Page 28 of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore
Nathaniel’s jaw dropped. She was sending customers to his shop? “I…yes. Yes, we do,” he said, snapping into customer service mode.
The man shifted the baby in his arms. “Do you carry mugwort?”
Nathaniel’s eyes flashed, remembering the handful of herbs Violet had conjured for him.
Was shemockinghim?
Any goodwill he’d dredged up for her during his visit to her shop evaporated. Perhaps it was retaliation for asking her to move her display. He felt bad about how he’d responded to her gesture that night, he did, but now she was sending some of her customers over here to prove her superiority, knowing full well that his stores of mugwort were all but empty. He’d been right that the conjured herbs from Violet were not the same as the real thing—the alchemical tests he’d done on the plants had all but turned them to dust, as opposed to the glossy effect it would have had on an authentic sample. They were organic certainly, but they weren’t the same as the real thing. He wasn’t sure what the effects of the herb would be if taken medicinally, but he wasn’t about to use his customers as test subjects.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the man. “We’re out of mugwort at the moment. Our new shipment should arrive next week.”
The man nodded with a weak smile. “No matter. I can get it from the new apothecary down the street.”
Everything inside Nathaniel’s head ground to a scraping halt. “Excuse me?” Marsh’s was the only apothecary in Dragon’s Rest, and had been for more than a decade. “What new apothecary?”
The man pointed with his free hand, and the baby cooed at the motion. “Sedgwick’s, down on the corner of Bank and Wyvern, where the mapmaker used to be.”
“The mapmaker? What happened to Digby?” But Nathaniel’s mind was already whirring. Sedgwick was the name of that man who had come into Marsh’s a few weeks ago asking about dangerous ingredients. His stomach sank as the man confirmed his fears.
“Retired and drinking rum on a beach somewhere by now, I’spect. Rumor’s that he received a generous offer—far too generous for Dragon’s Rest. Some outsider. Got it up and running right quick too.”
“I see.”
The man shrugged. “So if you haven’t got any, I’ll…”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Nathaniel smiled apologetically. “As I said, we’ll have a new shipment in next week, so please check back with us then if you have any further needs.”
“Perhaps,” said the man, and sauntered off.
Another apothecary, Nathaniel mused. And run by a man of means. This did not bode well.
“Prudence!” he hollered up the stairs. “I need you to watch the shop!”
A moment later she appeared at the landing, bleary-eyed and still in her nightdress. He remembered belatedly that she’d performed at the Claw & Hoard last night. “Can it wait?”
“It cannot. Get dressed and get down here. Keep an eye on Daisy.”
Several protracted moments later—Pru behind the counter with a strong cup of tea and Daisy curled up at her feet—Nathaniel marched up Bank Street toward the building that had formerly housed the mapmaker’s. In the matter of days since he’d last come this way, the facade had been painted with a garish orange trim around the windows and on the door.Sedgwick’s House of Alchemyproclaimed the carved sign, painted in tones of purple and orange to match the door. Nathaniel’s heart sank into his stomach.
The man on the street had been wrong: It wasn’t another apothecary that had opened its doors.
It was an alchemist.
An alchemist had moved into Dragon’s Rest and opened up shop.
And that alchemist wasn’t Nathaniel.
A peculiar sensation swept through him then, some poisonous concoction of anxiety and bitter disappointment, tinged with jealousy. Nathaniel clenched his jaw in an attempt to stem the panic that swelled in him like the tide. This was better, wasn’t it? No competing apothecary to interfere with Marsh’s.
Still, all his dreams for his family’s business flashed through his mind in an instant, of using alchemy to create medicines and cures. All of Pru’s half-baked ideas of teahouses and gardens and expanding their scope. He’d done none of it, and with a dreadful sort of certainty, he thought perhaps now it was too late.
Nathaniel had already lived his worst-case scenario. A competing shop was nothing compared to what he’d already dealt with, he reasoned. Logically, he knew that.
But the cold queasiness rising in his chest like a rogue wave hadn’t received the same message.
He swallowed the prickly lump that had appeared in his throat and laid his hand on the gold knob, entering the store. There were half a dozen people inside, Nathaniel noted with resentment, and from behind the counter, the proprietor’s mouth opened in a delightedO.
“Mr.Marsh!” Sedgwick’s sleek blond hair was tied back neatly in what Nathaniel suspected was his regular look. “I wondered if I might be seeing you. Give me a moment to help Madame Bixby here and I’ll be right with you.”
