The Solstice Syrup

The dawn of the summer solstice tinged the Oreb a rosy gold. At eight, the parish priest, Don Anselmo, came down the hill with the news the neighbourhood had been waiting for: the fever had broken in the Tanners' quarter, even in the Ferrers' little boy, whom Jacinta and Gabriel had watched over from three o'clock until he broke into a sweat, and there was not a single neighbour left in bed in the whole parish.

At the walnut counter of the apothecary, Gabriel was finishing his official report with his best goose quill, cut to a fine bevel. He was no longer using the black, funereal ink of seizure records and tax embargoes, but the bright crimson ink reserved for extraordinary decrees safeguarding common property.

"'I certify, in my capacity as senior auditor, that the Apothecary of Three Wishes of Puente Viejo constitutes a medical station of primary public necessity, protected by the communal charters of the Oreb and exempt from all fiscal intervention or metropolitan seal'," Gabriel read aloud, and pressed down the great red wax seal.

Jacinta came out of the back room carrying a wicker basket heaped with freshly baked rye bread —a gift that Elena Morán and Mateo Ruesta had sent that same dawn from Molino Claro aboard Lucía Ribes's river barge— and two steaming bowls of white tea with orange blossom.

"You've drafted a legal heresy of imperial proportions, Inspector," she said, setting the basket down on the papers, which were already dry.

"I've drafted the only truth I won't be ashamed to have signed when I look back in twenty years, Jacinta," Gabriel answered, laying the pen on the blotter and looking up with a calm he had never known in the halls of the tribunal.

Gabriel gathered up his ink pots and put his seal of arms away in its velvet-lined case. He left out, however, the sealing order he had brought from the capital, already signed and stamped, and threw it into the hearth without reading it again. Then he walked slowly to the open door, where the river breeze stirred the branches of the willows along the canal.

"The coach for the capital leaves in two hours from the high inn on the king's road," he said, stopping on the worn stone threshold.

Jacinta came over slowly and pinned to the lapel of his black coat a tiny posy of fresh mint leaves and a wild chamomile flower that gave off a sweet scent.

"The coach carries men who are in a hurry to shut themselves away among dusty bundles of paper and dry ambitions, Gabriel. But this apothecary has a copper still that needs a meticulous expert who knows how to measure the silences of the night, and a house over the river with more than enough room for two."

Gabriel looked into her eyes and took Jacinta's hand in both of his.

"There is no surer medicine than knowing that someone will keep watch over you when night falls."

"Then stay for supper, Master Auditor. Elena's bread is still warm, the river has stories I haven't told you yet, and the bed above the boiler, as you know, is still the only one free for two leagues around."

Around midday, the people of Puente Viejo began filing through the apothecary with baskets of eggs, trout smoked over alder wood and jars of goat butter. The Ferrer boy's mother brought nothing: she stayed in the doorway with the child in her arms, pink-cheeked again, not daring to come in, until Jacinta went out to fetch her. The mayor of the town, who two days earlier had signed the eviction order at the urging of the royal attorneys, came to the counter hat in hand to apologise and to give Jacinta the warrant declaring the apothecary free of all municipal tax for seven years.

Before evening fell, Gabriel went with Jacinta to the hanging garden of the bridge to cut the season's first mint leaves. He knelt among the plants without caring that he was getting black earth on his fine wool trousers, and learned to cut the stems the way she showed him, two fingers above the node. He cut himself once with the little sickle, and Jacinta bandaged his finger with a strip of linen and told him he now had his first wound of the trade.

At dusk he asked for a ladder, a pot of paint and the finest brush in the apothecary, and went over, letter by letter, the inscription the rain had erased above the door, the one that gave the house its name. Jacinta dictated it from memory from below: Clean water for the thirsty. Someone to watch over the feverish. And that no one, ever, should heal alone.