Page 50

“If you are dying, I may take it.”

Her head jerks back. “You may bloody well not. No. Absolutely not. That I will not permit. I’ve spent my entire life being useful to this parish, and I have every intention of being thoroughly useless the moment I am dead.” She points a finger at me. “You can stand there and hold my hand and look grave about it like a normal physician, and then you can leave me be. When I die, you do not get to eat me.”

I huff a laugh, a brief wash of heat fogging the inside of my mask. “I am pleased we have established the terms.”

“I mean it. You can find someone else.”

There are still more than two hundred people here, which makes it a remarkably fat little village as far as souls are concerned, and at the rate the pestilence is moving from house to house, I could probably remain for quite some time without going hungry. Eighteen months, perhaps, if winter proves especially cruel and the sickness continues at its present pace. Though I should probably keep that particular detail to myself.

She glances towards the shuttered window, then lifts her basket onto the counter and rummages through the bottles. “I’m not going to speak to Gideon about any of this again, before you ask.”

“I was not going to ask.”

“You were thinking it. But I’d rather not spend my winter watching men I’ve known since childhood set fire to the only person in Beswick who knows where the liver is.”

“I am aware of the danger.”

“I don’t think you are. Once Gideon decides God has put an answer into his head, there’s no shifting it. You could drag Adam and Eve from their graves to swear you harmless, and he’d only conclude the serpent had fooled them twice.”

She tucks a loose sprig of feverfew between the jars and grabs the handle. “Which is why I won’t be discussing it with him again. In fact, I’d rather not dwell on any of this. I’ve managed perfectly well by keeping myself occupied since I was twelve, and I’d thank you not to interfere with my methods.” She fixes me with a stern look. “And another thing. My bedroom is forbidden to you. You appear in my house without invitation quite enough as it is, but you are not to enter that room, and you are certainly not to touch me. If you so much as brush my sleeve, I’ll chop you up and feed you to the hens.”

Then she turns away and limps towards the door, pulling her cloak from its peg with her free hand.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What does it look like?” She swings the wool around her shoulders, then reaches for her mask and dunks it in the little bowl of vinegar on the shelf. “We still have the Walkers, Mrs Holt, and the Vances before dark, and Mrs Holt will have been telling everyone who passes her door that we have abandoned her. So, unless my discovery has somehow relieved you of your duties, I suggest you fetch your demon satchel and make haste.”

“You are remarkably calm about this.”

She gives me a flat look over the top of the cloth mask before tying it. “I am not calm. I am choosing to be useful instead.”

For all the peculiarities of my existence, being fed remains one of its simpler pleasures.

The blighted cavity behind my ribs, where my heart keeps its thin, uneven time, is full. For now. The blue has quieted the gnawing ache, leaving a deep warmth in its place that gradually spreads through me until I am almost comfortable in my own skin.

Almost.

I pull the door to the Lynch cottage shut, leaving the corpse behind me, still and cold in the bed. Nearly an hour in a room with the shutters drawn, calming a racing heart and a body burning itself hollow with fever, and it was done.

Beswick has lost another soul.

I step around a dead rat near the gutter and continue on my rounds. The man I am visiting next appears to be in no danger of providing sustenance at all. He was kicked in the stomach by a mule several weeks ago. The bruising is fading, and he has kept his food down for two days, so the visit should be little more than pressing about his abdomen and asking intrusive questions about his bowels. If I am especially fortunate, I may even find some justification for leeches, though I have learned that people become strangely suspicious when one appears too enthusiastic about them.

I turn into the next lane, where a stretch of pale stone shows through the crumbling mortar.

Sunlight lies hot across it. A woman’s hands move over a wooden table, wrapping cloth around a wedge of goat’s cheese while a loaf sits beside her, dark at the crust and hard enough that she tells me to soften it before I try to eat. Beyond the doorway, low houses climb towards a ridge of worn rock⁠—

My boot sinks into frozen mud. Beswick closes around me again.

Time does curious things to the mind, and whatever life I had before this one has been worn so thin that I can no longer tell which pieces truly belonged to me. Every so often, a memory rises unbidden, vivid and strangely familiar, but I have lived among so many villages and watched so many hands perform the same little motions that even I cannot say whether it is truly mine or merely something I have collected along the way.

Perhaps, after so long, the difference no longer matters. Everything folds into everything else eventually, one winter into another, one plague town into the next, faces blurring into voices and voices into names until whatever man existed before the hunger becomes harder and harder to pick out from the thing that followed.

Ophelia Harrow, at least, seems remarkably willing to accept whatever I have become. Her shop is dark as I pass, without so much as a candle burning behind the clouded glass. I slow beside the window, remembering how little our conversation earlier today appeared to trouble her once we returned to work. I had expected her to be rather more difficult, but instead she spent the afternoon complaining about Mrs Holt’s refusal to open a window and carrying on much as she had the day before, handing me instruments without hesitation and paying no more attention to my hands than she ever had.

Not once have I told a living soul what I am. I have had ample time to imagine what might happen if I ever did, and somehow none of those imaginings involved six hours of Ophelia Harrow correcting the angle of my lancet and telling me to move because I was blocking her light.

Perhaps she simply keeps moving until unpleasant things are forced to move with her. Or perhaps tomorrow she will wake, remember everything I told her, and finally have the good sense to be horrified.