“I know what it is to watch my child fall from my body at the hands of a man. And while my story is terrible, every woman has faced a man’s wickedness to some degree. Even you.”
A woman with an interest in history, whose husband has been unfaithful to her, goes mudlarking in London, and finds an apothecary's vial. This sets her off on a quest to discover the origins of the vial. Although time has shrouded some of the details, she learns that it came from the well-hidden shop of a woman apothecary who was spurred to provide other women concoctions that would help rid them of the abusive men in their lives, after she herself had been mistreated, at a time when women had few escape routes available to them. However, both the mudlarker and the apothecary decide to change course: the former decides to prioritize herself after her husband drinks eucalyptus oil in an attempt to gain her sympathy while the latter gives up dispensing poisons and chooses to honour the legacy of her mother from whom she had inherited herself. Vengeance, as the novel points out, isn't all it's cut out to be.