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Her hand stills over David’s palm for less than a breath.

The boy does not notice—too occupied staring at the rafters and regretting most of his recent decisions—but I do. The faint lift of her head, the small flare of her nostrils, the moment her attention slips past the split skin and bright line of blood to whatever has begun gathering beneath it. Not much yet. Only the first sour suggestion of rot, quiet and hopeful in the place where the blade opened him and the filthy water found its way in.

“Nasty water in the pit today, was there?” she asks, reaching for the curved needle.

David blinks down from the rafters. “Aye, mistress. River’s low.”

“Clearly.” She takes the linen thread and feeds it through the eye without taking her attention from his palm. “You’d have had an arm like a winter turnip by Thursday if you’d left it.”

His face drains. “Would I?”

“Yes, David. Which is why we are currently preventing it.”

“Oh.”

The crypt has not made her beautiful. She was beautiful long before it, though I have never considered it wise to tell her so whilst she is holding anything sharp. What has changed, however, is the way we work together. She has become determined to learn everything physicians would rather keep to themselves, particularly those things apothecaries are seldom permitted to practise, so that, in her own words, she might “stop waiting for some scholarly peacock to tell me where the important bits are before he charges a dying man sixpence to bleed on his shoes.”

A fair ambition.

Now she feels for the vessel before the needle reaches it, and can smell the filth beginning beneath the skin long before the corruption makes itself visible. She has always understood bodies better than most mortals understand their own names, but they speak to her sooner these days, and she has naturally taken this development as an opportunity to become harder to impress.

“There,” she mutters, drawing the stitch tight. “That is one. If you look at it again, I shall assume you want to finish sewing it yourself.”

David keeps his gaze fixed on the rafters while she sets the next two stitches, knots the linen and snips the tail with her shears. Honey and crushed comfrey follow, sealed beneath clean linen and bound with a strip of wool, and by the time she pats the finished bandage hard enough to make him wince, the boy looks as though he would rather reopen the wound than remain under her attention a moment longer.

“Keep it out of the river,” she tells him. “No scraping hides until the seam holds, and if the edges start leaking green, you come back before your master starts admiring the saw. Two pence.”

He drops the coins onto the table and flees down the stairs with the haste of a boy spared both infection and further conversation. The latch falls into place behind him, and although another mangled chorus rises from the taproom below, the room up here settles into something resembling peace.

I leave my place beside the linen press and cross the warped floorboards to the table, setting the rosewood box beside her jar of woundwort.

“The markets along the Shambles were unusually lively tonight,” I tell her. “Open it.”

She wipes the dried soap from her wrists with a coarse towel, tosses it aside, and draws the box towards her. The brass clasp clicks beneath her thumb, revealing a pair of gloves nestled against dark green velvet.

They are made from fine black kidskin, soft and supple beneath the fingers, with narrow seams stitched so neatly that they are almost impossible to distinguish from the leather itself.

She stares at them for a moment before turning her own hand over in the candlelight. Her fingertips remain as they have since her change, blackened from the nails to the middle knuckles, though the skin is perfectly sound beneath the discolouration.

“I told you three days ago I don’t care about the fingers.” She looks up at me, folding her arms across her apron. “They don’t hurt, they don’t rot, and they sew a cleaner line than they did when they were pink. If you bought these so I can hide them, you’ve wasted your silver.”

I reach behind my head and work the leather bindings loose, easing the mask away from my face before setting it on the table. My hat follows, and I rake a hand through my hair, grateful to have the weight of both removed after several hours spent wandering the markets.

I believe it took me a very long time to reconcile myself to my own change. For her, the only thing that has caused any difficulty whatsoever is the appearance of her hands—which troubles everybody else far more than it troubles her.

Only yesterday, when Mistress Wycliffe enquired about the blackened skin, Ophelia informed her she had been experimenting with a mixture of chimney soot and rendered goose fat, and had unfortunately discovered that the resulting preparation stained anything it touched. When the woman asked what ailment such a concoction was intended to treat, Ophelia replied that she had yet to find a suitable one. Naturally, Mistress Wycliffe accepted this without question.

“The gloves are not intended to conceal anything,” I assure her, resting my hands against the back of the chair. “It is February, and the cold shows no sign of breaking. I thought you might appreciate something warm.”

She looks back at the gloves, her expression softening.

“And,” I add, “I wished to buy you something nice. I was under the impression that one could occasionally give a lady a present without first requiring her to suffer some dreadful misfortune. Unless you would prefer a hat? There was a very fetching one with an enormous feather, though I thought you might object to the colour.”

“What colour?”

“Yellow.”

“Christ, no.”