Read Online Death at Apothecaries' Hall by Deryn Lake - Free Book Online Page A

stink, let me hasten to add, but your own highly individual scent. I would know you anywhere, my good friend.’
    Again by habit, John bowed. He had always, in common with so very many others, treated the Magistrate as if he were sighted, and now this habit was totally ingrained.
    â€˜As ever, Sir, you astound me.’
    Mr Fielding rumbled his wonderful mellow laugh. ‘I’ll get some hot punch sent in. No doubt you’ll need warming after the misery of the streets.’
    â€˜It is indeed very raw out there.’
    The Magistrate rang a little bell which stood on the table beside him and after a moment or two a light step was heard in the corridor outside. This was no servant coming to answer, however: instead, a ravishingly pretty girl entered the room, a girl barely thirteen years old but already one of the beauties of town. A girl so naughty with her flirting that the temptation to box her ears was never very far away. The Apothecary gave her the most severe glance he could manage in spite of her radiant smile.
    â€˜Why, Mr Rawlings,’ said Mary Ann Whittingham, Mr Fielding’s niece, ‘how very pleasant to see you again. I was only thinking the other day that I had not set eyes on you since the summer.’
    Vividly recalling how he had rescued her from a brothel where poor wretched children were offered to the old and beastly of London, and thinking that the little madam seemed totally unperturbed by the experience, John looked positively ferocious.
    She dimpled at him. ‘You frown, Sir. Have I done anything to upset you?’
    He stuck out his tongue, happily aware that the Magistrate could see none of this. ‘Of course not, Miss Whittingham. How could you?’
    He crossed his eyes and made a face like a gargoyle.
    â€˜Why,’ she answered, grinning, ‘I do vow and declare that you grow more handsome every time I see you.’
    â€˜Enough,’ thundered the Magistrate. ‘Mary Ann, stop teasing our guest. Ask one of the servants to make a jug of strong punch and bring it to us as soon as it’s ready.’
    â€˜Yes, Uncle,’ she answered demurely, thumbing her nose at the Apothecary, who thumbed his back.
    Mr Fielding sighed gustily as the door closed behind her. ‘What a creature! After her fright last summer I swear she’s bounced back to be cheekier than ever.’
    â€˜She’s certainly a handful.’
    â€˜Of course my wife, having no child of her own, positively dotes on her. That’s the root of the trouble.’
    â€˜What are you going to do?’
    â€˜Marry her off, I suppose, as soon as she’s of a reasonable age.’
    John’s heart sank at the very prospect of trying to keep the little imp under control for another three or four years.
    â€˜My apprentice is still in love with her.’
    â€˜She’ll settle for no young apothecary, my friend.’ The Magistrate sighed again. ‘No, I detect signs of vanity in her. I believe she’ll set her cap at a title.’
    â€˜She’s very beautiful. She might easily secure one.’
    â€˜What a business it is to rear a daughter,’ Mr Fielding replied.
    For this was how he thought of the child, brought to him at the time of his marriage by Elizabeth, his bride, who, for reasons that were not quite clear, was raising her niece as her own. John felt fairly certain that somewhere in Mary Ann’s background was a bastard birth, just as there was in his own.
    John had most certainly been born out of wedlock, and had been a starving three-year-old when his adopted father, Sir Gabriel, had taken Phyllida Fleet, John’s beautiful mother, forced to beg on the streets of London in order to survive, into his home. Later he had married her and John had been given all the security and background he needed. But he often wondered about his real father, another John Rawlings, son of the powerful Rawlings family of Twickenham, who had gone to find