Obscurity, The Ninth Chapter
In which a bottle of poison is discovered in rather familiar company.
e last read The Eighth Chapter, in which blood was spilled at the Mardi Gras ball.

There was one man in town, an Englishman, who brought with him to the territory a knowledge of sorts. He was an apothecary—one who curated herbs and chemicals from every corner of the world and used them to prepare materia medica for the city’s physicians and patients.
Though the room was dark, the apothecary’s services were primarily used for light. To bring healing to the ailing, or to tempt those bodies who lingered too closely to the veil to return from it. For these services, he was well sought, and a great many were healed by his remedies. But though the apothecary was greatly emboldened by his profession, discovering in his clients the natures that ailed them and delighting in finding the treatments that healed them, he knew there was no money in a cure. Circumstance had long taught him that fortune favored a touch of the gods and so he had become adept at administering them.
As a young gentleman, the apothecary left England to learn from the doctors of Europe. As we have thus far ascertained, the methods employed at those times left something to be desired—there was merely a lot of bleeding and leeching, methods that, needless to say, did not meet the desired end of wellness. So, our apothecary continued his search for the herbs and tonics that would remedy the sick and draw fortune from the rich. When he did not find what he was looking for in the West he set sail for the East.
How amazed he was by the Orient and how knowledgeable they were in the healing arts. There he discovered a people who were not only well, but thriving. Whose skin was not marked by smallpox, nor ailed by yellow fever, but rather was smooth and beautiful, as though dipped in healing waters. He asked after their physicians and, for a time, apprenticed under a man who served his patients herbal tea on golden platters and set brass needles upon their skin.
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