Page 70 of Malady

The leather splits across my knuckles as I strike the side of the well, then drag both hands over my face. But it is no use. The baby cries again behind my eyes.

If they were mine, I should know.

“Mercy, Doctor. Please.”

I lower my hands and peer down into the well, where William Mercer is somehow still alive. Barely. He has dragged himself into the curve of the stone and folded there as tightly as his ruined body will allow, half-submerged in filthy slush and shivering so violently his teeth knock together. His face has swollen almost beyond recognition, one eye buried beneath purple flesh while the other peers weakly up at me through a slit. His lips are split and black with old blood, mud has dried thick through his beard and hair, and almost nothing remains of the swaggering man I dropped into this well.

My gaze moves lower.

The broken leg lies useless beside him, twisted beneath the water at an angle that makes even me wince. His thigh has swollen around the break until the breeches have split along the seam, exposing angry, stretched flesh beneath, and something thick and yellow has begun to seep through the torn cloth and run into the slush around him.

“Be quiet, William. I am thinking,” I say, turning away from the well before I have to breathe in another lungful of rot, blood, piss and shit.

“Please. I’ve learnt, me. I swear on it. I swear afore God Almighty. I’ll never lay a finger on ‘er again. I won’t even pass t’time of day wi’ ‘er. Never again. Just—please, Doctor. Get us out of ‘ere. I’ll mend me ways, I swear it.”

I rake both hands back through my hair and walk away from the well, though William’s snivelling follows me across the frozen ground.

Wretched maggot.

I make it half a dozen paces before turning back towards the well, my boots grinding through the frost. What, exactly, am I still hoping to achieve? I wanted him frightened, and the miserable creature has spent the last week weeping in the dark. I wanted him to understand what he did to Ophelia, to know what it feels like to lie at the bottom of a well with a broken leg, entirely at the mercy of somebody who has no particular inclination to help him.

Well, he knows now.

So why is he still down there?

I have no idea. I have turned the question over for the better part of an hour and arrived nowhere useful, which is becoming something of a theme this evening.

Eight houses were barred today. Ophelia Harrow painted the black crosses herself, moving from door to door with pitch dripping from the brush between her fingers.

Merewick was already deep in the pestilence when I arrived, but after a few weeks the deaths began to slow. Not enough to call the village well, certainly, though there were mornings when the cart went out with only one body beneath its shroud, then mornings when it did not go out at all. Doors opened again. Someone fired the bakehouse ovens. Children began creeping back into the lanes, and for a handful of days the people of Merewick allowed themselves to believe they had endured the worst of it.

Then the pestilence turned.

Within days, every scrap of progress was gone. One house became four, and before long there were so many black crosses on the doors that I stopped counting. The sickness spread faster than we could bury the dead, taking whole families before moving on to the very people trying to help them. Even the men digging the graves began to sicken, and soon there were scarcely enough healthy hands left to put the dead in the ground.

By the end, there was nobody left to ring the bell.

Nobody left to pull the dead cart either.

I dragged them to the pit myself. Some I carried. Others I wrapped in whatever linen remained and hauled through the streets one by one, past doors that would never open again. By then there was little point remembering names. There was nobody alive to mourn them, and before long nobody left to ask where I had put them.

When Ophelia Harrow arrived in Merewick, she found a village full of bodies and one physician who had run out of people to save.

And now Beswick has eight fresh crosses.

Tomorrow another family will call for her, and she will go. There will always be somebody hammering on the apothecary door, begging for her, and she will keep answering until there is nobody left to ask.

I know exactly why she stays. That is precisely why I want her gone.

She should leave Beswick before it becomes another Merewick, lock the apothecary behind her and ride until the black crosses disappear from the roads altogether.

She could come with me. I could take her somewhere far from Beswick, and she would spend the journey complaining about my pace or the miserable state of whatever inn I chose for the night. Before long, she would have her herbs spread across every available surface, a cup of tea forever going cold beside her while she muttered over my shoulder as I worked. And I suspect I would grow rather fond of having someone to disturb the silence.

No.

She would never leave while there was still somebody here who needed her, and I would never ask her to. Nor would I take her anywhere.

I am being absurd.