Elena made it very clear that I did not have to read Jenny’s journal when I was in her company.

“Jenny is sharing her knowledge with you,” she said, “not with me. I’m merely able to see it because I’m attuned to these kind of texts, I expect.”

But I was less frightened of the journal, and its powers, when I read it in Elena’s company. I’d take soup or sandwiches or whatever leftovers Pearl handed me at the end of the day to the archive, where Elena and I would eat together and talk, and then sit down to read our books. Mine was always the same text, of course, whereas hers varied according to what she was researching at that point in time.

I knew how lucky I was to spend my days with two kind, supportive women. Pearl seemed happy when I offered to start work early so that I could help her with the day’s baking, and we worked away most often in companionable silence. Neither Pearl nor Elena pressed me for information about my family, or why I’d come to be in Ballaig on my own. I wasn’t surprised that my parents hadn’t made any obvious effort to report me missing, or to look for me. I was sure they’d be happier without me there.

I had only one regret about running away: I’d used my home address on my university applications, and the letters of acceptance – or otherwise – were sent to a place I no longer lived at. Phoning my parents wasn’t an option, and I didn’t know who to contact to ask if the letters could be re-routed to Ballaig, so I put the idea of going to university – at least for the time being – to the back of my mind.

I tried not to think beyond that summer, taking each day at a time, grateful to be away from the terrible tension and anger in the house I’d grown up in.

Everything started to change when Jenny’s timeline moved into her apprenticeship with the village healer, Eliza. After Jenny’s younger sister got scalding burns from a cooking pot, Eliza had tended to her wounds and instructed Jenny in how to apply the healing balm and change the dressings. Through that interaction, Jenny became Eliza’s apprentice. Almost from the first day of her apprenticeship, Jenny was at Eliza’s side during experiences that were nothing less than traumatic.

When a farm accident resulted in a broken scythe handle embedding itself in the chest of the farmer’s teenage son, Jenny watched as Eliza rubbed a dark, copper balm around the site of the wound, to numb the skin. Between Eliza, the farmer and Jenny, they cut clear through the wooden handle protruding from the boy’s chest without tearing the wound, and then Eliza treated the site and sewed it up.

Jenny told me this matter-of-factly, like it wasn’t something that made her feel as queasy as I did hearing it, not was it something she seemed especially proud of, although I thought she should be.

Jenny was by Eliza’s side during several births, as well as many deaths. The death of one child, four years old, from a fever which never broke – not for the days and days they treated him with every tincture and potion in Eliza’s ken – broke Jenny.

“Can we not do something to end his suffering, if you can’t ease his pain?”

Eliza’s eyes were pained as she looked at Jenny. “Aye, there are ways. But it’s best you don’t know about them. Then you can deny everything, in truth.”

“But I’m your apprentice!” Jenny said, exasperated and angry. “You should teach me everything you know!”

“I am protecting you by not telling you everything. Not yet, Jenny. You should go home now, so you won’t be here when it happens.”

But Jenny refused to leave the boy’s side – to leave Eliza’s side. She watched as Eliza took a small glass vial from deep inside her cloak, removed the stopper, and poured it into the boy’s mouth. Within minutes, he had passed peacefully to the other side.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The next day, Eliza took Jenny to her hidden garden, deep inside the forest, where she grew the poisonous plants. She explained that her ancestors had used the poison plants to ease suffering and pain when there was no hope of healing, passing the secrets of the blends and potions down the generations to Eliza.

Eliza explained how her ancestor, Abigail, had been forced to become the so-called guardian of the lazaretto on Nester Island during the height of the witch trials, when one of the villagers accused her of killing his wife. After a hasty trial, Abigail was found guilty and sentenced to exile on the island, where she tended to the sick and infirm who were ferried across from the mainland.

During her exile, Abigail protested many times about the cruel treatment of those afflicted by pox and pestilence, crammed onto boats when they were too weak to lift their heads, carried – or dragged, more aptly - up a steep incline to a makeshift infirmary exposed to the merciless winds and storms that raged in the sea.

Her pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears; her jailers argued that those with disease needed to be removed from the healthy population quickly, to avoid the spread of infection.

After two decades of protest, Abigail found a solution, one which involved collaboration with the current village healer, to prevent the unnecessary transit of mortally ill people across the sea. Thus, a small, secret network was formed, consisting of the women who believed in sparing any undue pain and suffering, at great risk to themselves.

This was the network of healers-turned-poisoners that Jenny joined that night, as Eliza eased the boy’s suffering.

I kept the lines of communication open with Jenny, even as she continued to show me what she learned from Eliza, about healing and about the quickening and slowing of death. I watched as she gathered nettle, fennel, chervil, crab apple, chamomile, betony, lamb’s cress, buckthorn and mugwort, and ground each into a fine powder. I watched as she and Eliza administered the poison-antidote, on the rare occasions when one of the villagers (in all cases, a lover or a spouse) – acting out of jealousy and rage – acquired a poison potion and fed it to their beloved. A bit of the anti-poison powder in some apple juice, poured down the poisoned person’s throat, kept them from passing out of the living world.

I watched her as she tended the poison garden deep in the forest, and taught me about the each of the plants. That there was danger in the immense beauty seemed to excite Jenny, her pupils dilated as she spoke as though she herself had taken belladonna. I, too, loved the beauty of those plants, especially henbane, or stinking nightshade, with its sturdy, tall stem, elegant leaves and almost papery leaves. A few drops of henbane on a cloth, then placed over someone’s mouth and nose, would render them unconscious. Useful when it was safer for the person to be unconscious when the healing was underway, deadly if too much was used.

Tall poppies in reds and pinks danced next to the henbane plants, and were used for the opium that was often administered with henbane. The soft, pillowy white flowers of hemlock atop a sprouting green crown of foliage belie the plant’s ability to similarly render someone unconscious. This sleeping trio of plants stood proudly near the front of the poison garden, potentially deadly but often used by Jenny and Eliza.

When I asked Jenny if she was certain the poison garden was hidden far enough in the forest that unsuspecting children couldn’t stumble upon it on some adventure or other, I saw the first flash of anger pass across her face. It lasted just an instant, but I could see that she was irritated by my question, and my impertinence.

“They would never find it,” she said. “We have made it impossible.”

I thought it was entirely possible that a child, roaming deep in the forest, testing herself to go deeper and deeper still, would come upon this dangerous place. But I kept that thought to myself.

Behind the sleeping trio were the deadliest plants, those that could kill instantly. The purple-blue flowers of wolfsbane were elegant and showy, almost like a wig suitable for Marie Antoinette, and also entirely deadly. The drooping, downward-facing yellow and white flowers were Devils’ Trumpets, their honeysuckle-scent almost drawing me closer, until Jenny put up her hand to keep me back.

The truth was that I loved those plants almost more than any others that Jenny showed me. I loved learning their deadly secrets, and about how the healers used them to ease pain and suffering so that they could treat the illness. I was in awe at the very thought of Eliza and Jenny using these plants, taking risks with their own safety, which required delicacy and tremendous skill, a balancing act of using them for good, not ill.

I stayed by Jenny’s side learning, her apprentice across the divide of time and space, until I could no longer avoid the obvious truth. Bringing about a merciful death for someone with no hope of getting well again was one thing. But killing an entire village population and then disappearing was the act of a brutal killer. And Jenny was the only resident of Ballaig to not be found dead in her bed that fateful morning in 1900, pointing the finger squarely at her as the one who’d killed them all.