The Poison Diaries: Nightshade (11 page)

She walks ahead of me to the next display case and points to its contents: a leather bag with a long strap, sewn together with thin strips of animal hide and adorned with painted emblems, seashells, and feathers.

“What is it?”

“One of my recent acquisitions. It is called a
medicine bag, from one of the native tribes of North America. A fascinating people, highly skilled in the use of plants' power. They too understand nature's essence as divine. So much so that they do not think it is man's place to own the land at all. Imagine that – think of all the wars we would have missed!”

Puzzled, I ask, “Is that why this information must be kept secret?”

“It is heresy, Weed,” she explains. “We live in strange times. The end of the century approaches, and the people are afraid: What unknown future lies in wait? Everywhere the world is changing. A spirit of revolution spreads like fire. Your American colonies have already succumbed. Now France has fallen prey to it. Some say England will be next.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, but I cannot block the memory of the preacher at the crossroads, my hands wrapped around his neck as he pleads for his life –
Repent, for the end is near
–

Her voice calls me back from the past. “The idea that we humans are not the rightful rulers of this
earth, but merely one type of thinking, feeling creature among many, all equally ensouled – it changes the very idea of what it means to be human. There is a chemist working in your country, a Dr. Priestley. I follow his work carefully. His experiments suggest that plants may even manufacture the air we breathe.”

She throws her arms wide. “Plants make the air! Do you understand what that means? Our food, our air, our very lives come from the plants. How could they not be of divine origin, of divine intelligence? How can we deny that, in some essential way, they are no less than you or I?”

I thought I would feel comforted to hear her say aloud these truths that have been unspeakable my whole life. Instead I become afraid. Why are the plants so afraid of Oleander that they cannot even speak of him, or hear his name uttered?

“What of Jessamine?” I ask.

“The collection also teaches us that nature is not an angel,” Signora Baglioni says quietly. “There is a dark side. Nature has its devils, too: the volcanoes
that spew ash into the sky and blot out the sun, the floods that clear away all life and force the world to start over. The Shinto priests of Japan would say, ‘The gentle breeze that cools us in summer is also the hurricane that destroys.'”

“The plant that cures also kills.” I close my eyes and feel the cold shadow of the dark prince pass over me. “All is balance.”

She takes out her ring of keys and begins unlocking one of the cases. “Yes. There is a balance, and that balance can be destroyed. May I have Mr. Luxton's diary, please?” I hand it over, glad to be rid of the vile object. She finds a place for it on a shelf. “I will catalogue it tomorrow. For now, I simply wish it to be locked away, where no one can find it.”

She pockets her keys and turns to me. “As I sat in my lovely garden, reading this book of horrors while you slept, I thought: Here in Padua the air is gentle and the bees hum with joy, but in some windswept corner of northern England, a man with evil in his heart has created a terrible garden that has somehow upset the
balance of nature, and let the hurricane have dominion over the breeze, the tidal wave over the gentle swells. Am I right, Weed? Is this the greater evil you speak of?”

I nod. “The poison garden has taken form and shape. It has anointed a leader. He fancies himself a prince.”

“Does this prince have a name?”

“His name is Oleander. He calls himself the Prince of Poisons.”

She takes me by my arms, searches my face. “And who are you, Weed? What role do you play in all this?”

“I – I do not know.”

“You do!” She grips my flesh hard. “Who do the plants say you are?”

I suddenly have the urge to bolt, to climb and claw my way above ground. But the signora holds me fast. “The plants in the forest of Northumberland call me the Human Who Hears.”

“And you
can
hear them.” She says it with awe. “You hear them all: the trees, the flowers – all the healing plants?”

“The poisons, too.”

She releases me. “How wonderful! It is a miracle, surely.”

“It feels a curse to me.”

“No, no! Listen to the ancients.” She gestures around the room. “In all of these lands, the person who could bridge the worlds was revered. He was a shaman, a holy person. Think of it: Humans can survive without animals, and animals without humans, but the Earth itself and all that lives upon it would die a barren, airless death without plants. They are our true masters, though we pretend otherwise. You are an emissary, Weed. A peacemaker, perhaps.”

“But what am I to do?” I say, feeling hollow.

“That is what you and I must discover, together. This Oleander is the real danger. Like the Hebrew
golem
of old, he is a monster that rises from the dirt and forgets he is only made of mud.”

“Oleander is a monster,” I say heatedly. “I would destroy him if I knew how.”

She reaches and chooses a book off the shelf. “My
grandfather wrote of just such beings – for Oleander is not the first dark spirit to rise up this way, and will not be the last. Here, listen.” She turns the yellowed pages, and reads:

“Jessamine!” My fists are clenched; I wish to strike and strike again – but my enemy is not here. “She is a healer. She is light and growth. That is why he has taken her.”

Signora Baglioni looks grim. “It is what I fear, too. Jessamine may well be the key to his power. You must find her, Weed – not just for your own sake and hers, but for the sake of us all.” A wave of grief crosses her face. “I hope – I pray – it is not too late.”

J
ESSAMINE
L
UXTON
.

Jessamine Luxton.

The name is so familiar to me.

Sometimes I think the name was once mine. I can close my eyes and conjure such sweet, simple scenes: a girl and a boy, lying together in the meadow grass of a sheep-dotted field. Gazing into each other's eyes, fingers entwined. Two children, playing at love.

The girl's name is Jessamine. The boy – what a strange name he has! It skitters along my memory like a dragonfly on a pond, so close to the surface, never
landing. But it is a strange name, of that I am almost sure.

Or perhaps the sweet scene in the meadow is a fantasy, and the story of a girl called Jessamine and the beautiful boy she loves with her whole innocent heart is no more than a dream I once had – a dream I have long since woken from and that is now almost completely forgotten.

For that is what happens to dreams. One wakes, the fantasies of the night fade, and the hard, cold truth of the day comes crushing down until it aches to draw breath.

How it aches, sometimes! A stabbing that tears my heart in two. Enough. Dream or memory, it does not matter. Jessamine is no more.

And what of Rowan, the unsmiling seamstress? In my mind she lies a corpse, bloated and pale, drowned at the bottom of the Tyne. Her naked body is tangled in the eelgrass of the riverbed. Her hair floats in the current; her eyes stare blindly into the murk. Her youthful flesh is blue and cold, food for the crabs and the fish.

Or is it? For I think I was Rowan, for a time. Can she be dead if I live? My mind is very unclear of late. A jumble of thoughts travel in endless spirals, whirling around and sinking ever downward – the past gets buried deeper every day, but I can still remember the warmth of Rye's breath in my ear, and the touch of his rough hands upon my skin.

I rarely feel pity anymore, or any soft or tender feeling, but I feel pity for Rye. He will not trust a woman again, that I know. He will spend his life as he was meant to spend it: as an outlaw and a profiteer, alone save for the parade of naive girls to be wooed, bedded, and cruelly tossed aside. Each conquest will serve as another useless revenge upon me, until in time he forgets me, too – just as I have already forgotten myself.

 

Belladonna is my name now. It suits me; at least it suits the girl who looks back at me from the mirror. My skin is pale as a snowdrift, for I cannot bear to go out in the sun, and I rarely have the urge to eat. Thanks to fresh applications of indigo and henna, my hair is a lustrous
raven black. It cascades like waves of a midnight sea over my angled, bloodless cheeks.

My eyes are nearly black, too – my pupils stare from within a thin ring of ice blue, dark and round and shining, like the deadly nightshade berries I once tended like a mother.

Belladonna. A most deadly nightshade, indeed.

Remember, Jessamine, you will be raising a litter of assassins…

Memory, or dream? A man spoke those words to me, long ago. A stern, forbidding man. He often scolded me. I was afraid of him; that much I do recall.

Was he my father?

My mind goes weirdly blank at the thought. I remember only this: that I left Rye in the dark of early morning, with Oleander urging me on and on.

Run
,
lovely,
he told me, in that mocking voice that slithers hourly within my brain.
Run, though you have nowhere to go.

I have only enough money for a day's bread – why did I not take more?

You should have listened to me, when I told you to let the girl die. Now you will run until you tire, until you hunger and thirst, until your feet bleed, until the snows come.

I will find refuge somewhere – surely someone will have pity on me –

For a time, perhaps. But it will make no difference. No matter where you go, it will be the same as it was with these ignorant, witch-hunting fools. You will be hated, hunted down, despoiled, and driven away.

What shall I do, then?

Obey me from now on, lovely. Obey me without question. I will tell you what to do.

I would not have survived without Oleander. He guided me from one town to the next. When I ran out of money, he taught me how to get more, so that I might buy what I needed to live – clothes, food, lodging, transportation.

From Oleander I learned that when one is skilled in the use of poisons, there is always someone willing to pay for the quiet disappearance of a rival, the death of a brutal husband, or the tragic, fatal illness of
a sibling whose inheritance one covets.

I had no idea how easy it would be, to earn money this way. But once one is without hope or scruple, many things become possible.

Yes, once one has ripped all mercy from one's heart, as if mercy were no more than a weed – a straggly weed, to be pulled up by the roots and thrown away with the rubbish! – so many utterly dreadful things become possible.

And truly, it is so difficult to obtain justice in this world. There are days I feel like a healer, still, when I am able to achieve what the law cannot. So I would not call myself unhappy, far from it. After seeing much of England, I have finally arrived in London. I have made many new acquaintances here, and they in turn have introduced me to all manner of pleasures.

Laudanum, for example. The formula is simple. It is made from opium, harvested from the seed case of the poppy flower and then mixed with alcohol. At first I was reluctant to drink it, but Oleander bid me do so, and I soon understood why. It creates the most
delicious feeling in the brain. It sharpens my senses like an arrow, until the world and its wonders are made vivid beyond words.

Laudanum makes the bright, clean scent of the night into an intoxicating perfume. It reveals the impossible nearness of the sky. After taking laudanum, there are times when I know, if I just stretched up a bit more, I could brush my fingertips against the stars.

And yet there are other senses that laudanum seems to extinguish altogether. The sense of memory, for one. The sense of guilt, the sense of honour; it erases all of these rather well.

I am glad, for to be without memory, guilt, or honour is an advantage in my line of work. I take laudanum to fall asleep when sleep refuses to come, and also when being awake has become too… complicated.

Mostly I take it when a phantom voice rises stubbornly to the surface of my mind, claiming to be a messenger from the ruins of long ago. It calls that familiar name:

Jessamine!

Jessamine!

It even uses that word, the one that is no longer mine to speak, or think: love –

This is all very interesting, lovely. But really, what is the point of dwelling on the past? It is the future that counts. Our future.

His name is Weed! I remember now. Oh, how I loved him! You promised to bring me to him, Oleander. Will you keep your promise?

Of course, lovely. Very soon, I will. Although I cannot guarantee what kind of reception you will get. As I recall, he could be somewhat priggish, and you are quite a bit changed from the simple country girl he once knew.

I suppose I am… I had not thought of that.

He may even be repelled by you. You are a murderer, after all. Your wits are addled by opium, and you can hardly claim to have been faithful. You have the sweaty horse trader to thank for that.

He will revile me for a monster – do not take me to him, Oleander, I beg you! I would not have him see what I have become –

Silly girl. Of course I will take you to him. It is always pleasant to pay a call on an old friend, and a promise is a promise. But first we have work to do. I wish you to meet some acquaintances of mine. They are men of ambition and vision, who can appreciate your true worth… not like that sanctimonious what's-his-name…

He is right, I know.

Oleander is always right. I see that now.

Strange that I did not see it before.