Morphine
The first man to isolate morphine was a young German apothecary named Sertürner, a pioneer of modern pharmacology. His life, however, ran anything but smooth.
For one thing, he was a morphine addict.
He had used his own body as the experiment, determined to establish the drug's effects and a proper dose. Once, he and his friends tossed back a median lethal quantity and wandered the border of death; the addiction that followed, so the story went, left him depressed for the rest of his life.
I wasn't revisiting that devotion out of any fresh reverence.
Succeeding at manufacture and building a business are two different problems.
Making the stuff didn't mean it would sell itself.
I had more than twenty kilograms of morphine on hand.
Raw opium still sat heaped in the warehouse, but production had been halted for now. We'd run out of sealed vessels to store the drug in, and the money had run out with them.
Now it really was time to think about distribution.
"Sir Knight. No—sir. Might I say a word?"
Jacob, Bono's elder brother, spoke while watching my face for a reaction. Opium dust clung to his cheeks.
Until now he and his younger brother had been laboring like opium slaves, splitting raw opium, but with the work stopped he seemed to have found the breath to talk.
"Speak."
"Is the medicine truly so effective? I don't mean any distrust, of course."
"Give it to a man who's just taken a musket ball and he'll forget the pain. It can suppress even agony that soaking him in opium couldn't touch. …A single dose is fifteen milligrams."
"…"
Jacob adjusted his spectacles, as if he'd briefly forgotten what he meant to say. He seemed to be reckoning how many doses the morphine they'd made so far would come to.
Considering they'd produced it in conditions only a little better than a cottage industry, the volume was considerable. That was why Jacob looked troubled.
"This isn't a quantity we could sell ourselves, I suppose."
"I was thinking the same."
"Then there is a way. We use word of mouth."
"Word of mouth?"
I decided to hear him out.
Not because I aspired to be the sort of employer who listens to his staff, but because I wanted a sense of how a former trading-company clerk—educated, by the standards around here—thought about morphine. Once I released it into the world, there would be no taking it back.
"The truth is… there's a dentist near where I live. He's getting on in years, but he learned tooth-pulling properly in a barbershop from the time he was young."
"…"
"Every time I pass the place, I hear screaming. Sometimes, they say, they tie the patient down and pull. What if you supplied them a small amount, cheaply?"
"And we wait until the rumor spreads?"
"Yes…! Give it a few months, and I expect people will come running, begging us to sell them some morphine. We'll be able to do business sitting comfortably where we are."
If all that mattered was making money, he wasn't wrong.
It might even have been the easiest, most comfortable road there was: pick one dentist's office where the screaming never stopped and supply the goods, wait for word of morphine to spread of its own accord, and sit in the office doing nothing but collecting coin.
Two months from now I might be seated on a cushion of money, with a handsome dividend to hand Sienna besides.
Over the medium and long term, though, it stood a good chance of threatening my own hide. Abuse would send more than a few people to their deaths.
Better to say it now, while I have the chance.
I looked at Bono, standing there with that artless expression, and at his brother Jacob.
"There's something I haven't told you."
"What do you mean?"
"I said fifteen milligrams will give you relief from pain. Take three times that, though, and you'll thrash about and slip under without even knowing it. Drink ten times that and you'll fall into a coma—you might never get up again."
"…"
"Do it Jacob's way, and it won't be long before someone dies."
Fifteen or a hundred and fifty, it was a trace amount either way—something you could measure only on a precision balance meant for poisons.
Simply warning people to take only the proper dose was never going to work.
Not because they were ignorant. Keeping to a single dose was simply a hard thing to do. If it had been easy, I wouldn't have seen so many stories in my previous life about people dying on the stuff, and my own brother—a practiced dealer—would never have overdosed.
"So the thing we made… was that dangerous?"
Bono asked, his face tight with tension.
Strange, that a man who'd served at the front should grow tense over a medicine—but I had no mind to blame him. A sense of danger was exactly what we needed.
"Bono. Jimsonweed, the plant you're already tied to, is an herb that eases stomach pain and asthma if you use only a little. Take too much, though, and you go blind, or fall into a coma."
"You mean it has to be used only in the proper amount."
He understood. I didn't know why he'd suddenly turned formal, but I let it pass.
As it happened, I had a job for the two of them.
Something far more important than spending the whole day mincing raw opium. A plan for how to sell.
"Go and sell it."
I sent Bono and Jacob out of Thames Palace, each on his own.
I wasn't sending them to stand in the street and hawk the stuff. I was only telling them to make the rounds of the hospitals in the Imperial Capital, explain morphine's effects with due courtesy, and propose a supply contract. If it proved necessary, they were even to offer a small sample.
The targets were hospitals with at least a hundred beds.
Some were run by the army. Others were kept by the rich as charity.
I'd chosen those outlets because anything smaller couldn't administer morphine in any systematic way. A hospital was hardly under perfect control, but it was far better than scattering the drug without discretion—and it was where morphine would do the most good.
Naturally, neither of them looked confident.
"If we just shove the goods at them out of nowhere, will they really buy? It might be different if it were you, Sir Knight."
Even to my eye, it didn't look as though anyone would.
A former clerk from a trading company, and a former guard-knight known to have drawn the displeasure of the Second and Third Imperial Princesses.
If men like that suddenly turned up asking someone to buy a little medicine, it would be stranger if anyone agreed on the spot.
We might not even get a meeting.
In any case, the reality was that most of the hospitals in the Imperial Capital were closer to places for warehousing the disabled and the sick than to institutions of treatment. When the truly wealthy were injured, the usual course was to make a large donation to the Church and obtain an audience with a saintess.
And then a pair calling themselves employees of Madoff Pharmaceuticals appear out of nowhere, peddling a drug with the claim that they have a medicine that can take away a patient's pain, and would the hospital please allow them to supply it on a regular basis?
Treating them as swindlers would be the normal response. No amount of earnest explanation of the effects was likely to change that.
And the price isn't cheap, either.
The price I'd set was fifty thalers for four doses—a day's supply.
Enough for three meals, with beer besides.
I didn't think of it as gouging, but set that price on a quantity an ordinary apothecary's scale could barely measure, and a hospital was bound to feel it was expensive.
Unless the Miller brothers talked as if revelation had seized them and somehow won a contract, they were very likely to be turned away outright.
That expectation was soon fulfilled.
"Sir. I went to the hospital sponsored by Marquis Rakiers, but I was refused without so much as seeing the director. I'd been waiting about an hour when some nurse came out covered in blood and told me to get lost. …I'm sorry."
Refusal.
"There wasn't a soul who didn't know Her Highness Sienna grows opium poppies…! They asked me right back who would buy opium at that price. I explained that morphine works differently and even offered a sample, but they wouldn't listen."
The next day brought another refusal. A great many of them.
"There's… nowhere left to go."
After days of being turned away, even the places left to visit had run out.
The Miller brothers looked ashamed at having nothing to show for it, but I wasn't disappointed in the least. I'd expected this from the start. The villain was me, for shoving them out the door while knowing full well they would fail.
"It's all right. Rest now. You've done your part."
"Our part…?"
"At the very least, you've stamped the name morphine into the minds of the people who run those hospitals. You've also left them the picture of us coming to them first, making a courteous offer, and being turned away out of hand. The shoe leather you've worn out will be of help later."
The brothers tilted their heads with a bewildered uh, so I sent them home. A few days of hard rounds, and their role was finished.
The rest was mine.
I meant only to wait until the right opening presented itself.
Two days later, Sienna sent an attendant to summon me.
Was she about to hound me to hurry up and bring in some money?
When I arrived, she did not look to be in any pleasant mood. The maid who had been arranging her hair was trembling so hard she shook.
"…Allan. I've just come from the main palace, on Father's orders. I've been keeping my appearances in check, but I could hardly refuse an imperial command."
"What happened there?"
"I ran into my sister. And that woman apologized to me, out of nowhere."
Sienna's elder sister was the First Imperial Princess, Victoria Carlyle.
She had the army's support. The First Princess was herself an active-duty major, and she was diligent about looking after the soldiers' welfare.
For a woman like that to have apologized to Sienna—then, probably.
"Was it the morphine?"
"Yes. Sister Victoria is the greatest patron of the Imperial Military Hospital. Does she fancy herself the director? She told me she was sorry she couldn't buy the goods. …She must have assumed I'd ordered you to start the business."
In other words, it now looked as though Sienna herself had needed ready money, tried to unload opium—under a different name—on the military hospital at a steep price, and failed, and her temper had soured because of it. Today, at least, I couldn't fault her for showing it.
Fortunately, I had a way to put her at ease.
"So word of morphine has reached even Her Highness Victoria. I hadn't thought it would travel this fast. I am truly sorry for the position this puts Your Highness in, but it is not bad news."
At that, a keen light came into Sienna's face at once.
"You were hoping for a situation like this?"
Sharp, as always.
I asked her leave; I had a medicine to go and sell. I spared her the details, but Sienna seemed to have guessed already. She only flicked a hand and sent me out.