第3章 The Copper Foil

The bottle came the next afternoon, delivered by Ned Trigg, the shop boy, who had been sent up from the chapel with it in a wicker basket and a note in Skell's neat hand: *With the compliments of the Unity. For the use of those who cannot afford it.* Prudence set it on the counter and looked at it for a long while. It was a stone bottle, squat, glazed brown, sealed with a cork and a smear of wax. The shoulder carried the society's mark, a raised ring with a lamp inside it, and beneath that, stamped small, the batch and the month: a practice of Skell's, she had heard, because he liked things numbered. This one was marked for November. She smelled the cork. Sweet, bitter under the sweet, faintly metallic, the way iron salts smell when they have stood. Nothing that a person would call wrong. She poured a little into a saucer of white china and held it to the lamp. It was the colour of dark tea. She touched the tip of her tongue to a drop, and spat it out again, and rinsed her mouth, and stood still while the taste worked its way from her tongue to the back of her throat and stayed there, an edge of something her father's book called *the taste of the warm metals*, dry and cold and slow, quite unlike the clean rust of iron that she knew. She might have been wrong. She often reminded herself that she might be wrong; it was a habit her father had built into her along with the weighing, because a chemist who cannot be wrong is a chemist who kills people. A taste is not a proof. A taste is a question. She went into the weighing room and cleared the bench and lit the second lamp and laid out what she would need. A beaker of clean water. A little bottle of strong acid, kept under lock, for the work that wanted it. A slip of thin copper foil, bright as a new penny, taken from a strip she kept for repairing the shop's gas jet. A waste jar, because even a question should be asked politely. Her father had taught her the copper test in this room, the winter she was thirteen, when a collier had died in the next street and the talk had run to poison for a fortnight and then run on to something else. He had done the test on a rumour, out of patience rather than suspicion, and had told her as he did it that a test answered nothing unless you had first decided what question you were asking. If the question was *is there a metal in this*, the copper would answer. If the question was *is this metal the reason a woman is cold in her coffin*, then the copper would answer yes or no and the rest was a magistrate's business. She warmed the cordial and dropped the copper into it, and let it sit. This is what copper does when a warm thing has a metal in it that is more eager than copper to hold to itself what the acid frees: it takes the metal onto its own face, and the face changes colour. Iron would leave a dull grey bloom. Lead would leave a grey-black sheen that dulled with time. Antimony, which her book named tartar emetic when it was made into a medicine and a poison when it was not, leaves a sooty, soot-black stain that will not wipe off with water and that comes clean with a rub of the fingers and a little of the acid and leaves a doubtful, dark orange mark, and the whole thing is done in a quarter of an hour. She watched the foil. Nothing happened for a long time, and she began to think she had been a fool, and then the bright copper face nearest the cordial went slowly the colour of old soot, and stayed, and she took it out and held it to the lamp, and rubbed it with her thumb, and it did not come off. She sat down. The coal fizzed in the grate. On the counter in the other room the shop bell hung silent, and the street outside was the deep afternoon of a town with two hours of work left in it. It was not proof. It was the beginning of proof. She knew the road from a question to a fact: you must answer whether the metal was in the cordial because the cordial was made with it, or because the cordial had been made with it, which were not the same thing at all. You must ask whether it was in every bottle or a few. You must ask who had the making of it, and who had the pouring, and who had the carrying, and whether the woman's own hand had put it in the child's cup. You must ask, above all, whether a person had died of it or simply of the town. And when you had asked all of it, you must find someone in authority who would listen, and that, in Cinderthorpe, for a woman with no register and a small trade and a father in the churchyard, was the hardest test of the lot. She asked the foil one more question before she was done, because a test that has never failed has never been tested. She boiled a spoonful of the iron tonic she made herself, the honest one, gentian and sulphate of iron, no sugar, no charity about it, and dropped in a fresh slip of copper, and watched it for the quarter-hour. The copper went a dull slate grey at the edges and no darker, clean iron, nothing to frighten a child. She set the two slips side by side on the bench under the lamp: one grey and dull, one sooty black and stubborn. Her father had a word for a pair like that. He called it a witness, and he called the other one a confession. The bell over the shop door rang. Ned Trigg came through with his cap in his hand and his boots still wet from the yard, a boy of fourteen with a face like a question mark and a habit of standing on one leg when he had news. "Miss Ruddock, there's a man at the door for the powders." "Which man?" "The one with the cough. Mr. Gantry." Gantry. The weaver with the two children on the list, the two who had been crossed through. Prudence put the foils away in the drawer and wiped her hands and went through, and sold the man his cough mixture and took his pennies, and watched his face while she folded the paper, and saw nothing there but the ordinary tiredness of a man who had buried two children in a season and would not have called it anything but the will of God. When he was gone, Ned loitered by the counter. "That's the second time today I've been up to the chapel," he said. "Mr. Skell sent the bottle, and then he sent me back for the basket, and then he asked me if you'd had many of the cordial already, and I said I didn't know, and he gave me a penny." "Did he." "A penny and a look." Ned shifted to the other leg. "He's a rum one. He was mixing in the back room when I was there, with his sleeves up, and the stuff he was stirring was yellow, like custard gone wrong, and he put the cloth over it when he saw me, quick, like it was a baby." Prudence stood very still. She thought of the cordial's colour, dark tea, and of the yellow she had seen in a chemist's back room only once before, in her father's, when he had been making up a lotion of calomel and had told her to stand back from the steam. "Yellow like custard," she said. "Was it warm?" "I didn't touch it," Ned said, offended. "No. Of course not. You did right." She gave him a penny of her own. "Next time he sends you, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, and tell me what the room smells like. Can you do that?" "Easy," Ned said, and went back out into the wet, pleased with his two pennies and his errand. Prudence wrapped the stained foil in paper and put it in the drawer of the balance, and went out to wash her hands in the cold water. ---