Medicine

By Sebastian

It seemed only yesterday that he had died. Yet, the calendar on her desk said that today was the twenty second of January 1901, so that made it almost four decades. “Oh, my darling man! “ she sobbed as she moved slowly through the long, dark hallway.

There were so many memories. He was a small, not very handsome man, uneasy in company. Scarcely the sort that she, a young woman of great prospects, was supposed to marry. He had been endured, rather than accepted by her family. Yet she had fallen in love completely.

The wedding ceremony, children, parties, holidays by the sea, exciting inventions that were taking the country by storm – steam engines, railway lines, countless new buildings. Was there ever a better place to live than in London in the mid-1800’s?

Then the Black Cloud came into their lives. When she had become fat and tired from the nine children that she had born, too distracted by the many other things that she had to manage. She couldn’t even remember the Black Cloud’s name, but she could see the long hair and slim figure and young, vibrant eyes. And she remembered the look on her husband’s face when she walked in on the two of them.

Six months later, her husband was dead. Nobody really knew why he had died, only that he had suffered from severe stomach pains. They had wanted to perform an autopsy, but she had refused. What was the point? It wouldn’t bring him back. It wouldn’t make the guilt of living go away. It wouldn’t dull the pain.

She entered the study and sat down heavily at the desk. She opened the top drawer and pulled it out completely, trembling with the effort as she placed it on the ground. She reached into the desk cavity and fumbled behind the handsome walnut paneling. Eventually, she drew out the small canvas bag, knotted at the top, and placed it on the desk.

She sat for a while, her eyes half-closed as if praying, her breath coming in gasps. She pulled the strings apart and put the small, cloudy, medicine bottle on her desk. Then in one swift movement, she took out the stopper, put the bottle to her lips and swallowed the contents.

As she sat back in her chair, the memories returned. Mixing smaller doses of the bottle contents into her husband’s tea, every day for a month. The guilt about his suffering in his final weeks, but she was not going to lose him to the Black Cloud. Her body convulsed and she started to drift into the blackness. Her final sight was of the silver bowl given to her more than sixty years ago at the Grand Coronation.

“Forgive me, my darling”, she whispered. And Her Majesty Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, slipped away to join her beloved Albert.