Chamomile Dust and Sealed Papers

At three in the afternoon, the apothecary's great walnut table looked like a battlefield between two irreconcilable views of the world. Gabriel had spread out on the cloth twenty-six sheets of crown stamped paper, three horn inkwells with inks of different colours and a graduated brass ruler with which he checked that Jacinta's handwritten notes were tabulated according to the chancellery's decimal system.

Jacinta, for her part, had scattered three dozen bundles of freshly peeled white-willow bark, jars of aged apple vinegar and a fragrant mountain of dried chamomile whose yellow flowers gave off a golden dust that floated in the air and fell without mercy on the auditor's immaculate notarial records.

"This entry for the fifteenth of May is legally inadmissible," Gabriel said, pointing with the metal tip of his goose quill. "It says, word for word: 'Three handfuls of valerian root boiled until the water sings like a cricket in the night air'. What kind of quantifiable scientific parameter is 'until the water sings like a cricket'?"

"It's the exact point at which the steam doesn't burn the volatile oils of the root, Mr Noguera," Jacinta answered without blinking, crushing black elderberries in a green jasper mortar with steady strokes. "If you boil it at a rolling boil, the way your court manuals say, the medicine smells rotten, upsets the stomach and puts the patient to sleep for three days without bringing the fever down by a single degree."

Gabriel pursed his lips severely, but he couldn't help letting his eyes slide to the right-hand column of the calfskin-bound notebook. In it, in a clear hand, were the names of the neighbours treated over the last five years: eel fishermen, rye farmers, linen weavers, children from the parish school. Not a single death recorded from summer fevers. Not a single case of gangrene in the harvest wounds that in the capital's hospitals invariably ended under the surgeon's saw.

"The order of your files is admirable, Master Auditor, but the life of this valley won't fit between two cardboard folders," said Jacinta, coming over with an earthenware cup and offering him a boxwood spoon so he could taste the warm concentrate of mint and honey.

Gabriel took the spoon almost without thinking. The flavour, fresh and intensely herbal, burst on his palate with a cleanness he had never found in the imported French bottles the medical faculty kept under lock and key. He looked at Jacinta; she was smiling with the assurance of someone who knows that plants have laws no desk-bound pettifogger will ever understand.

At that very moment, the apothecary door burst open with a bang. Tomás, the errand boy from Elena Morán's mill, staggered in, his linen shirt soaked in cold sweat and his breath ragged from running.

"Miss Jacinta!" the boy shouted, gripping the edge of the counter with trembling hands. "In the Tanners' quarter six families are burning with marsh fever. My mother says the lower well has gone bad in the midday heat and two children are delirious in their beds."

Jacinta asked no idle questions. She dropped the jasper mortar on the table, knotted a linen scarf over her head and looked Gabriel straight in the eye.

"Master Auditor, you can stay here making sure your wax seals don't gather dust, or you can take off that fine wool coat and help me carry forty pounds of willow bark and arnica flower to the great copper boiler. You decide which side of the story you want to be on this afternoon."

Gabriel stood still for three seconds. Then, with a methodical calm that surprised Jacinta herself, he undid the bone buttons of his frock coat, folded it carefully over the back of the chair and rolled his shirtsleeves up to the elbows.

While Jacinta filled the hemp sacks with sage leaves and elderflowers, Gabriel went over to the great vellum-bound herbal resting on the lectern. He turned the pages with care: every plant was drawn in pen with bark inks and clay pigments, and each was annotated with the hour of gathering according to the moon and the soil where it grew strongest. For the first time in ten years of his career, the inspector suspected that there was more science in that herbal than in the whole library of his college.

"Tell me which mallet I should use to crush the bark, Miss Durán. And don't call me auditor again while there are patients waiting for a remedy on this river."

Jacinta handed him the boxwood mallet. Then she scribbled a note and gave it to Tomás with a coin: «To Beatriz Valls, in Altasierra. White thyme, all you have». It was four hours' walk each way, and without that essence the syrup they were going to distil that night would not bring down anyone's fever.