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

Chapter 8

They left two days later, disguised as a merchant and his housekeeper traveling to settle an estate — in a plain carriage without crest or livery, Alexander’s arm bound beneath an ordinary coat rather than the fine linen of a sick room. The road to the docks took the better part of a day, and Elara spent much of it watching the countryside change from the tidy hedges of Blackwood’s tenant farms to the crowded, smoke-stained streets nearer the water, where the air itself seemed to carry the tang of tar and salt and something fouler beneath it.

The trader Thorne had named — a man called Silas Darkwood, who kept a warehouse near the eastern wharves, stocked with crates of foreign creatures bound for menageries and private collectors — proved harder to find than his reputation had suggested, and harder still to draw into conversation once found. He was a broad, weathered man with the particular guardedness of someone long accustomed to dealing in goods that skirted the edges of what was strictly permitted. And he eyed Alexander’s plain coat with open suspicion.

“I don’t discuss my custom with strangers,” Darkwood said when Alexander, introducing himself only as a gentleman with an interest in exotic creatures, attempted to open the conversation with the careful vagueness of a man unused to subterfuge. “Nor do I discuss it with their servants.”

It was Elara stepping forward before Alexander could press further — and risk closing the man off entirely — who changed the shape of the conversation.

“You keep scorpions among your stock, sir,” she said. “Not the common sort, either. The larger variety from warmer country. I’d guess by the smell of this warehouse alone that you’ve had one recently, and not sold it whole.”

Darkwood’s guarded expression flickered, just slightly, into something closer to genuine surprise. “And what would a housekeeper know of scorpions?”

“My father worked a menagerie fifteen years, sir. I know the smell of a creature’s crate as well as I know the smell of my own kitchen. And I know that a man doesn’t keep such a creature for its temper. He keeps it because someone’s paying well to have its venom drawn.”

The trader studied her a long moment, then glanced past her to Alexander, weighing something Elara could not quite name.

“There was a man,” he said finally, his voice dropping. “Came through some months back. Wanted venom drawn fresh, no questions asked. Paid double what I’d ask of anyone with sense. Didn’t give a name I trusted, and didn’t come himself the second time. Sent another in his place to collect it. A thin fellow. Spectacles. Spoke like a man of some learning — physician’s manner about him, if I had to guess.”

“Would you know the first man again if you saw him?” Alexander asked, his voice carefully even, though Elara could see the tension gathering in his jaw.

“I might. Well-dressed. Careful speech. The sort who doesn’t like to be looked at too closely, if you take my meaning. Kept his hat low, stood in the shadow of the door the whole while. But there was a ring on his hand. I noticed. Gold, with some manner of crest worked into it. I don’t forget a detail like that — not when a man’s paying me not to remember his face.”

Elara felt the carriage ride weariness drop away from her all at once. A crest. A family crest, on the hand of a man who would not show his face but could not resist wearing his own signet ring, even into a warehouse full of poison and secrets.

“Would you know the crest again?” she asked before Alexander could.

Darkwood described it as best his memory allowed — a hawk, wings spread, worked in gold against a dark field — and Elara did not need to look at Alexander to know, from the sudden stillness that came over him beside her, that he recognized it already.

They said little on the ride back to Blackwood. It was not until they were within sight of the estate’s own gates, the fields grown familiar again in the dusk, that Alexander spoke at last, his voice low and controlled in the particular way of a man holding fury on a very short lead.

“That is my cousin’s signet. Julian has worn that ring since our grandfather’s death. There is no other in the family who carries it.”