Free A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

by no means ready to slow down. He was sitting on a stool.
    “Yes?” said Jeremiah Jones.
    “I need to know about bella indigo.”
    Jones took a snuffbox from his pocket, pinched a large amount of snuff, and stared at it, rolling it reverently between his fingers. Lenox felt his ten minutes melting away. But at last the chemist placed the snuff in his nostril and snorted it in. Then, mystify-ingly to Lenox, who still had one eye on the boy and his food, Jones simply left the room through the door in the back wall.
    Lenox counted to sixty before he asked the boy, as politely as he knew how to, where the man had gone. The boy looked up slowly and said, “He gone through that door.”
    This could have been more helpful. “What’s in there?” Lenox asked.
    “D’you ’ave summing to eat?”
    In the best society such an abrupt change of subject was unusual, but Lenox searched in his pocket and produced a piece of candy. The boy looked at it the way a lion might look at a bony old antelope, half hungry and half disappointed, as if he had been hoping that Lenox might produce a twelve-pound roasted chicken.
    “Another room,” he said, reaching for the candy. “That’s what’s in there.”
    Lenox gave up, and the two resumed their rather gloomy silence. After another half minute, though, Jones came out again, carrying a small turquoise bottle.
    “Fifty pounds,” he said. “But it’s nearly eleven months old.”
    “Why does that matter?”
    Jones looked up. “Because bella indigo only lasts for a year after it’s brewed.”
    “Where do you get more?”
    “Oxford.”
    “The university?”
    “The only place in England that grows it. Or in Europe, for that matter. It’s a famous poison, in my trade, from Asia, but only Oxford dares to grow it.”
    “And sells it?”
    “Oh, no—never. They wouldn’t sell it. Very closely restricted.”
    “Then how did you get it?” Lenox asked.
    “Well, not never. See now, would you like to buy it?”
    “Can you tell me when the last bottle of bella indigo was bought and by whom?”
    “Do you have two more pounds?”
    Lenox handed over the money, and Jones pulled open his book, which seemed to be cross-referenced, in a remarkably Byzantine way, by the potion’s source.
    “Four years ago,” Jones said.
    “So the bottle you sold would no longer be effective?”
    “No.”
    “And you’re the only person in London, or in England, who sells it.”
    “Yes.”
    “Except for the person who gives it to you from Oxford?”
    Jones slammed the book shut and carefully capped the pen and placed it back on top of the ledger. “Good day, sir,” he said.
    Lenox stepped forward. “Please, one more question. Here’s another pound.”
    He handed Jones the money.
    “One more.”
    “Why do they make it? At Oxford or anywhere?”
    “Why do they make any poison, sir?”
    “No other reason?”
    “Well,” Jones said, “it has one other use.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The chemistry dons sometimes mulch their flower beds with it,” he said. “It’s particularly good for roses and orchids.” And then he walked through the door again, without so much as looking back.
    Lenox said thank you as quickly as he could and ran outside to catch the cab before it left. When he stepped onto the curb, though, he saw that it was several blocks away already and looked ready to turn. A shilling didn’t buy what it had when he was a boy.
    “No!” he said, and waved his arm, and in his haste stepped into the road. But he was unaccustomed to the broken cobblestones of the neighborhood, and his foot plunged halfway up his calf into an icy pool of water beside the gutter.
    Lenox swore only rarely, but he did so now. The chill ran through him, and as he began to walk the wind battered his leg. But he made haste, and soon he was out of the Dials; perhaps there would be a cab, and then, he thought hopefully, it would be no time until he was in his library, sitting by the fire and eating something