(Enjoy this chapter from The Testers: The Poison Remembers)
The wine touches my tongue, and I know.
Foxglove—masked beneath Spanish muscatel—bitter as betrayal. Metallic undertones bloom across taste buds long scarred by survival. Copper rides in on sweetness like a knife sheathed in velvet.
Three heartbeats. Four. Still standing.
Across the candlelit din of the Hall of Presence, I meet Margaret’s eyes. Her fingers work dried yarrow in her apron pocket. I see the tension in her shoulders—how she’s already read the room, the rim of the goblet, the page’s trembling hand.
Someone here wants the king dead.
And they’re willing to kill me to do it.
My name is Thomas Tester. My family does not rule, or pray, or heal for coin.
We taste for poison.
Born in the shadow of Black Mountain—where Wales meets England’s edge, where wild things cling to stone—I was raised to swallow danger before others sip. My grandmother taught me the difference between healing and harm the way other boys learned hymns.
She pressed diluted belladonna to my lips when I was seven. “Feel that burn?” she whispered. “Good. That’s your body learning to live.”
I wept blood and bile for two days. But I lived.
Men like Bainbridge call this concoction medicine when they administer it. Witchcraft when women do. Tonight, it’s neither.
Tonight, it’s murder. And I’ve just swallowed it.
Behind Harrington’s thin smile, Thomas Boleyn watches like a man who’s already measured my coffin. These wolves have circled for weeks—sniffing weakness ever since Anne caught the king’s wandering gaze. Court politics sharpen faster than knives.
Harrington lifts his own goblet, feigning camaraderie. “A fine vintage, wouldn’t you say, Master Tester?”
The poison licks its way down my throat. My gut clenches, but I smile. I have to.
To spit at the king’s table would get me beheaded faster than the foxglove can work.
My son Edward watches from the gallery—eight years old, eyes too old for his face. I will not let him see me fall.
Margaret’s hum threads the noise—soft, steady, a Welsh healing song no one else here would recognize. It’s our tether. Our ward. I feel it in my bones, in my breath, in the ache of muscle resisting collapse.
We prepared for this.
Beneath the floorboards of our quarters lie elderberry tinctures gathered in secret, hawthorn to calm a failing heart, charcoal for drawing poison. Remedies passed mouth to mouth for generations—never inked on parchment, never trusted to the hands of men who burn knowledge once they’ve stolen it.
I sip again.
Because a Tester does not flinch. We do not panic. We buy time for the antidote to reach our blood. We play our part until the danger passes—or kills us.
Some families test metals for kings.
We test death.
The only question is whether I survive this cup . . .
. . . or whether my son inherits a legacy of sacrifice without understanding its cost.
Because in every court, in every century, someone profits from poison.
And someone must stand between the chalice and the crown.
The pharmaceutical industry didn’t start yesterday.
It grew from centuries of people swallowing risk so someone richer didn’t have to. In 1521, Thomas Tester tasted foxglove for a king at Hampton Court, bitter on his tongue while the throne stayed safe. Five hundred years later, Grace Blackwood follows overdose maps through Appalachian towns and sees the same pattern: new bar codes, same wounds. Oak halls became exam rooms, robes became white coats and logo shirts, but the danger still lands at kitchen tables where families line up orange bottles and try to match fine print to what they see in the mirror. Herbalists, nurses, and mountain women keep their own notebooks because they know the official charts will leave out the worst of it. Draw a line from foxglove in a royal cup to opioids in a paper bag; it runs straight.
