The Lock-Keeper's Physic

About this book:

On the fog-choked banks of the River Lea in 1624, lock-keeper Thomas Reed tends the gates with oak-hard hands and a healer's quiet knowledge. By day he raises the sluices for grain lighters and timber hoys; by night he brews willow-bark for bone-ague, lungwort for the rattling cough, and comfrey poultices for wounds the river deals. The boatmen call him a cunning man. The apothecaries in London call him a danger. But when a strange, oily sickness begins to creep downstream—turning water slate-gray, blackening fingernails, and leaving strong men gasping in their bunks—Thomas finds his herb-lore tested against a poison no simple draught can cure.

As the autumn mist thickens and the cough spreads from towpath to malt-house, Thomas traces the contagion to the tanneries at Ware, where new lime-pits bleed something far worse than effluent into the stream. With each chapter—*The Mortar and the Pestle*, *The Poisoned Wellspring*, *Heavy Metals and Holy Water*—the river yields its secrets: a corruption that binds chemistry and superstition, greed and grace, in a slow current toward *The Great Stagnation*.

Steeped in the mud, smoke, and green smell of seventeenth-century England, *The Lock-Keeper's Physic* is a historical mystery that reads like a remedy brewed from *The Name of the Rose* and *Year of Wonders*: atmospheric, precise, and pulsing with the rhythm of a world where every cure grows beside the poison, waiting for the hand that knows the difference.