The Apothecary – Part 1: The Remedy

The apothecary stood on a narrow lane, its window crowded with glass jars and bundles of dried lavender, its door hung with a brass bell. By night, with the blinds drawn and three candles lit, it smelled of mint, camphor and warm wood.

Perpetua was forty-seven, an herbalist and former pharmacist, steady-handed and unsmiling, with dark hair under a linen cap. He was thirty-nine, a lawyer, her partner of five years and an insomniac, who had admitted one night that nothing calmed him quite as much as being told precisely what to do.

At the counter she placed a prescription pad and wrote, slowly. Treatment Plan. His limits and hers: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, no one else. The word was Antidote.

"Say it."

"Antidote."

"If you say it, the Apothecary closes the shop. We make tea."

"Yes, Madam."

"Not yet." She slipped on a long grey coat, a pair of white cotton gloves and a small silver pendant. Her voice dropped, level and unhurried. "Patient. Your symptoms have worsened."

"I'm sorry, Madam."

"You will be." She pointed at a high wooden stool beside the counter. "Sit. Hands on your knees. You will take your treatment in silence."

He sat. She moved slowly round the shop, measuring, grinding, weighing, the pestle's soft knock the only sound. She did not look at him for ten minutes. At last she came to him with a small brown cup, tilted his chin with a gloved finger and held it to his lips.

"Drink."

He drank. Chamomile, honey, something bitter and warm. She watched his throat move.

"Are you content, patient?"

"Content, Madam."

"Good. The treatment will be long."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Tincture.