Secrets Bitter and Sweet
Inspired by the bittersweet or woody nightshade (Solanum dulcamara).
My grandmother tells me the story. The Herbarium. A group of so-called healers – half of them charlatans from what she says – and I am to lead it! Perhaps she’s been too long out in the sun. I shake my head in perplexity. I am miffed that all this has been decided in my absence, without my permission.
‘No,’ I tell her, ‘I don’t have the wisdom. They won’t listen to me. Surely you must lead. Or Mother.’
‘Now, now, young May’ she says, with exaggerated patience, ‘Have faith. You will find the wisdom. Your mother can’t do it. She isn’t capable. Sometimes the magical skills skip a generation, you know. And I… well, I am too old to take it on.
Besides, there’s more. Every last one of them has a secret. That Rustyback doesn’t even know his own secret. Fool.’
I wait.
‘I know all the secrets and I will share them with you. If they step out of line you will have the means to control them.’
I sense she isn’t telling me the truth. ‘There’s something else,’ I say.
‘Clever girl,’ she says approvingly, tapping her nose. I wait. ‘No,’ she says. ‘All in good time.’ So she has a secret, too. And I cannot fathom it. I’ve never seen her look so shifty.
She magicked her husband into a toad and crushed him under her heel. That’s what they say of her. She is not a person to be trifled with. So I don’t.
Mercury, Buckler and Adderstongue
‘Let us begin with Mercurio,’ says my grandmother. ‘What do you know of him?’
‘Mr Mercurio sells…’ I hesitate and lower my eyes modestly. But I need to say it. ‘He sells cures for unfortunate diseases.’
‘So he does,’ she says, quite matter-of-fact, ‘and how do people catch them?’
I am shocked. This is not a proper subject for a young woman. ‘By breaking their marriage vows.’ I say it shyly. I can’t help myself.
‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘If people kept to their marriage vows there’d be a lot less business for Mr M.’
I can’t see where she’s leading. I am gawping, and she takes pity.
‘He supports this business with a second enterprise.’
I see the light. ‘You mean he sells love potions, too?’
She sighs. I am too slow on the uptake. ‘Yes he does. But he also goes in disguise and arranges discreet introductions and trysts between married persons who… wish to stray. Do you follow?’ She looks thoughtfully into the distance. ‘So, like many successful entrepreneurs, he both creates the problem and supplies the solution. Rather ingenious, when you consider it. But I doubt he would like that to be generally known.’
*
‘And Dr Buckler?’ I say, eager to show my knowledge. ‘Why, he sells coloured water and pretends it’s a cure. The true healers despise him.’
‘Very good,’ she says, staring into the distance. I wish she wouldn’t do that. It makes me uneasy. ‘Very good. But no secret.’
I am deflated again, grumpy. ‘Then what? I suppose he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead, does he?’
My grandmother turns her unsettling gaze on me, frowning. ‘How did you know that?’
‘What?’ I say, confused. ‘I don’t know that. It’s the first thing I thought of, that’s all. Anyone can see he has two eyes like anyone else.’
She is very serious now. ‘Only the favoured few can see it. Including me. He uses it to transfix people. And he most certainly wouldn’t want that fact generally known.’
She gives me a look so piercing I step away from her. ‘And what else do you see, I wonder, that you haven’t seen fit to mention?’ She doesn’t expect an answer, and I can’t give one.
*
‘Very well then’, she says. ‘Now what of Adderstongue?’
‘Adderstongue?’ I simply can’t call him “Mr Adderstongue”. ‘Everyone knows about him. Forked tongue. Pale green. No secret at all.’
‘No indeed,’ says my grandmother, watching me out of the corner of her eye.
‘I suppose he talks to snakes, does he, or turns the milk bad?’ I say. Either of these would be damning, never mind the forked tongue.
She catches my drift. ‘No, he does not,’ she says. ‘And the tongue is irrelevant.’
I think that is unlikely. ‘But it does worry people.’ How could it not?
‘Quite so,’ says my grandmother crisply. ‘But he has another secret and guards it well.’
It must be something quite terrible, then, I think.
A smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. ‘He does good deeds. Leaves coins behind in the houses of the poor, hides them in the rags of beggars. He won’t be able to do that if it’s generally known. It’s his life’s work, and he needs it to be secret. That’s the hold you will have over him.’
This is such a surprise it takes me a while to find a sensible answer.
‘But surely, Grandmother, you wouldn’t want me to put a stop to his generosity?’
‘No, of course not. You won’t. But he doesn’t know that, does he? The threat should be enough. Trust me, he won’t risk defying you.’
Deadly Secrets: The Monk, Burdock and Rustyback
Inspired by the deadly nightshade, (Atropa belladonna). No introduction needed.
‘As for the Monk…’
‘He is not a monk, Grandmother. That is his secret.’
She doesn’t like being interrupted. ‘How can it be a secret, you idiot, when even you know it? No, as for him, he confers with the dead. Don’t look at me like that. He can and he does. I’m not entirely convinced he’s properly alive himself, to tell the truth. He learned his reading and writing from a deceased abbot who loved books and died in the scriptorium.’
I look sceptical. She shakes her head and goes on. ‘The abbot found the hereafter very dull and looked for a mortal to latch onto who would share his passion for the written word. I know this, before you ask, because I have seen the ghost visit our Monk. Very easy to conjure up, he is – very partial to an illuminated capital, can’t resist them. Very talkative, too. Obviously not from a silent order.
‘There’s not many scriveners who take instruction in spelling and page layout from someone who’s been dead a century or more – and I doubt our Monk would want people to know about it. Nasty accusations – dealing with the devil – the undead, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t do at all. Distinctly bad for business.
‘Just mention Brother Ezekiel to him if he gives you any bother, and he’ll see that you know what’s what.’
*
Burdock and Rustyback
‘The secrets here are intertwined, as you might say,’ says my grandmother. ‘And close your mouth before a moth flies in, girl.
I close my mouth. All the things she says make me gape.
She glares at me. ‘Tell me what you know, then.’
I know when I’m being set up only to be knocked down again. ‘I don’t know anything about those two, except Mr Burdock deals in baldness cures.’
‘No, no,’ she is already losing patience. ‘Let me put it simply for you. Mr Burdock follows Old Rustyback. He does it discreetly.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that rusty old cloak contains a hidden cache of gold coins; they fall out one by one as the stitching fails.’
‘And Mr Burdock picks them up?’
‘Exactly.’
‘He wouldn’t want Rustyback to know this. That’s his secret?’
‘Simple enough even for you, my girl. Burdock wears rags, pretends penury, when he has a secret stash of Rustyback’s gold.’
That is a pretty good secret to know. ‘But what of Mr Rustyback? He doesn’t know there is gold hidden in the cloak – is that what you’re saying?’
‘He does not.’ She waves her hand airily. I wish she wouldn’t. She might cast an accidental spell.
I think it through. ‘So Rustyback has a secret, but he doesn’t even know it himself. So what hold do we have over him?’
‘Oh, that. He is a demon condemned to human form.’ She says this as if it were an everyday occurrence. ‘An incompetent demon, but a demon nonetheless. Mr Burdock knows this, which is why he follows so stealthily to steal the gold. A demon can turn nasty, you know. In any case, I don’t suppose Rustyback would want his demonic nature made public, would he?’
She never ceases to amaze me.
Look out for part 9 of The Herbarium, in which we learn some more alarming home truths.