Great mischief Read online

  Part One

  TOWARD the end of the last century, a time already remote enough to make fables seem possible yet near enough our day to share its commonplaces, a druggist by the name of Timothy Partridge kept a modest shop, too modestly tucked away in a narrow side street. The thirty-sixth year of his life doubtless appeared to him as humdrum and unremarkable as this of ours, except that Partridge, in a more credulous age, was a believer in the remarkable. Being a trained pharmacist, he believed in the marvels of science and in what he could see, smell, and weigh on his brass scales; but he also believed in realities not measured in drams and scruples, including the strict doctrines of his Church and other matters less pleasing to orthodoxy.

  An evening in winter with a sodden rain falling seemed a time for dealing with what is generally considered factual. A thin gas pipe descended from the ceiling into the middle of Partridge's Pharmacy and turned up in a hook at the end, on which the unshaded jet, lighted thus early, swung impaled. It hung there like a friendly, bogus serpent hissing against the literal plunk of water striking the paving stones outside, and it partly illumined the shop lined with reposeful rows of jars. It also revealed in part, the top part, Timothy himself in his mohair sack coat. His nether limbs in the great blot of shadow cast by the stove he sat hugging might have been those of fish, beast, or human for all the jet disclosed.

  The sack coat, though it was Timothy's daily dress in the shop, hung with a vaguely accidental look from his narrow shoulders which managed to convey through the cloth a distinction deserving of more sumptuary covering. The light struck the back of his head bent over his reading; his hair, worn long, almost to his collar, was thick and stiff and of fine raven black. Hair, bones, and coat, taken together, suggested a naturally extravagant mind within severely clipped by the sharp blades of circumstance.

  The pharmaceutical journal in his hand carried accounts of rare drugs, discoveries that gave promise of eliminating some of the ancient scourges of mankind, but the heartening news brought no elation to Timothy. He studied the price list and clucked, he glanced about the drowsing shop and shook his head, he thought of the numerous people who had calls on his generosity because they were poor or relatives or both, or because they had performed special services for the late Confederacy, still an actuality to the faithful in these latitudes. Thus it was that the pharmacy ran on a shoestring; besides, as his sister Penelope always said, "It's wrong to make money out of people's afflictions."

  This saying of Penelope's came up through the page Timothy held and overlay the print. She was six years older than he, and her opinions had a way of following him about, of rearing up like a signpost when the road forked and gently pointing out the right way. Bustled along by her conviction, he usually found the right way easier to take than the primrose path; her rich, warm voice persuaded him to rightness; yet feeling her ardent and personable presence beside his rocking chair, he stirred, rattled his journal fretfully, and bethought him that he was chilly.

  Through the isinglass panes in the fat paunch of the stove, he saw that the coals had indeed burned low. He opened the little door, decided against putting on more coal for the present, and blew a hopeful gust with the bellows. The embers obliged him by sending a red glow through the aperture. His legs, now withdrawn from the shadow, proved to be quite ordinary, thinnish legs and terminated in feet comfortably snubbed into carpet slippers. But the ruddy shaft slanting from below caught his face and shoulders in a half-satanic light. It threw into relief the mournful descending curve of his mustache; it reddened his oval jaw, and his eyes under his high shining forehead sent back into the depths an answering glare. Bent toward the opening, he seemed to be invoking the Pit.

  After a while he closed the stove door and sat back,

  relaxed in his rocker. He glanced idly toward the windows; seen under the weak and sallow gas jet, his face had nothing of Satan about it. It was the face of a good man, bewhiskered in the prevailing fashion, enjoying in the cosy cave of his shop an hour of unexpected quiet, vouchsafed him by the kind gods of the weather who were keeping people at home with this drumming rain. The rows and rows of bottles created a sense of order in life; in the front windows the great glass jars of green and amber liquid jeweled his surroundings at small expense. Beyond them the street was deep blue and empty, the color of space itself.

  Suddenly Timothy caught a glimpse of a large black sphere flying past, as if a dark planet whirling on its course had shone for a moment in the reflected light from the shop window. It flashed again in the second window, but at the door it halted and pressed against the glass panes, collapsed to a narrow wedge, and on the instant the shop bell jangled as the door sprang open and a young woman stood inside the threshold. The long cloak thrown round her swept the rainy outdoors into the security of the shop. Water poured from the folds of her black cotton umbrella and ran in a tiny dark stream along the floor.

  Timothy put on the spectacles he wore largely because of the magian dignity they lent him, and said, "Good evening, ma'am," in a voice from which ran a like trickle of surprise. As the girl stood and stared at him without speaking, he got up and went behind the counter, adding, "Come in out of the wet—and close the door, if you please."

  Without shifting her scrutiny of him she reached one hand behind her and swung the door to; the bell fastened to it jangled again as it slammed. Bad-mannered piece! said Timothy to himself. Utter want of consideration. . . . The girl's unfriendly eyes left him and went round the shop, searching it from the frieze of little Gothic arches that framed the top shelf to the heavy mortars and the big stone jars lined up on the floor. When she had finished her deliberate inventory she came up to the counter.

  "I want a jar of solanum—a large jar."

  Her voice was challenging, like the ring of a coin on the counter. Unsuitable, thought Timothy, who had old-fashioned views about women and soft speech— • almost discordant.

  "Have you the prescription?" Mechanically he adopted her abrupt address, thinking: Bad manners are as catching as measles.

  She hesitated, then brought from under her cloak a crocheted purse, a cylinder of faded silk. She felt the lean mesh and shook her head. "I must have left it at home."

  "Well . . . solanum is a pretty powerful drug," he said kindly. "I don't like to mix it without a physician's order."

  "It's for my father—he has a bad earache. You don't need a prescription. And you surely can't expect me to go all the way home to get it—in this weather."

  She stared through the shop window at the rain drenching off the eaves and making a thick silver fringe where the light caught it. Timothy took a good look at her over his glasses. She had never been in the shop, he was sure, nor could he remember having seen her about the town. But then he was not observant of people; he was a little nearsighted, he frowned down on the pavement when he walked; his thinking and his curiosity were bounded by the shop and his reading. So he might have passed her on the street—though she had a crispness about her you didn't easily forget. He suddenly saw that she was small; the long cloak and her commanding manner had given him a deceptive impression of height when she stood at the door. Damp ringlets straggled wispily from the scarf tied under her chin.

  "There are several kinds of nightshade," he parried. "I can't be sure what your prescription calls for. Solanum Virginianum, solanum nigrum—"

  "That's it."

  He was used to mixing solanum in small quantities for earache, neuralgia, even to cure whitlows. But that headstrong manner of hers—

  "My delivery-boy will be back after a while. You'd better let me send him to your house for the prescription. Do you live far from here?" He got out the slate on which he jotted his memoranda and prepared to write down the ad
dress, wondering if she had no relative, no servant to escort her through the streets at this time of night.

  What irked Timothy most about his customer was her refusal to bear a responsible part in conversation. She answered you or not, as she pleased; and if she did speak, very likely it was without looking at you. He had a picture of what Sister Penny would think of such manners. There was a long pause now in which the gas jet resumed its cheerful hissing against the rain.

  "It's late already," the girl said without turning her head. "The moon is rising—"

  Timothy was sufficiently startled to glance from her profile to the streaming panes. The creature was daffyl "Come, now— You aren't going to pretend you see the moon in the windowl It's pouring cats and dogs."

  "Dogs—ughl I hate them! But the moon is out, you know, above these black clouds . . . from the other side they look like miles and miles of puffed muslin. 'Trip, sing at moonrising: Waste, wane, sleep again . . .' "

  As if It were a sort of rune she were repeating. And humming seemed to join in, like other voices far overhead.

  Well, really—thought Timothy. What is this? The romantic talk of young ladies? Not likely. Mooniness didn't fit in with a personality so harsh and wild. A bluestocking, maybe, a besotted reader like himself, but of astronomy rather than alchemy—a taste for astronomy or physical geography might produce this beyond-the-clouds view of the world.

  She suddenly dropped the runic manner and turned to look about the shop again, including Timothy in an amiable inventory. "You have a nice place here—I've

  never been in before. What a pretty row of blue jars!"

  The long shelf of little porcelain jars did indeed make a gay cerulean band across the dark wall of the shop. Timothy warmed quickly to her new tone of voice, which had somehow become j>ersonal. "They're English apothecary's ware, and quite old. They do look shiny and cheerful—as if they contained the cures for all the ills that plague people. But"—he heaved a mocking sigh— "I'm afraid that's a foolish pretension; as some doubter once remarked, more men die of the physic than of the disease."

  This was not the proper thing to say to a customer, but then his hearer was hardly a proper customer. She had opened her cloak and begun to move, with a swing that was easy in spite of her bulky clothes, among the crucibles and glass cases cluttering the shop. Her dress, which covered her from neckline to shoe-top in the fashion of the period, left everything to the imagination and even stimulated that faculty, and Timothy became suddenly conscious of her body inside the bell-shap>e, of a simple and natural declaration it made of its presence, which flushed him with sensations at once lively and a little embarrassing. Her casual movement— or was anything about this siren quite casual?—described a circle that seemed to be narrowing on Timothy, when it brought her close to the shelf of blue jars. She paused and read the provocative labels with lazy interest: P. Canth.—P. Myrrh—Pulv. Aloes—P. Ipecac.

  "What's that?" She pointed, unapologetically, to the shelf above Timothy's hand.

  He turned and looked up. "This?" The clear glass jar held some small brown objects. "Just a frog and a pair of newts." He took them down and set them on the counter. "They're sort of interesting because they're not found locally. There used to be a journeyman apothecary who came through here; he sometimes sends me biological specimens from wherever his beat takes him."

  The girl picked up the jar and turned it in her hand, fascinated, apparently, by the mummified creatures beginning to fall to powder.

  "They should be in preservative, but it dried out a good while back. From my neglect," he added.

  His disarming honesty brought the first spontaneous smile to her face, a look almost of liking. She set the jar on the counter. "And now can I have my solanum, please?"

  There was nothing of coaxing or demanding in her manner. She made a polite and reasonable request, the kind to which Timothy was most susceptible.

  She must have seen hesitancy in his face, for she exclaimed, "Wait—" and, searching some inside pocket, she held out a soiled paper. "I did bring it after all!"

  Timothy opened it and read the prescription, though grease spots from many refillings and the slovenly Latin of an earlier day made it all but illegible. The blurred signature was unfamiliar; not a physician of this locality, nor, he suspected, of this century.

  "Well, this is an old fellow," he temporized. "We call these ingredients by their modern names. I don't even know that I have them all—that long drought last

  fall dried up the St. John's woods before the plants could be gathered, and shortened local supplies." He strolled along the shelves pretending to look while he thought how to meet the situation. The mixture prescribed was distinctly queer, he couldn't think what it was designed to cure; and it omitted the oily base-though that was not significant, many doctors allowed their patients some latitude in mixing medicines at home. Still, solanum was a drug to keep track of, and he didn't believe that story about the father's earache. He took down a jar or two and showed her that they were empty, as he knew they would be.

  Perfunctorily he pulled out several wooden drawers containing roots of various sorts and shut them again, passing over, however, a drawer marked "corks" which contained other roots, purveyed mostly to poor whites and Negroes from the back door. In this he could actually have found a kind of nightshade, a horse nettle, popular as an aphrodisiac; serve her right if— But no, what he ought to sell her was a box of Beecham's Pills; undoubtedly she was liverish, with all those queer notions.

  This gave him an idea. "Here's something that will be just right for you," he said, "just the ticket." He opened the glass case that held his line of patent medicines and took out a box of Swift's Specific. "Specific" in Timothy's observation meant exactly the opposite-good for everythmg, hence good for nothing. But at least she couldn't harm herself or anyone else with it. He read the label aloud. " 'Nature's own remedy, made

  from roots gathered in Carolina by a recipe obtained from a half-breed Cherokee . . .' Undoubtedly there are several varieties of solanum in it. 'Cures cancer, catarrh, eczema, idcers, and blood-taint.' " Whatever ailed her, that ought to cover it. "Take as much as you can put on the point of a knife in a wineglassful of water—"

  He swung around in the narrow passage and ran full tilt into the girl, who had come soundlessly behind the counter and stood at his back. Her light eyes, close to his, struck through him with such a look of determination and power that Timothy involuntarily fell back a step or two. The natural impulse to beg her pardon rose to his lips and froze there; naked intensity of this kind would have no use for apologies.

  "You have the solanum and you might just as well give it to me. I can tell what you've got in those jars and drawers—it takes more than glass and wood to hide things from me. And your mind, Doctor, is even easier to see through. One believer smells out another fast enough."

  Timothy retreated in wild confusion, because he didn't care to sort out his motley beliefs, and her unshrinking gaze pushed him toward the horrid abysm of logic. She went on. "It's time we dropped the pretence. This is the night for a meeting; I'm short the necessities—the drought has pinched other folks beside you—and I have to come here for them. So don't waste any more time with this flapdoodle."

  The word was like a slap in the face. What kind of were-woman this was, bursting into his shop with her talk of meetings and ointments, he couldn't decide. Was

  she real or sham? But he felt disinclined to find out by thwarting her. . . .

  Cautiously he brought the ingredients together and began to pound them in a mortar.

  He took his time, because a queer sensation was growing on him of being dragged from his moorings. The mixture burned his fingers a little, his body felt light. The girl stood stock-still where he had left her; he would have liked to tell her to go back to that part of the shop where customers properly belonged, but he saved his breath. When he had prepared the components he went through the back room of the house to the pantry, where he took a
small firkin of lard from Sister Penny's cold shelf and brought it back to the prescription counter. Meantime his visitor had returned of her own accord to the front of the store and stood looking moodily out of the window.

  He carefully measured out the lard, mixed it with the ingredients, and solemnly pasted the label on the jar: Apply twice daily for earache. Then he went behind the front counter and wrapped it up. "This is for external use only," he said. "Solanum should be mixed with an equal quantity of pure hog's lard before applying, so I took the precaution of mixing it for you. This will make it useless for anything but an external anesthetic."

  He half-expected another outburst, but she gave him a sharp, surprising smile. "That's all right—it's no good to me without a grease base. You could have saved your lard, high as it is now. How much do I owe you?"

  "Oh—about thirty-five cents," he said, remembering the lean mesh purse.

  She opened it, took out a fifty-cent piece, and snapped it down on the counter. "What you've given me is cheap at fifty cents. Good night, Dr. Partridge." Snatching up the jar, she made for the door.

  "Wait a moment!" He wanted to draw her out further about those queer ideas of hers, but his words were lost in the shrilling of the bell as she jerked the door open. She took off from the threshold like a night bird swooping, a darkness on the dark.

  A harsh squeaking came in and filled the quiet shop; the great mortar and pestle that hung above the entrance were shaking on their metal bracket from some passing gust. The cold, damp draft struck Timothy to the bone. He went over and slammed the door himself.

  "Whewl" he said, sitting down on the edge of his chair, for the strong dream-sensation began to fade and left a slight dizziness, more of the limbs than of the head. "A queer creature, and no mistake. . . ." He went on muttering platitudes to cover the unsettling fact that he really didn't know what to think about his visitor. To make it further confusing, the visitation seemed more dreamlike the more he himself withdrew from the dream-area and his senses picked up again his area of reality—his apothecary's scales on the counter, the small-talk of the gas jet, the smell of orris root and spirits of nitre.