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I keep my voice low as we pass the next row of cottages. “What did she mean in there?”
Iscairn turns his mask towards me. “What do you mean?”
“Alice. She woke this morning with a death sentence, yet she did not ask whether you could save her. She asked whether you would make it like it was for David.” I glance up at him. “What exactly did you give him? If there’s some tincture I do not know about, then you need to tell me sooner rather than later.”
“I gave him poppy for the pain,” he says. “When the fluid gathered in his lungs, I held him upright and kept his head raised so that he might breathe.”
“I’ve given poppy to dozens of dying people,” I say, my grip tightening around the basket. “I’ve propped them against pillows and wiped bloody froth from their chins while their families prayed themselves hoarse. Poppy dulls pain, yes, but it does not make death gentle. So either I have spent the past year doing something catastrophically wrong, or there is something you are not telling me. What else did you do?”
“I stayed with him until he died.”
Which means that after I finally sent him home, he went back and spent the rest of the night in that infected cottage. A physician is supposed to lance the swellings, leave instructions, and go home to his own bed. Not sit with a patient until the end.
“But that still doesn’t explain the peace,” I press. “Was that truly everything? Poppy, holding him, and staying?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” I stare into the impenetrable amber lenses, shifting the basket higher against my hip. “Then I shall have to accept that I’m simply terrible at my profession.”
“How many people do you tend in a day?”
I blink and give my head a small shake. “What?”
“Not only those confined to their homes. How many come through your shop?”
I frown, trying to remember the last day on which I bothered counting. “I don’t know. Twenty, perhaps. Thirty when things are particularly bad.”
“And how many hours are there in a night?”
My eyes narrow. “Iscairn, if this is leading towards some painfully obvious lesson in time—”
“You are one woman tending to over two hundred people. I tend those already sick enough to remain in their homes. You tend everyone else as well. Do not mistake a lack of time for a lack of skill.”
My fingers loosen around the basket handle.
It’s an odd thing—hearing somebody else say it aloud. I’ve spent the better part of a year measuring myself against the people I failed to reach. I know I’m only one woman, with one body that can carry only so much before it gives out. Knowing that has never stopped me from thinking I should somehow have done more.
“Come,” Iscairn says, turning for my shop. “We should return to your garden before the chickens finish your pasty.”
“It is not a pasty!”
6
OPHELIA
“Do not test me today, Roger,” I call, setting my basket down on the frost-whitened surface of the Boundary Stone.
It sits half-buried in the hollow between Beswick and Oakhaven, an age-old slab of limestone that spent most of its existence marking little more than whose sheep belonged where. Two months ago, Oakhaven barred its roads against the pestilence, making the stone the only permitted trading ground between our parishes. Six hollows were bored into the stone for coins to sit beneath vinegar; larger goods are left on the surface, and neither side approaches until the other has retreated well beyond the marker.
It's excessive, inconvenient and, judging by the conspicuous lack of death carts rattling along the road beyond Roger, effective.
I’ve suggested we do the same in Beswick. Twice. Gideon called it ungodly, Brother Leon demanded to know how we would feed ourselves without passing merchants, and half the parish looked at me as though I had proposed starving us all deliberately.
So our roads remain open. Naturally.
“Master Flint says t’price’s gone up, Miss Harrow.” Roger remains a good thirty paces away on the Oakhaven side, his scarf wound so many times around the lower half of his face that his voice barely reaches me across the frozen field. “One bundle o’ dried willow for two jars of your mint tallow. If you’ve not got t’tallow, he wants three silver groats left in t’vinegar holes. Not a penny less.”
I plant both hands on my hips. “Then you may tell Master Flint that he is welcome to push his price increase directly into whichever of his weeping sores troubles him most. We agreed one jar for one bundle three weeks ago, and now he’s decided that winter is the ideal time to discover a talent for extortion, while everyone’s dropping from fever.”
