Maryrose Wood - The Poison Diaries

“But why do you keep some plants apart then?” I demanded to know.

“Because of you, Jessamine. Because you are only a child. Until you are older, and have the wisdom to know what you may touch and taste and what you may not, I keep the most powerful plants behind the locked gate, where they cannot harm you.”

“You don’t have to lock the ‘pothecary garden, Father.” I pouted like the baby I was at the time. “If you tell me not to go in I surely will not.”

“If you surely will not,” he said with a smile, “then the existence of the lock should not trouble you in the slightest.”

I have never won an argument with Father, but it is not for lack of trying.

I add more coal to the fire, and light a fresh candle to sew by. It is mid-afternoon, but the sky is thickly blanketed with clouds. The day feels dim as dusk.

Father must be working hard, wherever he is. I hope it is not a child who is ill. Not that I am squeamish about sick people: in fact, I prefer to go with Father when he pays his visits. I like to watch how men thrash about as they battle against terrible fevers, or how women moan and grunt as they labour to bring their babes forth, while Father mixes just the right medicines to help ease their pains.

But there is so much work to do at the cottage, especially with spring coming. Now that I am old enough to mind the house and care for the gardens myself, Father usually insists that I stay at home.

So here I remain, with only my sewing basket and the wet seed babies of my lovely lady for company. A damp, shaded spot near the stone wall suits the belladonna plant best. Or so Father tells me. I have never seen it growing there myself, for I am still not permitted to enter the apothecary garden. It is too dangerous; I am too young, I do not know enough – Father is stubborn as stone and will not change his mind. Yet I want to learn. For now I content myself with leafing through Father’s books and examining the specimens he brings home.

That is how I came to know the belladonna berries. Every autumn Father collects the lush, ink-black fruits and preserves them in a glass jar, that he keeps on a high shelf in his study. In late winter he removes a few and delicately slits them open to harvest the seed.

This is the first year he has entrusted the seeds to me to prepare for planting. “Remember, Jessamine,” Father warned, “you will be raising a litter of assassins.”

That was Father’s idea of a joke, but I knew to heed the warning. When I change the soaking water, I wear gloves and remember not to touch my fingers to my lips or eyes. After I finish, I wash my hands twice with lye soap and throw the gloves in a bucket of bleach. I place a lid over the pail that holds the seeds and the fresh water, tie it fast with strong twine, and mark it POISON.

I do this even when I am alone, as I am now – one never knows when a vagrant might wander by in search of a cool drink. Even those who cannot read will know the sign POISON. If they ignore it, they do so at their peril.

Then I carry the discarded soaking water far from the cottage and drain it into a swampy, overgrown ditch. I choose one so thickly surrounded by bramble and gorse bushes that the duke’s sheep and cattle would never try to drink from it, nor any human either.

Last week I found a dead cat by the ditch. But I think it had died of something else. Even so, when I told Father, he dug a hole and buried the body right away, and Father is no particular friend to cats.

It was a deep hole, deep enough for a man’s grave. The cat was small, with soft orange fur. I know it was soft because I petted it to say good-bye, but the body was cold and stiff and Father told me not to touch.

I said a silent prayer too, as Father shovelled the dirt back into the hole. Soon the last glimpse of orange had disappeared; a slight depression in the muddy earth was all that marked the place. Within a fortnight that would grow over with brambles too.

“It is a rare beast that gets such a funeral,” Father remarked, sweating and leaning on his spade.” Lucky cat.”

Personally I think the cat would have been luckier had it lived. Then again, life for a stray, unwanted thing is not always pleasant, so perhaps Father was right after all.

And of course, we have other ways of keeping the mice away from our cottage.

Father laughs when I call Hulne Abbey “our cottage”.

“It is a ruin, a wreck, a pile of weathered, moss-covered rocks,” he always corrects me. But this is the only home I have ever known, and who can feel at home in a ruin? Anyway, Father exaggerates; where we live is no mere pile of rocks, though it is centuries old. It is not large, but it has a feeling of spaciousness; even, if you ask me, of grace.

That is no surprise. Father says our house used to be the chapel, in the long-ago days when the old monastery still stood on these lands. For miles around, the buildings and farms of the abbey stretched up through the hills until the distant spot where the planting fields end and the line of the forest begins. For five hundred years these fertile acres teemed with people and animals and life. No more though. Now Father and I live in the chapel; the rest of the monastery is rubble, and all the Catholics are in Ireland and France.

Sometimes, when the weather is fair, I lie on my back in the grass of a nearby field. I close my eyes and try to imagine that last, terrible day, in the hours before it was all laid waste. But even the grandfather of the oldest person in the town of Alnwick was not alive to see it. There is no one who can tell me what it was like to hide at the edge of the forest, as I imagine I would have done, watching in terror and fascination as the king’s soldiers smashed the ancient buildings to bits and then hunted down the fleeing monks like so many helpless rabbits.

Father often says he wishes they had torn down the chapel and left the monks’ library standing instead, but I like our home just as it is, a long, rectangular structure made of rough-hewn blocks of stone. Long ago Father divided the interior into rooms. My bedchamber is small and up a long flight of stairs, in the old bell tower. On the main floor is a bedchamber for Father, a study in which he does his work, and a front parlour where we take our meals. It is where I write my garden diary too, at the end of each day’s labours.

Of all these rooms, the parlour is the largest, and the one that still looks most like a church. There is a high, vaulted ceiling, and tall, arched windows that Father says once had stained-glass pictures in them. Now they are filled with thick, plain glass that is divided into many small panes. On sunny days the light slants through the panes and makes narrow, glowing pathways across the dark wood planks of the floor.

I used to play hopscotch with those paths of light when I was small – if I leap over the light without touching it, Mama will live , I would say to myself. But if my foot touches the light she will die.

My foot never, ever touched the light – to this day I will swear it – but Mama died anyway.

Oh, how I wept! I was only four, so perhaps the outburst can be forgiven. But I remember how Father’s voice stayed calm.

“That is the way of things,” he explained to me at the time, “All creatures die when their time comes. No matter what we do, or how we may feel about it, nature always gets her prize in the end.”

Father is always so strong and wise. Sometimes I wish I were more like him. I wish I could accept that the way fate has arranged things is both right and good, and that living here alone with him, sewing and cooking and tending the garden, and perhaps, when I am old enough – perhaps , in my mind I can hear him say it! – learning to help him with his work, as I am beginning to do now with the belladonna seeds, is exactly the way my life was intended to be.