The Physicians Gave Up on the Duke’s Only Son – The Herbwoman They Scorned Stayed the Whole Night…

Chapter 7

The apothecary Pemberton chose to consult was not a man known to the fashionable physicians of London, nor to anyone who might carry tales back to the family floors of Blackwood. His name was Ambrose Thorne, and his shop sat down a crooked lane near the old tannery, its window crowded with jars of dried root and coiled snakeskin. Its proprietor, a stooped, soft-spoken man who had once kept correspondence with naturalists abroad, had never quite lost the habit of curiosity that came with it.

Pemberton went to him after dark, wrapped in a plain coat rather than his usual livery, and carried with him the cloth on which Elara had laid the poisoned stitches, folded now inside a wooden box lined with wax paper — precisely as she had instructed. He told no one at Blackwood where he went, not even the footmen who kept the gate. For Alexander had impressed upon him that whoever had arranged the poisoning would be watching for exactly this — for signs that the household had begun to look too closely at what ought, by their design, to have been quietly buried along with a duke’s failing health.

Elara had wanted to go herself. She had said as much plainly when Pemberton first proposed the errand, and he had refused her just as plainly, on the grounds that a maid seen slipping from the estate after dark would draw a different kind of notice than a steward about ordinary business. And notice was precisely what none of them could afford.

She had accepted the refusal with poor grace and spent the evening of his absence pacing the guest wing’s narrow gallery instead of sleeping, listening for the sound of his return.

“Handle it by the cloth only,” she had told him before he left. “Not the thread itself. Whatever’s dried into it may still do harm to bare skin, even now.”

Thorne received him in a back room lit by a single lamp, examined the thread beneath a glass for the better part of an hour without speaking, and when at last he set down his instrument, his expression had lost all the mild curiosity it had carried at the start.

“This was not accident,” he said. “Whoever you serve, the thread has been steeped deliberately and with some skill in venom drawn from a scorpion — and not any creature native to these shores. What you’ve brought me comes from a species found only in warmer climates. Imported, I should think, at very particular expense and very particular risk. It is not a substance a country apothecary keeps on his shelf, nor one a physician stumbles upon in the ordinary course of his trade.”

“Could it be bought? Here in England?”

“Bought, yes. From the right hands, and at a price that would make most men blanch. There are traders who deal in such creatures for the curious and the wealthy — down at the ports where foreign cargo comes ashore. A man wanting scorpion venom in sufficient quantity to work into a wound would need to seek one of them out directly. It is not the sort of purchase made carelessly, nor kept secret without considerable effort.”

Thorne looked up from the glass, his gaze steady on Pemberton. “Whoever arranged this knew precisely what they wanted and knew precisely how to obtain it without drawing notice. That is no accident of ambush, sir. That is a plan laid with patience.”

Pemberton carried the news back to Blackwood before first light. And it was in Alexander’s own chamber — the Duke sitting up now, color returning to him day by day, though he tired still faster than his temper liked to admit — that the household’s small circle of trust gathered to hear it repeated.

“Someone within reach of this house imported venom,” Alexander said when Pemberton had finished, “for the express purpose of stitching it into my shoulder.”

His voice was flat. But Elara, standing near the window with a tray she had stopped pretending to be occupied with minutes earlier, could see the effort the flatness cost him.

“Someone who knew the ambush would leave a wound — and had already arranged what would be done to it before Mercer ever threaded his needle.”

“It would explain why Mercer left so quickly,” Dr. Warren said. He had grown quieter these past days, his earlier bristling pride worn thin by everything it had failed to account for. “A man does not flee an estate the morning after treating its master, unless he fears what that treatment might reveal.”

“Then we find the traitor who sold the venom,” Alexander said. “And we find whoever sent Mercer to buy it.”