Could this really hold the clues, maybe even the answers? The box looked insignificant – it was made of cheap plywood, which had split in places – with an ill-fitting lid and an old paper label, mostly worn away. It looked as though it might once have held cotton reels. It spoke of a life spent scrimping and saving, of making do. To Alys, it was as exciting as if it was a treasure chest made of beautifully seasoned wood, and containing the rarest jewels. She hardly dared open it.
Alys sat on the edge of her bed and gazed around. She had always found her room at Moira’s calming, peaceful. She would unlatch the door, step in and instantly feel it – like a big sigh leaving her body, her shoulders dropping, relaxing. She’d always assumed the paint colour to be responsible, or put it down to the light in the room, the direction the windows faced.
Perhaps she hadn’t fully appreciated the sense of history in this room before? The stripped and polished floorboards and old, pine chest of drawers must have dated back generations, to her great-grandmother Beth’s time and even well before that. She’d always assumed that the patchwork quilt on the bed, its faded cotton squares in every shade of blue, must have come from a later era – Moira and Kate’s mother’s, perhaps? Or perhaps it, too, dated back even earlier? The view out of the window, though – fields stretching out to the distant moorland – must have been the one that Alice saw each day, and Sarah before her, Elisabeth after. The path that Alys took to Nortonstall must have been the one that they had trodden so many times before her, through trees of every season. She felt a sense of anticipation as she turned back to the box. She wasn’t sure what she would find in there, only that her instincts told her that it was going to be significant in some way.
Alys expected an aroma of dust and mildew as she lifted the lid away. Instead, the smell of herbs that rose to greet her transported her instantly to sun-drenched meadows. Nestling on a bed of dried foliage that had long ago lost its colour but still held onto a faint scent, was a leather-bound journal, quite obviously handmade. A solid rectangle of brown leather was folded around yellowing pages, which protruded beyond the edges of the cover and were held in place by rough stitches through the journal’s spine. A thin leather cord bound around the cover kept it all together.
Lifting the journal from its resting place, she discovered a small, cream fabric bag beneath it, hand-embroidered with a sprig of lavender in greens and purples that had kept their vibrancy over who-knew-how-many years. A dull gleam amongst the papery dried foliage led her to an oval locket, minus its chain and rather battered and misshapen. Front and back were etched with tiny ivy leaves, and a scroll on the front contained the date, 1894, in tiny writing. She tried to open it to see whether it held any photos, to give a clue as to its owner, but the damage it had suffered meant that it remained, frustratingly, clamped shut. Alys was struck by thoughts of who might have placed these items there, before closing the lid and putting the box away for safekeeping. On an impulse, she slipped the locket into her pocket, intending to ask Moira if she knew anything about it, before turning her attention back to the journal. Tugging at the leather cord, she paused to wonder whose hands had tied the loose knot over the years. Sarah? Alice? Elisabeth, perhaps? As the cord fell away and she opened the pages with great care, Alys saw at once the names of herbs, in a neatly drafted ledger of prescriptions, of doses. The names of the patients treated were followed by their ailments: ‘Albert Parkin – bronchitis; Florence Broadhurst – rheumatism’, along with details of the remedy dispensed, how much they had been charged and whether they had paid. Turning the pages, Alys noticed that some patients had paid their bills in pennies and farthings at different dates, clearly scraping the money together as and when they could. Against the entry for ‘Molly Ramsay, daughter of Ivy – lobelia syrup, once daily’ there was the sad legend: ‘No charge. Beyond help.’
Totally absorbed, Alys went on turning the pages. The herbal described treatment for everything from the mundane: ‘John Arkwright – warts upon the hands and nose; bloodroot and tincture of Echinacea’ to the more serious ‘Margaret Clark – weekly poultice of figwort applied to leg ulcer’.
The centre of the book held a plan of what appeared to be a garden, with herb borders named, and the months for harvest, or perhaps flowering, inked in against each name. A list ran down the side of the page, of place names that Alys recognised from the locality, such as Tinker’s Wood. More herbs, ones that weren’t named in the garden, were listed here.
Towards the end of the book, Alys found remedies copied out in a careful hand. Some of these pages were clearly much used, being creased and spotted with liquid turned all shades of brown by the passage of time. Amended amounts and faded pencil scribbles were testament to ongoing revisions to the remedies. Two pages were clearly so frequently used that Alys found that she had to peel them apart, terrified of damaging the brittle paper. The remedy on the left-hand page was for a rosemary tonic shampoo, the title of the one on the right read ‘Heart tonic’ and beneath, in brackets ‘Alice’s remedy’. Alys started, and nearly dropped the book. She read on through the list of ingredients: skunk cabbage, valerian, hawthorn, pulsatilla, skullcap.
There was a murmur of voices, then footsteps on the wooden stairs. ‘Darling, are you up there?’ It was her mother’s voice.
Alys snapped the book closed, wound the cord loosely around it and pushed it and the embroidered bag back into the box. She put on the makeshift lid, then looked wildly around for a hiding place. Shoving the box underneath the bed, she stood up and prepared to greet Kate, trying not to look as guilty as she felt. Although she had no reason at all to feel that way, it was just that her mother’s presence frequently made her feel somehow in the wrong. And today was no exception.