The apothecary’s daughter

Abstract

Cornelius is a widowed apothecary who lives with his daughter Susannah. In addition to taking care of the house and the pharmacy bills, Susannah is a great admirer of her father's work and loves helping to prepare the concoctions commissioned by some of the city's doctors and clients. Little by little she learns to make the mixtures with the exact amounts based on plants such as lavender, licorice or turpentine, among many more, and ends up becoming a great expert in natural remedies, something very unusual for a woman of that time. His father meets a young widow with children and falls completely in love with her, to the point of getting married. And the life of the young apothecary changes completely: she is no longer the apple of her father's eye, the interesting readings and debates about various topics that they have between them are left aside and for a time, she becomes a kind of Cinderella who, in addition to helping her father in the pharmacy, has to take care of and keep her uncontrollable stepbrothers distracted. As if that were not enough, her stepmother is unbearable and her days are becoming less bearable and complicated until she meets Henry Savage, an attractive young man, a friend of the family, who tries to convince her that he is completely in love with her and asks her for her hand. Susannah, despite her fears of getting married and the obligations that this entails, especially procreation, follows the advice of her good friend and ends up accepting the proposal, leaving behind the troubled life she has led during the previous months. . But she soon realizes that her husband is different, very different from how she had imagined. He abandons her with the excuse that he has business to attend to, he comes home very late and as much as she tries to "be a good wife" he rejects her. After a few months of marriage and in the face of Henry's disappearance for a few days, Susannah receives tragic news: her husband has died of the plague, like many other citizens of London at that time, and his life completely collapses when to realize that she has been left alone, mired in the debts that her husband has left everywhere and without the dowry that her father had given to Henry. Hard and difficult moments that he ends up dealing with his cunning, his intelligence and his passion for natural medicine, and that despite the virulence of the epidemic and all the vicissitudes that are happening in a society also affected by other diseases, his life takes an unexpected turn.