Malady
In sixteenth-century England, Ophelia Harrow has no use for God.
She’s Beswick’s apothecary, and she’s buried too many good people to believe there’s anything waiting beyond the grave. To Ophelia, death is no divine judgement. It is sickness and suffering, flesh failing as flesh always does. But when the village physician dies, leaving her the only one to tend the sick, Ophelia must go beyond the parish to seek a replacement.
She finds Doctor Iscairn standing among the mass graves of a neighbouring village.
Masked and unnerving, he refuses food, scarcely sleeps, and will not cross the threshold of her brother’s church. None of it should inspire much confidence, yet he understands sickness the way the pious understand sin. At first, that’s enough for Ophelia to overlook the strangeness surrounding him. But the longer they work side by side, the harder it becomes to dismiss what she sees—and the more the earthly world she has always trusted begins to fracture.
Because Iscairn is no ordinary man.
For centuries, he’s walked through England, harvesting from the dying what disease cannot destroy. He does not interfere with death, and he has never allowed himself to truly care for the living.
Until Ophelia.
As fear and religious fervour tighten their grip on Beswick, so too does her attachment to the impossible creature at her side. And when the plague finally comes for her, Iscairn must confront something three hundred years of death have never prepared him for: the possibility of losing the woman he loves, and the terrible uncertainty of whether even he can save her.
____________________________________
18+ Mature Content. Please check the content warning at the beginning of the book.
Pages
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138
- Page 139
- Page 140
- Page 141
- Page 142
- Page 143
- Page 144
- Page 145
- Page 146