Ayla the Apothecary

Words by Chris Cottom

Art by Yaleeza Patchett

It is early in the physic garden, where twelve-year-old Ayla is snipping dew-wet dragance and daisies, as her father has instructed. She looks up at the turreted schloss high on its crag above the forest, over which the sun has yet to rise. She shivers as she recalls stories of successive Counts of Mittenwald taking their pleasure with the village’s maidens, one generation after another.

She loves to sit beside her father Albrecht as he concocts the salves and poultices which draw folk from far and wide. She’ll listen attentively to the litany of aches and agues of everyone from stinky swineherd to dimpled damsel, and it seems there’s never been a time when she hasn’t known her comfrey from her calamine or her heartsease from her horseradish. 

“Betony for headache, vervain for the nerves,” she’d recite as a youngster, skipping back and forth across the floor of their cottage. “Horehound for a cough, anise and cumin for colic.”

Before she’d seen ten summers, Ayla was adept at measuring seeds and spices into the mortar and pummelling them with the pestle under Albrecht’s watchful eye. But there was one plant which her father insisted he, and he alone, must gauge and grind. 

“Henbane will unblock a bile duct or ease a clenched limb,” he said. “But too high a concentration will seize the heart, and, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow in the east, death shall follow. A death which is ghastly and full of pain.”

As she tends the profusion of herbs and medicinal plants in their garden, Ayla always treats the henbane with respect. So proficient had she become that, on her last birthday, Albrecht had said, “From this day forth the physic garden is your domain. I shall spend more time in study and experimentation.” 

Today, as she surveys morel and mallow, knapweed and maidenhair bursting up in the fertile soil of spring, Ayla wonders where she might grow still more, to sell to wise women and other apothecaries. For her kindly father often treats poor people for nothing, blind to the cost of the exotic spices with which he complements his home-grown ingredients. Ayla knows he can’t resist the dark-skinned merchants with their pungent sacks of cassia and cinnamon, peppercorns and grains of Paradise.

Ayla’s older sisters, Hedwig and Fronika, have fallen to flirting with the farm boys next door. Bartel and Steffan are as tall as pine trees and as fair as harvest-ready wheat. Of an evening, the girls will help them drive their cattle down to the meadows after the milking. Here they will tarry while darkness falls and mosquitoes feast on whatever flesh they might find. As Ayla lies on her thin palliasse by the hearth, she’ll hear her sisters giggling in the lane as their swains bid them farewell with what she assumes is a surfeit of kissing, and which she prays will not rile their father. She recognises that, for all his learning, Albrecht understands little of coquetry and courting, and still mourns his wife, who had left this world on the very day she had squeezed Ayla into it.

* * *

It is nearly Saint John’s Eve. For weeks the young folk have been gathering wood for the midsummer bonfire. Hedwig and Fronika speculate without pause about which maid will dance with which admirer. Ayla has made garlands of mugwort and vervain for people to throw into the fire to ward off ill-luck. Even her father says he’s looking forward to taking a cup of wine with the other elders and joining in the singing, although he’ll leave before Bartel and Steffan and the other young men start leaping across the blaze so their corn will grow as high as the flames.

As the family eats their supper of elderberry soup with dumplings they hear a chink of harness and a clatter of hooves, followed by such a knocking it can only be the pommel of a broadsword. Albrecht opens the door to a manservant in the livery of their liege lord, the Count of Mittenwald. 

“My master is afflicted with a grievous headache that demands your alchemy,” the man says, eyeing the three girls sitting very still on the settle at their oak table.

Albrecht says he will be honored to serve the Count by compounding a salve. “And you may tell your master I shall deliver it to the schloss myself.”

“Send one of your daughters with it,” the man says, jabbing a gauntleted finger at Hedwig. “The buxom one. And make haste.”

And with that, he strides back to his horse and remounts. With a jangle of reins, he is gone.

“Ayla, you must assist me,” Albrecht says, as Hedwig and Fronika clear away their interrupted meal. “Equal quantities of horseradish and bishopwort, wormwood and helenium, garlic and hollowleek. Pound them well, then we’ll sweat them in butter with—”

“Celandine and red nettle. I know, Father, for you have taught me well.”

An hour later Ayla hands Hedwig a vial of bitter-smelling salve.

“Tell our lord to administer it hourly to his forehead and temples.”

“Ask Bartel to accompany you,” Albrecht says, as Hedwig swings her thin cloak around her shoulders and sets out for the schloss above the forest. 

* * *

It is several hours before Hedwig returns. She speaks not a word to her anxious father, but takes straight to the bed she shares with Fronika. From her palliasse by the hearth, Ayla can hear her eldest sister sobbing while Fronika tries to comfort her. 

The next day Ayla overhears Fronika confiding to their father that Hedwig had had no difficulty in persuading Bartel to leave the evening milking to his brother and climb the track through the forest with her. But when they knocked on the metal door of the schloss, Bartel was ordered away, leaving Hedwig to deliver her medicine alone. Although Bartel waited for her amongst the trees, he’d fallen asleep on the pine needles, so Hedwig failed to find her sweetheart when at last she flew down the hill, her flaxen hair loose and flying out behind her.

* * *

Barely a month later, Ayla is looking forward to Lammastide while she hangs bunches of lavender from the rafters to dry, when a rap on the door tells her that the Count demands Albrecht’s wisdom anew. 

“My lord desires a potion for his lady,” says the manservant. “A love-charm, for she is dry and unwilling. Send it up before nightfall with your other daughter. The tall one.”

Fronika’s face blanches milk-white as she learns what she has to do. But she assures her father that she will ask Steffan to escort her. Albrecht and Ayla boil up an unguent and Fronika sets off to find her beloved and protector.

* * *

Ayla sees her father sigh with relief and press the tips of his fingers together in gratitude when Fronika returns home safely in the gloaming. But soon Hedwig can no longer mock her sister’s breasts as apple-sized, just as she can no longer disguise the swell of her own belly. 

Ayla knows how mortified her dear father must be at their lord’s misuse of his innocent daughters. But she understands there is nothing on this earth he can do about it, other than make an agreement with their neighbour, Bartel and Steffan’s father, so each sister might marry her suitor quietly and without delay. 

* * *

A few days later, the Count of Mittenwald himself comes to the door. Albrecht bows stiffly to the short, black-bearded man. 

“Sire.”

“Master Apothecary, I need an elixir to strengthen my sinews and stir the blood. I require my lady to give me a son, but I no longer have the rise to play my part. Her prattling ways and interminable devotions would extinguish the ardor of a stallion.”

Flushing at such talk, Albrecht orders Ayla into the garden for some water mint. But Ayla has grown up seeing the ewes tupped by the ram, and the cows led to the bull, so she knows very well what the Count means. While her sisters cower like cupboard-mice behind the settle, she crouches below the window and hears him say, “Mix your potion well Master Apothecary, for I’m of a mind to test it tonight. Send it up with your youngest daughter.”

“My lord, she is but a child,” Albrecht says. “I can send Bartel the herdsman with it. Or Steffan, his brother.”

“Your daughter,” the man says, turning on his heel. “The young one.”

After the Count has ridden away, Ayla comes indoors, holding her apron out before her, laden with herbs. 

“I have what we need, Father. Seed of fennel, rocket, anise and wild carrot. Leaves of mint, pennyroyal and origan. Allow me to make this for our liege lord, since I am to deliver it to him.”

“Ayla … the Count—”

“Father, I am neither shapely like Hedwig, nor slender like Fronika. I have the figure of a spit boy and shall not be thirteen until Eastertide. You need not fear for my virtue.”

“Very well,” says the apothecary, taking a moment to gaze at his daughter, already busy with her chopping and grinding. 

Then he goes to call on his neighbor to broach the subject of two weddings.

* * *

In spite of her assurances to her father, Ayla trembles as the steward leads her through the corridors to the Count’s chambers. She’s relieved, however, to find him attended by the whey-faced Countess, absorbed over her needlework. The Count insists that Ayla takes a chalice of warm spiced wine with them to fortify her homeward journey, and gives her a coin in return for the little packet she hands over while his lady isn’t looking. Then Ayla dances down through the forest, thankful the presence of the Countess had restrained the base instincts of the monster who’d had defiled her hapless sisters. 

* * *

The next morning, even before Bartel and Steffan and the other herdsmen have finished their morning milking, the whole village knows the Count has died in the night. Word spreads that he’d expired at the very moment of penetrating the saintly Countess, who, naturally, would now enter an extended period of prayer and mourning.

When asked to opine on the cause, Albrecht says he believes his lord had long suffered from a weak heart.

* * *

At a midsummer wedding more than two decades later, Ayla the Apothecary regards the groom, Hedwig’s firstborn, tall and fair like his father, Bartel. She wonders, not for the first time, what exactly had happened on those two summer evenings long ago when her sisters, one full-figured and one willowy, had taken the track up to the schloss. 

As if reading Ayla’s thoughts, Hedwig, now a stout matron with grey-flecked hair, ambles over and sits down, her body settling like turnips in a sack. They look across at their father, dribbling a little as he sits with Fronika and Steffan. Albrecht now suffers a palsy which makes his once fastidious fingers tremble so terribly that Ayla can no longer trust him with the pestle and mortar. These days, he’s content simply to sit in the physic garden in the balm of evening, enjoying the perfumed air with the little sense of smell which remains to him.

“Father’s mind is feeble,” Hedwig says. “He’s been telling us he received a purse of gold from the Countess after the Count died, which he used for our dowries and the land for the bigger garden. A likely tale!”

Ayla points to the groom dancing with his bride, both laughing as her crown of myrtle starts to slip from her chestnut hair. 

“He’s happy, isn’t he?”

“I’d already fallen pregnant with him that evening,” her sister says.

“Which evening?”

“That evening Father sent me to the schloss, just before St John’s Eve. Bartel and I had been dancing the Paphian jig for months.”

“So that loathsome man violated you even though you were already with child?”

“No, of course not! Not the eldest daughter of the clever apothecary who could cure his headaches. He did leer at my globes beneath my bodice, but didn’t all the men when I was seventeen?”

“So … what …?”

“Bartel waited in the forest while I gave the Count the poultice or whatever you’d made. Afterwards we lay on the pine needles to play at rantum-scantum together. Twice. Then I kissed him goodnight and ran all the way home.”

“But the Count …”

“I realized that blaming him would force Father to discuss a marriage settlement with Bartel’s father. Father would have been ashamed to think I’d been practising night physic before I was betrothed.”

“I can scarcely believe this,” Ayla says, lifting her hand to her mouth, and thinking back in horror to her own visit to the schloss. “Surely it wasn’t the same for Fronika?”

“It was. She too already had bacon in the drawer. But she didn’t stay out so late in the forest. Steffan put it under her kirtle but once that night.”

Ayla’s face flushes as red as a field poppy. 

“Do you still share such intimacies with each other?”

Hedwig heaves herself up. 

“A sister keeps no secrets from a sister. Does she?” 

* * *

At midnight, the village women lift the bride’s veil and cut off her braid to show she’s arrived at womanhood. Ayla watches and cheers before slipping away through the warm night. She can see clearly in the moonlight as she uproots every clump of henbane in her garden. Then she chops it with her spade and buries it deep in a hole not far from the gnarled apple tree.

* * *

Early next morning, while her husband and children remain asleep, Ayla goes into the garden. A soft summer mist hangs low over the fields, and the shrubs and blackthorn hedges are laced with spiders’ webs. She picks camomile and sorrel, valerian and borage, each in flower and wet with dew. At her table, she twists whips of hazel into a circle before weaving her delicate greenery in and out. 

She returns to the little wooden church, its path scattered with the grain with which the wedding guests had showered her nephew and his bride. The headstone of the last Count of Mittenwald has long been the most elaborate in the churchyard, dominating it as his home has always dominated the village. Ayla looks up at the old schloss on the crag, where his Countess still lives. The sun has already risen high above its turrets, and it no longer seems quite so forbidding.

Ayla places her wreath of flowers towards the top of the Count’s grave and stands quietly for a moment with her hands clasped before her. As a blackbird trills into song, she smudges her thumb across her cheek and sets off for home, planning what she might plant in her garden in place of the henbane.

About the author

Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. He has work published or forthcoming in 100 Word Story, 101 Words, Eastern Iowa Review, Flash 500, Free Flash Fiction, Leon Literary Review, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, One Wild Ride, Oxford Flash Fiction, Roi Fainéant, Streetcake, The Lascaux Review, The Phare, and others. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien. More at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom 

About the artist

Yaleeza Patchett has been creating illustrations since the moment she was able to pick up a pencil. Through her artistic journey she became well versed in the mediums of graphite, ink and acrylic. Recently she has begun to further exercise her artistic skill in the realm of dark macabre, pagan, and blackwork illustrations. Through this she has found meaning and new love for her artwork. Yaleeza currently resides in the Southside of Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband Jon, her bloodhound Jojo, and her two cats, Boogers and Finn.