Chapter 8: Dame’s Cure
THE wild rabbit hopped along, regularly checking that Olivia was still following. It’d turn back every once in a while, then wait if Olivia was too far behind.
Olivia had never managed to have a conversation with a rabbit before. They ate, they ran, and they made babies. That’s about all their minds were filled with. They resembled hedgehogs in that regard.
But, while Olivia couldn’t pick up this rabbit’s thoughts, it was definitely thinking something.
They’d traveled over a mile from the restaurant when Olivia started thinking she should probably turn back soon, but that’s when the rabbit stopped and looked up at Olivia.
“Here?” she asked. “Oh! Those are dame’s cures! You wanted to show them to me?”
Olivia tore her eyes from the mushrooms to look back at the rabbit, but it was already gone.
The rabbit had watched Olivia from inside its hutch and saw her go out every day to forage mushrooms and make mushroom ladders. It must have decided she was some sort of animal that loves mushrooms.
“Well, I do love mushrooms,” she said. “But this…”
The caps of the mushrooms were around four inches across, and their cheery yellow filled an area about as big as one of the tables in Olivia’s restaurant. There were three patches, actually, about the same size. Olivia had heard these mushrooms used to be foraged quite a lot, loved for their flavor and incredible medicinal effects, but they were over-foraged in the end. She hadn’t seen any in about ten years.
If you soaked dame’s cures in water for a good time, they cooked into a delicious mushroom with a fragrance like butter. These mushrooms had a scary side though: if you ate too many without soaking them, you might stop breathing in your sleep.
Eating large quantities without soaking them first induced deep sleep followed by feeling refreshed when you awake, which was why they were called “dame’s cures,” or so Olivia’s grandmother had said.
“But why did it end up ‘dame’s’?” Olivia had asked her.
“Good sleep improves your skin, and apparently it’s common practice for ladies to wake up before their husbands to put on makeup, so they need the sleep,” said her grandmother.
“But wouldn’t it just be better for their skin to not wear makeup in the first place?”
“You’ll understand it once you’re older.”
Olivia smiled when she thought back to that conversation.
“I bet Freddy would be delighted to have some for the pharmacy,” she said. She had been thinking lately that she wanted to give some sort of thank-you gift to Freddy since he was always so generous with giving Arthur time off. He could probably make quite a bit of money with these mushrooms, since no one had even seen them in recent years.
Olivia carefully began picking the mushrooms.
“They should grow back next year, too,” she said, leaving pairs of mushrooms untouched in each little section in hopes they’d come back.
She hadn’t brought anything to carry the mushrooms in, so she took off her cardigan and piled the mushrooms in that. The thinly knit cloth dirtied and stretched as she carried the weighty load of mushrooms back.
“I can wash out dirt, and, if the whole cardigan’s a lost cause, I can just reknit it. We’ll just consider it a worthy sacrifice since these mushrooms will go for quite a lot.”