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OPHELIA

LANCASHIRE, JANUARY 1512

When the first villagers dropped twelve months ago, the church declared them sinners.

Then went the pregnant women. Then the babies. Then the little snot-nosed children whose worst crimes amounted to chasing chickens with sticks. That was when divine retribution began to look considerably less righteous than the holy folk would have us believe.

It is difficult to believe in righteous punishment when it cannot tell a murderer from a six-year-old.

So I have arrived at an explanation of my own—one the church would undoubtedly consider every bit as wicked as the sinners it so readily condemns.

Perhaps the plague is not God’s wrath at all.

Perhaps it is the earth that has grown sick of us—of the blood worked into its soil, the backs broken upon it, the children sent to bed with empty bellies, the bruised throats, and the girls left sobbing in piss-stained alleyways at the hands of brutal men. And now it’s turned against us, poisoning the air in our lungs and driving fever through our bodies as though it has decided, at last, that it has endured enough.

Enough rape. Enough rot. Enough ruin.

Mrs Higgins fidgets on the other side of the counter. The earth may well have reached the end of its patience with mankind, but unfortunately, I still have customers to serve, and a pot of preventative salve cooling between my hands.

I force my lips into a smile and slide the pot towards her. “Here you are. A little beneath the nose and across the throat. The mint should sweeten what you breathe, and the wormwood will help against the corruption in the air.”

Whether any of it will keep the pestilence from her lungs is another question entirely. Still, it’s preferable to her barricading every window and sitting over a brazier of pitch until she chokes on the smoke before the plague has the opportunity.

She gathers the pot against her chest. “May the Lord be with you in these trying times, dearest Ophelia.”

May He prove more useful to you than He has been thus far.

I allow her three steps towards the door before clearing my throat. “Uh. Mrs Higgins. You appear to have forgotten the small matter of payment.”

She pauses, a guilty crease forming between her brows. “Ah. Yes. About that. I have no coin.”

“Something you might have mentioned before I sacrificed the last of my good mint for you,” I say, holding my hand out across the counter for the pot.

“I do have something…” she mumbles, patting her pockets.

Unfortunately, proper coin has become so rare in Beswick that I’ve recently accepted payment in onions, lamp oil, and, on one memorable occasion, a hen with a particular enthusiasm for attacking my ankles. So when Mrs Higgins produces two honey cakes, browned at the edges and shining beneath a sticky glaze, my mouth waters, and all pretence of coin flies out of the window.

“You could have led with those,” I grumble.

A grin tugs at her lips as she sets them on the counter. “I thought you might agree more readily once the salve was already made.”

I draw the cakes towards me before she can reconsider and tear off a bite. The honey sticks to my teeth. After weeks of whatever Gideon insists on calling pottage, it may be the finest thing I’ve tasted all winter.

Mrs Higgins chuckles and shuffles towards the door, ducking beneath the brittle bundles of lavender hanging from the rafters. She’s barely reached the threshold when the bell above it gives a jangle and a scrap of a boy comes hurtling inside, smacking straight into her skirts.

She staggers sideways. “Thomas!”

“Sorry, Mrs Higgins,” he gasps, squeezing past her. “Miss Ophelia. Need you right now. Doctor Taylor’s dead.”

I scoff, still chewing as the bell jangles again. “That would be a remarkably poor joke, even for you.”

He straightens, lifting his gaunt little face, and my stomach drops. Thomas is always grinning about something, usually immediately before breaking it or being chased away from it. There’s no grin now.

The honey cake turns claggy and tasteless.

“Brother Leon found him at the church. Everyone’s gone to the square to listen to Brother Gideon.”