It is always cooler inside the apothecary than out. That is the first thing every patient says, and the second thing every patient notices, and I have stopped being grateful for it the way one stops being grateful for one's own lungs.
I closed the door and stood for a count of six, listening to the street empty.
My ears are one of the things I keep best. Madam Lustra has called my trades, plural, in her better moods: the healing one and the other one. The door lock takes a long count to settle, and in that long count I know if the street is empty or not.
It was empty. The grey coat I had not looked at, whose not-looking had cost me two streets of focused attention on a brass lamp post I had no use for, was already round the corner of my memory into the part I would pick over later.
I let my hands move.
I am good with my hands. Patients don't always come back to tell you that, but the ones who don't come back are mostly the ones I have not been able to help, and most of the ones I have not been able to help have not been able to be helped by anyone. That is a professional sentence. Madam Lustra trained me to think in professional sentences. The world outside the apothecary does not always allow them.
I unlocked the case of fresh aconite. I set it on the middle bench. I put the kettle on.
I had been home four minutes when the bell above the door rang.
This was wrong.
Customers come in the morning. Customers who matter come in the morning with an appointment that has been negotiated by letter over three weeks. This was not morning. This was not a customer. This was, by the look of the brass shoes alone, a house.
The man in my doorway was tall in the way tall men are tall: apologetically. He wore the deep plum velvet the Imperium reserves for households of a certain stature. The buttons were moon-stamped. The livery was not the livery of the building I had politely stopped thinking about six minutes ago, but it was, by the look of the cut, the livery of the building next door to that building.
He did not come in. He stood on the step.
"Miss Adams." His voice was the voice of someone who had been trained to say a name as if it were a small object placed carefully on a tray.
"Yes."
"A delivery for Madam Lustra. To the Velvet Mansion."
"I am not Madam Lustra."
"Madam Lustra has been good enough to send it on through your establishment, miss."
He held out a small wooden case. The wood was pale ash. The clasps were silver. The case did not bear the apothecary guild seal, which is what I would have expected if Madam Lustra had wanted the case to be obviously hers.
I did not take it yet.
"Where did it come from," I said. "From Madam Lustra's shop, I assume."
"From her hands, miss. Through mine."
The kettle, behind me, decided to whistle. I was pleased with the whistle. It gave me a reason not to answer for the count of three. I counted them.
"Send it through," I said, finally, "in the morning."
"The buyer is expecting it this evening, miss. By her word."
"Her word." Her word. The buyer's word. The buyer. As if I had not already named her, in my own head, before the bell finished. I had been afraid of the bell before it rang, and the bell had simply been honest about it.
The man waited.
I took the case. The ash was cooler than the air outside, and a little damp. The damage to my dignity if I said no would have been considerable. The damage to my profession if I said yes would have been considerable. I chose the smaller damage.
"I'll take it within the hour," I said.
"Within the hour, miss."
"It will be in the buyer's hands before the sun is off the chimneys."
"Her word will be pleased, miss."
He turned. The brass shoes went down my three apothecary steps the way a man carries himself down three steps he would rather not be carrying himself down. I closed the door. The lock took its long count.
I stood in the middle of my shop with the case under my arm and the kettle screaming in a corner I had forgotten to attend to.
The kettle I could fix. The case was different.
I set the case on the middle bench. I unlatched the clasps. Inside, nested in ash wool, was a small bottle the colour of weak honey and a folded card.
The bottle I knew. My own recipe, two seasons old, returned under a name I had not used for it on the bench. Whoever had made it had been taught by the same hands that taught me.
The card said: For her hand, in person. Your good name is the receipt.
Madam Lustra's handwriting. The flourishes a woman uses when she wants to be sure the recipient knows the flourishes are deliberate. Not a delivery. A summons dressed as one — the kind of thing Madam Lustra has done for sixteen years, which I have never refused, because refusing would mean I had stopped doing the work I have done since I was sixteen. I have not stopped.
I pocketed the bottle. I changed my coat for the dark one with the silver buttons that says respectable trade, please do not look too closely, and walked four streets east to the address I had on paper as the Velvet Mansion, and on my own tongue as somewhere I had not been in three years.
The street was the same. The brass doors were the same. The lamps were not lit, because the sun was still on them.
I stopped on the step.
Above the bell-pull, on a plate I had not in three years let my eyes settle on, was a name. Carved into the brass, not raised, fresh in the way only fresh carving is fresh. The lettering was private.
Mara Liesen.
I put a finger on the L. I did not say it. I had not said it aloud, except in my own head, in sixteen years. The name belonged to a girl I had been asked, when I was sixteen, to keep safe. The girl was now a woman with a mansion, a velvet parlor, a chessboard I had been shown once, and an apothecary's daughter who carried bottles in coat pockets and who had, all afternoon, not looked at a grey coat in a café row.
I let my finger rest on the L a moment longer than curiosity. The brass was warm from the day's sun. The carved letter was colder than the metal around it, the way carved things always are.
I let go. I rang the bell.
The door opened from the inside by a hand I did not see.
I would, on the way in, be asked to remember who I was.
