Page 26 of Malady

Gideon frees his sleeve from my grasp and straightens his cassock, the stubborn set of his mouth telling me the argument is already over. Nothing I can say will compete with this—none of it will sound half so comforting as the promise that perhaps, finally, somebody knows how to make the dying stop.

Fine. If they insist on shutting themselves inside the nave with a dozen open wounds and calling it holy, then so be it.

By the time my boots reach the lane, I’m walking fast enough that my whole leg feels ready to give out, but irritation carries me onwards. I’m going back to my shop to count my supplies, because by next week, half of those holy penitents will probably be feverish and leaking through their bandages, and I refuse to be caught unprepared simply because everyone else in Beswick has collectively lost their bloody minds.

I round the corner beside the apothecary, head bowed against the wind, and walk straight into Doctor Iscairn. My boots slip in the slush, and I catch myself against the wall.

“You startle easily, Ophelia Harrow,” he rumbles.

I press a hand to my chest and glare up at him while my heart gradually retreats from my throat. “You were standing motionless around a blind corner. I think the fault may be shared.”

The faint crack of another scourge carries between the cottages before he can answer, followed by the distant swell of prayer.

“I see the Brethren of the Cross have arrived,” he says.

“You know of them?”

“Yes. I’ve encountered them in other villages when the pestilence takes hold. They believe their spilt blood appeases divine wrath. Your brother welcomed them?”

“With enthusiasm.” I fold my arms beneath my cloak. “He has opened the church to them, praised their suffering and apparently decided that a dozen men flaying themselves through Beswick is exactly the sort of divine intervention we have been lacking.”

“Your brother is frightened,” he says, his pale beak tilted towards the churchyard. “When people have exhausted every remedy they understand, hope becomes easier to accept than helplessness.”

I give him a flat look. “Hope will be of tremendous comfort when their backs begin to rot.”

“Flesh rots regardless of faith. But they are not treating the body, Ophelia Harrow. They are treating the despair.”

A familiar wooden rattle sounds farther up the lane. Robert rounds the corner behind the death cart, his mule dragging it through the churned slush with a single canvas-wrapped body on the boards. As the cart reaches the apothecary, one wheel drops hard into a rut, and Robert stumbles with a curse. The body lurches sideways, caught only by the rope around its middle as the upper half of the canvas slips loose.

A pale face rolls into the light.

My stomach plummets.

Death has leached whatever warmth remained in her, leaving her skin the terrible, bruised grey of the pestilence.

But Alice Fletcher’s face is not contorted. Alice Fletcher’s corpse is almost smiling.

“She died in the night,” Iscairn murmurs. “I checked on her at first light. The pestilence took her sometime before dawn.”

Liar.

I search those amber lenses for some flaw in the performance. A hesitation, perhaps, or the smallest shift in that unnerving composure. Some lingering trace of blue beneath the glass. Anything that might betray the thing I watched kneeling beside Alice’s bed while the cottage glowed around him.

There is nothing. Only Doctor Iscairn beneath the eaves, speaking of a dead woman with the same calm he might use to discuss the likelihood of more frost.

It would be considerably easier if whatever he is had the decency to look unnatural. Horns would be useful. Cloven feet would settle several questions at once, and I would even accept a forked tongue if it spared me another morning of trying to decide whether the enormous physician standing outside my shop belongs in a sickroom or one of Gideon’s sermons.

Instead, I’ve been given this.

A man who kneels for frightened children, steals their teeth when no one is looking, settles quarrels with irritating ease and tends the sick with more patience than Doctor Taylor ever possessed—then draws impossible light from a dying woman and lies to my face about it the following morning.

Demon. Devil. Monster. Nightmare. I’ve turned every word over until they mean almost nothing, and none of them tells me what I actually need to know.

What is he, and what did he do to the Fletchers?

8

OPHELIA