Page 63 of Malady

“Were they aired?” I call up to him sharply, testing the weave with cautious fingers. “Did they beat them before packing? We don’t need down-valley rot wrapped around our folk.”

“No need for airing, mistress,” the driver calls back, tossing another parcel down to Matthias. “The old lord died of eighty winters and a worn-out heart, not the pestilence. Ceased breathing quiet-like in his sleep. His folk stripped ’em straight from the linen presses to send up-valley.”

The wool springs apart beneath my hands. It’s thick and dry, gloriously clean. There’s no damp in the weave, nor the stink of sickness… Just good sheep’s wool stripped from the beds and cupboards of some dead lord whose coin has finally become useless to him.

Mrs Baker’s already crying as she wraps a large length of heavy frieze around her little girl, tucking it beneath the child’s chin with shaking hands. Mrs Holt has cornered the driver beside the wheel and is arguing fiercely for a second cloak on the grounds that one of hers has a hole in the shoulder and therefore apparently does not count. Brother Matthias is carrying armfuls towards the church steps. Brother Leon is shouting names. Even Gideon has stopped declaring the end of days long enough to organise a pile for the sick.

All winter, I’ve watched the fog creep beneath doors and settle into bedding until even an ordinary cough turns wet and ugly. These blankets will not cure the pestilence, but they might spare a few poor souls the misery of freezing to death while they wait for it to finish them off.

Gathering the grey coverlet against my chest, I step back from the crush around the cart, a smile tugging at my mouth.

For the first time in months, it’s easier to count what we’ve gained than what we’ve lost.

Perhaps Beswick has a chance yet.

16

OPHELIA

Three days have passed since the cart came through, and Beswick is somehow new again. It’s as though somebody plucked the whole miserable village from the ground, shoved it back into the womb and birthed it a second time, pink and squalling and determined to live.

I can hardly make my way down the lane without encountering somebody swaddled in the dead lord’s wool. Mrs Higgins has taken to wearing a blanket about her shoulders even indoors, and yesterday I nearly walked straight past old Sam Stalley because he was wrapped so thoroughly that all I could see of him was his nose. Still, I’d rather have them all wandering about looking like badly bundled infants than shivering themselves into an early grave.

Better still, the churchyard has been quiet. I’ve managed three whole mornings without being woken by half-naked men whipping themselves bloody. Even Gideon’s become insufferably cheerful, having decided beyond all reason that the Almighty sent the cart specifically to reward his pastoral endurance. He’s spent most afternoons holding smug little prayer vigils in the churchyard, wrapped in a rather fine sheepskin cloak that he apparently considers a personal gift from Heaven.

Which means he has left me well alone.

It’s been bloody glorious.

I pull my new cloak tighter around my shoulders as Iscairn and I make our way back to the shop after finishing our rounds. The lane is still frozen hard beneath our boots, but for once I’m not limping my way through it, because my thigh is behaving today. There’s still a pull through it now and then, enough to remind me not to get too confident, but nothing like the deep ache that usually has me gritting my teeth through every step. Whether I owe the reprieve to several decent nights of rest or Iscairn’s deeply unnatural remedy—which I’m still quite annoyed with him for using—I’ve decided not to examine too closely.

Good days are rare enough. I’m not about to waste one arguing with it.

And nothing has happened today to spoil it. The greatest medical crisis we have faced has been marvellously mundane.

When we checked on the Vance cottage this afternoon, the babe had been fussing himself red over an itch while Mary bounced him against her shoulder. She pulled up the hem of his little gown to show me a scattering of small red swellings across his legs, and I prescribed a dock-leaf wash with a smear of lard without a second thought. Stored wool always carries a few passengers, grand estate or not, and bringing a cartload of it into warm homes was bound to stir them up.

A few angry bites are a paltry price to pay for keeping the frost at bay

By the time we reach the apothecary, twilight has begun to stain the sky purple. A scruffy rat scurries out from beneath a woodpile, nosing at a frozen cabbage leaf before darting into the gutter. Iscairn steps neatly around it without breaking stride, and we carry on. I hurry inside ahead of the wind and shove the bolt into place behind us, glad to have a door between myself and the cold.

I’m halfway to the dying hearth when something rustles behind me. Iscairn is standing by the door, hanging his snow-crusted coat on its peg. Then his hands move to the brass buckles at his wrists, and I pause.

In all the time he’s been making himself comfortable in my shop, I’ve never once seen him undress.

Slowly, he peels away one black leather glove, then the other.

Holy…

I suppose I’d expected scales. Warts, perhaps. Something at least a little unpleasant beneath all that black leather, considering the teeth in his satchel and the idea of what he actually is.

Instead, as he reaches for the iron poker, he reveals hands better suited to some quiet scribe bent over a manuscript.

They’re pale and rather beautiful, his fingers long around the poker as he nudges a log back into the fire. A tiny brown mole sits near the base of his thumb, somehow making the whole hand even prettier.

Hm. I wonder what it would feel like to rub the pad of my own thumb over it…

Christ.