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“I do not require rest.”
“Splendid. I do.” I shift the basket to my other arm and point back towards his lane. “Go home. Sit beside the hearth. Stare at a wall. Sharpen something alarming. Whatever it is you ordinarily do when nobody is bleeding in your vicinity. I can’t relax with you looming amongst my shelves, and you’ve spent the entire morning cutting open buboes and preventing me from falling face-first into the road. I think you can survive an hour without me.”
The pale beak dips. “I will return in one hour.”
“Two,” I counter.
“One.”
“One and a half.”
“One and a half.” He inclines his head and finally turns towards his own lane, his long cloak sweeping over the frost.
What an extraordinarily strange man.
5
OPHELIA
After Gideon’s speech to the village last night—which was considerably less satisfying than the one I had prepared for him, lacking both crawling on his knees and any acknowledgement of my lifelong superiority—I ought to have gone straight to bed. Unfortunately, Doctor Iscairn apparently needed to “acquaint himself with the parish and its patients,” so I spent half the night dragging him from one end of Beswick to the other until three of my toes went numb.
By the time I finally sank beneath my blankets, my dreams were filled with chickens. Great, fat, contented chickens laying warm eggs directly into my lap, and not a single soul mentioned needing a tincture. It was bliss. Gorgeous, feathery bliss.
This morning’s reality has been much less idyllic. Half my rosemary has given up on life, and my hens have been muttering behind me since dawn as though it’s somehow my fault their little feet can no longer scratch up a decent worm.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent the better part of an hour kneeling on a grain sack trying to wrestle elecampane from the dirt. Getting the stuff to survive a Beswick winter is difficult enough. Getting it back out again is proving worse. My breath smokes in front of my face, yet I’m sweating beneath my hair by the time I wipe my forehead with my sleeve and drive the fork into the earth again, working my way around the crown a little at a time.
As another trickle of dirt filters down my sleeve, the hens’ disgruntled muttering erupts into a noisy flurry of squawks. Two of Sam Stalley’s birds squeeze through the broken stones and scuttle across the garden to join mine in destroying what remains of the bean row.
“Oh, for—pack it in!”
I shoo them with the hand fork until they finally bugger off, clucking their outrage, then drop it beside the trug, turn back to the elecampane and grab hold with both hands. With an almighty crack, the root gives, and I topple backwards, landing on my arse hard enough to jar my teeth.
Pale roots sprawl across the dirt between my boots. Ugly thing. Useful, though. Boiled down with honey, elecampane is the best thing in my shop for a troubled chest, and judging by the number of coughs currently rattling through Beswick, pestilence or not, I’ll need every root I can prise from the ground.
Into the trug it goes.
The next clump waits barely a foot away, so I shuffle sideways on the sack and work my fingers beneath the stiff leaves, feeling around for the crown. Just as they close around the stalk, something small and warm bursts from the hollow and races over my wrist. I whip my head towards the movement in time to see a rat vanish between the beds.
Little beast.
“You appear to have frightened it,” a voice rumbles behind me.
I yelp and twist around, one muddy glove clapped to my chest. Iscairn stands beyond the low garden wall, his head slightly cocked.
“For the love of—” I blow a stray hair out of my eyes. “Do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Appear out of thin air without making a single sound, when I’m already being attacked by wildlife.”
The pale beak dips towards the rat’s escape route. “It was fleeing from you.”
I grumble beneath my breath and push myself up onto one knee while Iscairn lets himself through the gate, crosses the path between the herb beds and crouches beside me, only to thrust a small linen-wrapped parcel right under my nose.
I eye it suspiciously. “What is that?”
“The food you described. I believe I have found you a pasty.”
