Page 51 of Malady

My preoccupation with her is an anomaly. She ought to be inconsequential. Another mortal in another dying village, useful company while I remain here and easily forgotten once Beswick no longer has need of me. Hundreds have come and gone, most of whose names I can no longer summon without effort.

And yet, my thoughts return to her leg. I used the soulglimmer on her once already, on the road from Merewick—partly because the pain had become unbearable, and partly because I required five minutes of silence in which to think.

It would take considerably more than that to undo years of a bone healing badly, but I could try.

Until this morning, even asking would have required an explanation I could not give. Now she knows enough for the conversation to be possible. Whether she would let me is another matter.

She told me not to touch her, and inconvenient though that has occasionally been, the instruction was clear. I will not turn an offer of help into another debt she thinks she owes me. So I shall wait until she asks, which means I may be waiting a very long time.

The leg is hardly the only thing I have noticed. Somewhere between the sickrooms and the burials, she has become the closest thing I have ever had to a colleague. I had an assistant once, perhaps eighty years ago now, a shrill little woman who complained endlessly about my handwriting and had the unfortunate habit of rearranging my instruments whenever my back was turned. She worked beside me for nearly seven years without ever learning what I was, and when eventually I left, I doubt she thought of me afterwards as anything more remarkable than an unusually disagreeable physician. But Ophelia Harrow knows precisely what walks into those sickrooms beside her, and this afternoon she walked into them anyway.

Perhaps that is why I wish to relieve her of some of the burdens Beswick so readily places upon her. Half the village seems convinced she can survive indefinitely on too little sleep and whatever food she remembers to eat between patients, and I would like, if only once, to see what remains of Ophelia Harrow when nobody is demanding something of her.

The road carries me past the mouth of Butter Lane, where the yellow door sits halfway down amongst the rows of grey stone. Nell Mercer believes herself a widow now. I wonder whether she is crying for William, or whether she and the children are sleeping more soundly without waiting for his boots on the stairs.

I confess, I had already taken a certain amount of pleasure in threatening his hyoid bone. But that was before I knew about the well—before I knew he had left Ophelia Harrow in the dark. And it was certainly before I saw the bruises fading along Nell’s upper arm.

The patient with the kicked bowels will have to wait.

I leave Butter Lane behind and continue through the sleeping village, where the last scraps of candlelight disappear as the houses give way to open ground. Fog lies thick across the fields, swallowing the distant hedgerows until only the narrow stretch of frost-stiffened grass remains visible beneath my boots. Each step breaks through the silver crust with a soft, brittle crunch, the sound carrying strangely far in the stillness.

Beyond the road, Beswick fades into little more than a few dark rooftops rising through the mist. I cross towards the trees, passing hedges whose bare thorns are beaded with moisture, while the taller grass brushes wetly against my coat. Ahead, the woods emerge slowly from the white, their thin black trunks gathering closer together beneath a tangle of branches.

A few more steps bring me to a low circle of old stone, furred with moss and slick beneath the cold.

I stop beside it.

What little moonlight reaches through the clouds catches along the upper stones, but nothing below. Damp air rises from the opening, carrying the smell of earth and old water.

I rest one gloved hand against the rim and lean over.

For a while, there is nothing but the creaking of branches and the rasp of my breath beneath the mask.

Then, far below, something moves in the inky dark, and a slow ripple of water whispers against the stone.

Slowly, my mouth curves beneath the beak.

“Hello, William.”

13

OPHELIA

Yesterday, I managed perfectly well. There were patients to see and medicines to prepare, which left very little room for dwelling on the fact that the enormous physician walking beside me had been alive for three hundred years and occasionally swallowed whatever escaped a person when they died. I handed him instruments. He irritated me. I irritated him. It was all relatively normal—as normal as normal can be when the doctor is not, strictly speaking, a doctor.

Then the sun went down, the blankets came up, and whatever happened between ten and four is a matter between me and the ceiling. Very little of it involved sleep.

Daylight had made everything easier to ignore. In the dark, my mind had nothing better to do than drag out every unpleasant thing I’d tried not to think about and arrange it behind my eyelids.

One minute I was back at the well with black water closing over my head. The next I heard the crack of my own leg breaking all over again. Somewhere between the two came Alice Fletcher, lying beneath her blankets while that impossible blue light poured from her mouth and disappeared into Iscairn.

Every time I shoved one image aside, another took its place. By the sixth hour, I was lying there red-eyed and aching and thoroughly sick of my own thoughts when the faint clink of glass drifted up through the floorboards.

No one sane would break into a locked apothecary to rummage through my tinctures.

That giant, bird-beaked bastard.

I scramble up, snatch the iron poker from beside the hearth and march downstairs hard enough to make every tread complain beneath me. Let him hear me coming. Two days ago, I could simply scold an arrogant man. Today, I’m apparently going downstairs to curse out a three-hundred-year-old soul-eater for meddling with my bottles, and all my usual chastisements suddenly feel woefully inadequate. So I’m backing them up with heavy footsteps and something blunt.