第12章 The Broken Glass

The letter from the Pharmaceutical Society came on the Wednesday, and it was the quietest threat that Prudence had ever read. It was one page, in a secretary's careful hand, and it thanked her for her correspondence, and informed her that the Society had received further information concerning her trading, and reminded her that the sale and compounding of scheduled poisons by an unregistered person was an offence, and requested that she attend upon the Society's solicitor at her earliest convenience, and hoped that she was in good health. That was all. It named no complainant. It set no date. It simply stood at the door of her life with its hat in its hand and let her look at it, which was the way these things were done, and which was, she thought, more frightening than any threat, because a threat can be answered and an invitation cannot. She was still holding it when the window went. The smash came from the street, and it was followed by another, and by the sound of boots running on the wet cobbles, and when she got to the front the lower pane of the shop window was in pieces across the counter and a wet half-brick lay among the bottles of cough mixture, and the cold fog was coming in through the hole, and the street outside was empty and black. She swept it up herself, pane and brick and all, and she did not cry, because she had learned before she was twenty that tears in a shop are a thing customers remember. But her hands shook, and she sat a while on the stool with the broom across her knees. Ned Trigg came limping in the next morning with a bruise the size of a saucer over his eye and his lip split, and would not say at first where he had got it, and then said it in a rush, because he was fourteen and could not keep a good grudge to himself. "Two men. Up by the cut, when I was coming back with the sulphur. They said was I the boy that runs for the poison woman, and I said I didn't know any poison woman, and they knocked me down and one of them said, tell her the shop burns easy, and then they went off laughing." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "I wasn't scared, Miss Ruddock. I was only angry." Prudence knelt down and looked at the eye and fetched the arnica and the cold cloth and did not let him see her face while she did it, because she had brought this down on a boy of fourteen whose only crime was running her errands, and there is no medicine for that. When he had gone she sat a long while in the weighing room with the lamps out and the fire going down, and she did the sum that a woman in her position does at least once in such a business, which is the sum of what she has and what it would cost to stop. The shop was worth a little; the stock a little; her father's name a little, and less each year that the register grew. She was thirty-four. She had no husband and no children and no kin nearer than a cousin in another town, and if she stopped now she would have the shop and the winter and the small steady custom of the poor, and she could keep them all her life if she never again asked a question that a magistrate did not want asked. It was not a contemptible life. It was, in fact, the life she had told herself she wanted, in the years when she had wanted nothing more than to keep her father's brass balance and his name above the door. And then she thought of the eleven clean ones, and of the box in the drawer, and of the child at the Bott court with the dark line on her gum, and she knew, with the flat certainty of a test that has been run twice, that she was not going to stop, and that this was the last night of the old life and she had already lost it and simply did not want to spend the evening saying so. That evening she had her visitor, and she had been expecting him since the brick. Barnaby Skell came to the shop by the side door, without the bell, and stood in the weighing room with his hat in his hand and his small quick face arranged into a great and genuine sadness, and he did not sit down until she offered, and he did not offer to sit. "I have come as a friend," he said. "I want you to hear me as a friend, and then I will go and we need never speak of it again. You are a clever woman and an honest one, and you have made a mistake, which clever honest women make more often than any others, because they cannot believe that the world is as careless as it is." He looked at the rows of jars. "You have seen a pattern in the deaths, and the pattern is real, and it is not what you think. Deaths come in clusters in every town that has our drains and our water and our wages. You have been handed a shape by your grief for your father and your pride in your trade, and you have mistaken the shape for a hand. I do not blame you. I have made the same mistake in my own way, several times, and it is the reason I keep the society's books so strictly, because I have learned that a man who trusts his own eye is a man who will one day swear to a shadow." "And the boy who was knocked down for running my errands?" Skell's face did not change. "There are roughs in every town as well, and they care nothing for the society and less for you, and I am sorry for the boy and I will make it right with his mother out of my own pocket, because that is the kind of thing the Unity does, and you would know that if you would let yourself. And here is my offer, plainly: withdraw from the coroner what you said, write the Pharmaceutical Society a letter saying the cordial is sound, and I will undertake that no complaint of any kind is ever made against your shop. You will sell your bismuth and your cough drops and your grey powder, and you will live, and no one will hurt the boy again." He said it all in a voice of such warm reason that for a moment she almost could not find the lie in it, which was exactly the danger of the man. He did not deny. He did not threaten. He came into her own house and offered her the shape of her own fear and asked her to call it her own mistake, and he was so good at it that a weaker, tired, frightened woman would have taken his hand and been grateful. She thought of the clean bodies. She thought of the mark on the wax. She thought of a mouth that remembered the weeks, and a house that had been made to lose more than the town lost. "No," she said. Skell looked at her for a long moment. Something went out of his face then, the sorrow, like a shutter closing, and what was behind it was not anger. It was arithmetic. "That is a great pity," he said, and put on his hat, and went out into the fog, and this time he did not trouble to close the side door behind him. Prudence sat in the cold room and listened to the fog come in through the open door, and she understood that she had just done the one thing that would make him move, and that from now on she was not the woman who suspected him. She was the woman who had to be answered, and men like Barnaby Skell did not answer a woman like her with a letter, or a brick, or a knocked-down boy. They answered her once, and finally, and in a way that could be written on a certificate as the fever. ---