pursed lip, which in her case passes for a smile. “Noon sharp. Mind you’re here for it.”

The apprentice behind the counter at the Blackhorse Alley apothecary shop holds up his hand. “Please, Mrs. Devlin, you go too fast for me. What were the last three you mentioned?”

“Twelve scruples guaiacum powder, two ounces tincture of roses, and sarsaparilla extract, six ounces.”

With a quill, he scratches a few cryptic marks onto a scrap of paper. “Is that all?”

She’s already requested more than fifteen different simples—medicines of only one ingredient. She prefers to make her own compounds, creating unique combinations for each patient and their particular symptoms. Mademoiselle de Keroualle’s treatment will consist of a gentle herbal purgative, some hartshorn mixed in rosewater to ease the pains of fever, and an electuary—a medicine made with honey—with the diaphoretics guaiacum and sarsaparilla to bring on a cleansing and fever-reducing sweat. This will be followed, as soon as the patient is able, by soothing herb-infused baths and a steady administration of her father’s remedy, a complex blend of more than twenty herb, flower, and root distillations. She nods to the apprentice, who turns toward the back of the shop with his scrap of paper. “Wait,” she says, mentally calculating the coins in her purse. “Would you add syrup of poppies, two ounces, please?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The apprentice disappears through a curtain into the back room. The public portion of the tiny shop is only ten feet wide and half as deep. It’s not much more than a doorway opening into a small room filled by a U-shaped wood counter and, behind that, floor-to-ceiling shelves. She’s the only person in the shop, but it feels strangely occupied. Lining the walls are glass and ceramic canisters filled with the raw materials of the apothecary’s art: hartshorn and dried toads; gnarled
ginger root, peony root, and mossy tufts of fern; birds’ nests, doves’ tails, swallows’ eyes, and crows’ beaks; snails and mouse tails and a jar of pale gold liquid innocently labeled Puppy-Dog Water.

The apprentice pops his head out from the curtain. “Mr. Murray wants to know if you’d like London treacle instead. He says it’s quite good, he made it only yesterday.”

London treacle is a compound that includes opium, along with sixty other ingredients. Originally, many centuries ago, it was created as an antidote for poison. That it is entirely ineffective for this purpose has in no way reduced its popularity; the London
Pharmacopoeia
recommends it for maladies ranging from ague to Saint Vitus’ dance. “No, thank you. Just the poppy syrup, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Hannah looks outside and catches her faint reflection in the window. It startles her. At first she doesn’t recognize it as herself: shadowed eyes stare out of a ghostly countenance without a spot of color anywhere, not even in the pale line of her mouth. She wonders how others see her, if she is beginning to appear as haunted as she feels. The headache is still with her. It’s a near-constant presence, an enemy that temporarily retreats only to regroup and attack with greater force. Some mornings it will disappear for two hours or even three, lulling her with the false promise of a day without pain. But gradually it creeps back again. At times her awareness of it will come upon her suddenly, in one sharp, blinding jolt, and she will realize that the headache has been with her for hours, that everything she does and has done, every effort, every movement, every word she has spoken, is and has been informed by pain.

She tries to remember when her affliction began. Not, she is certain, while her husband, Nathaniel, was still alive. Even during the long vigil of his fatal illness—smallpox that struck him down before he was yet four and twenty—she cannot recall being troubled so. And Sarah? The months she had with her daughter were among the sweetest of her life. Bittersweet, as Nathaniel did not live to see his child born. Tears she remembers, many tears, especially after Sarah succumbed to a fever, but headaches? No. This distemper did not
begin until after her father died. Yes, she thinks, it must have started sometime in the past year.

Like many doctors, Hannah is a recalcitrant patient. She allowed weeks to go by, expecting the intermittent pain to go away again on its own, before making a concerted effort to cure her own ailment. As the headaches became more frequent, she sampled many remedies, staying up late at night to peruse by candlelight every recipe book she could find—the
Pharmacopoeia,
Culpeper’s
Herbal,
Gideon Harvey’s
The Family Physician,
her own parents’ notes and observations—until her eyes ached as much as her head. At least, she tried those cures that seemed the least informed by superstition: concoctions of cephalic drugs such as amber, clove, cinnamon, rosemary; cold plasters and hot plasters; the distilled water of vervain; chamomile flowers moistened with warm milk. She had stopped short of shaving her head and anointing it with a paste made of myrtle, oil of roses, and ground beetles, or extracting the mind’s morbid humors by attaching a leech to her nostrils and letting blood, as was sometimes recommended. After months of experiment, she has found that opium is the only medicine that alleviates her pain, temporary though its effects may be.