Page 3 of Hemlock & Silver

My interest in poisons began when I was eleven years old.

My sisters and I had been sent to the countryside to avoid the foul air that was said to permeate the city that summer, bringing typhus and glandular fever with it.

My father had an estate there with orchards and olive trees and a small vineyard, all of it capably managed by our aunt.

It was startlingly lush to my eyes—Four Saints is on the edge of the desert, and while you can grow plenty of things there, few of them come in such shocking shades of green.

On the first day, our cousin Anthony was given charge of his cousins and told to show us around the estate.

Anthony was nearly thirteen and clearly resented being saddled with three younger children—my sister Catherine was only seven and inclined to be weepy—so he dedicated himself to showing just how ignorant the town-based cousins were.

“Bet you don’t know what this is,” he said, about the olive trees and the presses where the oil was made.

“Bet you don’t know what this is,” about the killdeer pretending to have a broken wing and the great fields of ripening wheat and the ant lions hidden in their funnels of sand.

“Bet you don’t know what this is,” he said, of the purple and yellow flowers of nightshade, which, he assured us, would kill us dead if we so much as touched a petal to our tongues.

And “Bet you don’t know what this is,” about a tall plant with a lacy mop of white flowers, which he pulled up from the ground, displaying a pale, knobbly root crusted with dirt.

“What is it?” asked Catherine, as she had asked for the last four hours.

“It’s a carrot, stupid,” said Anthony. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Really?” asked my sister Isobel, as she had also asked for the last four hours.

“It doesn’t look like a carrot,” I said. Carrots, in my experience, were purple or yellow, not cream-colored, although it was carrot-shaped and had the same little leggy roots.

“It’s a wild carrot,” said Anthony. “Bet you didn’t know they could grow wild. Bet you thought they only came from a market cart.”

I shrugged. I had never given much thought to the origin of carrots.

Anthony laughed at me, chopped the root off with his knife, wiped off the worst of the dirt, and popped it into his mouth.

Two hours later he was dead.

The next day, while the whole estate was plunged into mourning and Anthony’s mother had taken to her bed, I slipped away to the field where the poison hemlock that looked so much like wild carrots grew.

I looked for the knot of lacy white flowers, pulled one up, then laid it out on the ground and crouched over the pale root, studying it.

I knew that death existed, of course. I had lost two grandparents and one baby sister in the crib.

I had not particularly liked Anthony, though I felt very bad for his mother, so I could not say that I was mourning him.

But it struck me as deeply bizarre that Anthony had been alive and then his path had intersected with this quiet little root and now he wasn’t alive any longer.

I sniffed cautiously at the carrot-like shape.

It smelled like mouse nests. I wondered if Anthony had noticed that and simply kept chewing because he didn’t want to spit it out in front of his cousins after making such a big deal about it.

Bravado and a little root no thicker than my own small thumb had killed him.

I could pick the root up now and bite into it, and I, too, would be dead. The thought gave me a strange queasy feeling, as if I was looking down from a very high place.

It had all happened so fast . Two hours! It seemed wrong that something so large and irrevocable as death could happen so fast. The sun hadn’t even gone down. Anthony had died in daylight, and no one had been able to say, Wait, stop, this shouldn’t happen, and change it.

But when the horse threw the stable boy last year and his head hit the stones and he died, it took less than a minute. Two hours is much, much longer than that.

Two hours should have been long enough to do something.

I jammed my chin onto my fist, my mind twisting and turning over those two hours.

My aunt had tried to make Anthony vomit, but it had been too late.

They poured medicines down his throat and rubbed oil under his nostrils, hoping to stave off the creeping effects of the poison, but nothing worked.

In the end, they prayed desperately to Saint Adder, but it seemed that not even a saint could help.

“There’s no antidote,” one of the servants had said softly to another, not realizing that there was a young girl listening. “Oh, poor boy. There’s no cure for hemlock. Better they should let him go peacefully.”

I sat back on my heels beside the root that was stronger than a saint, thinking.

Overhead, the sky was a perfect shade of blue, and the wind rustled in the grass, and a killdeer called, crying over its not-broken wing.

I cataloged all those things absently, but the thought that kept coming back to me was a simple question.

Why isn’t there a cure?

I was a child with a child’s attention span. Many adults think this is no more than a butterfly’s, flittering from thought to thought, but they have forgotten how, in some children, it is as sharp and pointed as a stiletto. Mine was focused now.

The victim I chose for my stiletto was the herbwoman who made up possets and tinctures for the estate.

I walked into the stillroom, smelling the rich array of scents, pungent and sweet and acrid by turns, went up to the herbwoman, and asked, without preamble, “Why is there no cure for hemlock poisoning?”

The herbwoman was good with herbs and awkward with people, particularly children.

She was so awkward, in fact, that she did not answer with a story that would impose order on the world, as my nurse would, nor a parable placing it in the hands of the saints, as the family priest would. Instead she told me the exact truth.

“I don’t know.”

My eyes narrowed. An adult telling me that they didn’t know something was both novel and unwelcome. “There should be a cure,” I said.

“There may be one,” the herbwoman offered, inching away slightly, “but no one knows what it is.”

This opened up new possibilities, and I didn’t like any of them. If there was a cure, then Anthony had died because of ignorance. (The weary young woman who attempted to teach languages and deportment to me and my sisters was very fond of the word ignorance and used it often.)

I stood in the quiet of the stillroom, thinking. The herbwoman, with many sidelong glances, went back to grinding dried borage with a mortar and pestle. Soft crunching sounds drifted through the room, while I worked through the ramifications of ignorance.

Some poisons did have cures… No, that was wrong. Some poisons had cures that people knew about . I had seen people hawking such things on the streets of the city, promising antidotes for arsenic and the bites of mad dogs and overindulgence in lead, whatever that meant. But not hemlock.

“How many poisons don’t have cures?” I demanded, startling the herbwoman so badly that she dropped her pestle.

“Saints!” the woman said, getting down on her knees to retrieve the wayward implement, which had, of course, rolled under the table.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “Lots, I suppose. Beetleblister and cherry laurel water. Autumn crocus. Distillate of cyclamen.” She scrabbled for the pestle, which had rolled too far back for her to reach.

“I’ll get it.” I flattened myself, slid half-under the table, and emerged with the pestle, which I handed over. The herbwoman wiped it off on her skirt and went back to work.

“Could those other poisons have cures, too?” I asked. “Except nobody knows what they are?”

“Very likely,” the herbwoman said, clearly wondering when this alarming child would go away.

I folded my arms. “How did people find the cures we do have, then?”

The herbwoman rubbed a hand over her face and again told the truth, which, in this case, many adults would not have. “In ancient times, they’d poison prisoners and then give them an antidote. If the prisoner lived, they’d know it was a cure. If he died, they’d know they hadn’t gotten it right yet.”

If she was hoping that this gruesome information would cause me to flee, she was disappointed.

I lifted my head like a warhorse hearing battle.

“ Really? ” I breathed, appalled and fascinated, imagining the poisoned prisoners and the desperate hope that they would be the lucky one who got an antidote that worked.

“They don’t do that now,” the herbwoman said hastily, doubtless wondering what idea she’d put in my head. “Only a long time ago.”

“What do they do now?”

“Err… test it on dogs, mostly. Or doves sometimes, or rabbits.”

I made a pained noise. I was fond of dogs, and this seemed much more real and immediate than a prisoner from ancient times who would’ve been long dead anyway.

“At any rate,” said the herbwoman, in a desperate attempt to wrestle back control of the conversation, “doctors know all sorts of cures these days. But there are lots of poisons, so be careful what you eat. Not like poor young Anthony.”

She turned her attention firmly to the table in front of her. When she finally looked up, I can only assume that she was enormously relieved to see that the merchant’s daughter and her questions had gone away.

My sisters and I returned to the city as soon as it was safe to do so, leaving the olive trees and the poison hemlock and the grieving mother behind.

I, who had never particularly cared for my lessons or my tutors, went into the library and ran my fingers across the tooled bindings of the books, then pulled one down and began to read.

No one bothered me for two days, and then I heard footsteps and looked up to see my tutor standing in the entrance to the library.