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Maro's Herbarium and Apothecary

by MelWong

"It's a shame, but what am I going to do? I can barely feed m'self as it is, let alone m'three bairns and this one on the way. It's a hard life."
- Washerwoman Lilac Rain, wife of the drunkard Manaros.

"Abortion is a sin! That vile act halts a soul's journey and prevents it from rejoining the glory of the Immaculate Dragons! For the children!"
- Excerpt from the Immaculate Ayeva's streetside sermon. Much pelting with rotten produce followed.

This is a little herb-shop in one of the few green corners of Firewander, at the end of Giblet Walk. A scraggly apple tree sprouts through broken cobbles on the street between the herb-shop and Malurie's Dressmakers. More old pits and cracks have been ingeniously edged in mostly-whole brick borders and filled with loamy soil to form impromptu flowerbeds. The pastel tones of the small wildflowers are a welcome relief to the faceless little shops lining both sides of the square and the flower-heads bob in the lightest breeze.

The herb-shop is run by Willit, son of the late Maro whose name still fronts the shop. Willit is a skinny, soft-spoken young man whose breath smells like wintergreen. He is currently unmarried, and neighborhood gossip has placed him as much too shy to stand a chance of winning a mate. He grows most of the herbs that can be grown in a small lot behind his shop, and he is often seen pottering around the street flowerbeds in his free time. In fact, he was the one to put loam down in the potholes in a bid to make the street more attractive, something that frustrates other shopowners to no end as their slumlords have raised rents in response.

While he does stock a standard variety of medicines, including maiden tea and expensive sweet cordials (kept in a locked cabinet behind the glass-topped counter), his tenure has been known more for his discretion and under-the-table services than the efficacy of his prescriptions. He does minor medical services such as wart-removal and wound-dressing, but the real draw is that he performs abortions for desperate women as long as they can pay his fairly modest fee, no questions asked.

Any woman seeking to have a troublesome pregnancy terminated (be it a result of a missed dose of maiden tea, rape, or other misfortune) need only come to his shop with money up front. She will then be scheduled for an appointment in the evening after shop hours are over. Willit performs the procedure himself, using a peeled reed and herbal wine as a disinfectant. His patients are all sedated with bitter herbal draughts brewed from ingredients he harvests himself out back. His fatality rate is astoundingly low for a back-alley abortionist; most of the time the women will wake up once the sedative wears off and are ushered out the back door with a packet of herb tea to stanch bleeding and ease cramping.

Rumours

• Some of the urchins have sworn that the aborted fetuses are turning into tiny hungry ghosts, haunting the street at night. That has led to the erection of tiny shrines for the unborn, in the form of stylized porcelain statues more commonly put up as memorials for dead children. The fact that offerings placed at the feet of the two-foot tall statues occasionally vanish is yet more grist for the rumor mill.
• The abundance and beauty of the wildflowers growing in the beds has been attributed to the secret of a very grisly fertilizer made from the ground-up fetuses he aborts. Some alewives have claimed that the occasional dead patient makes it into the compost heap on account of a pariah dog unearthing a bleached skull from his back garden once, but said rumor has never been confirmed.

Secret

• Willit sexually assaults his patients while they are unconscious, cleaning them up before performing the abortions. Many a woman has woken up in his backroom sore and with her mouth tasting of wintergreen. So far, they have just attributed their discomfort to the procedure itself and the taste to the herbs.