Page 49
“That’s disgusting.”
“You put urine in glass jars and hold it against the sunlight,” I remind her.
She sighs, her eyes drifting towards the ceiling. “Fine. You have me there.”
At last, she lowers herself onto the stool, stretching her bad leg out in front of her. “So this is all a disguise, then? The medicine, the rounds, everything?” She gestures towards my satchel. “You call yourself a physician because it gives you an excuse to stand beside people while they die.”
“It did, originally. Sick men tend not to question why a physician has entered their room, and there are only so many unexplained deaths one can leave behind before somebody begins asking inconvenient questions.”
“So you learnt medicine because it made feeding easier.”
“Yes. The dying have never been difficult to find, Ophelia. Once I was already spending my time amongst them, it seemed rather pointless to know nothing about keeping them alive. So I learnt. At first enough to make the pretence convincing, then enough to be useful.”
And then more than that. I cannot remember when I stopped learning merely because I needed the disguise. There was always something new to discover about the body, some peculiar ailment that made me want to understand it better. After long enough, pretending became rather unnecessary.
There are still moments when my hands know a thing before I can remember where I learnt it. I have had a very long time to forget the man who came before, but occasionally I wonder whether medicine belonged to him before any of this did.
“So… what do you want from me?” she murmurs.
I look at her. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I did. But I do not know what you mean.”
“You let me trail after you into sickrooms, taught me things Doctor Taylor would have hoarded until his dying breath, carried me halfway across Beswick when my leg failed and have spent a frankly irritating amount of time appearing in my house without invitation.”
“I knocked on several of those occasions.”
“Do not ruin my point.”
I snap my mouth shut even though she cannot see it.
“Gideon told me there would be a price,” she continues. “He said if something came to a dying man and took away his pain instead of frightening him, then he might trust it. Welcome it, even. And by the time he realised what he had let near him, it would be too late.”
An icy tingle works its way through my bones.
Gideon.
Men of the cloth have never required much encouragement where creatures like me are concerned, and Brother Gideon already sees the Devil’s hand in every fresh grave. A few questions from his sister, one answer that catches strangely in his mind, and before long he will be looking at me instead of the pestilence when he speaks of evil from his pulpit.
“You had suspicions about me and spoke to Gideon?”
Her head jerks up. “No. Christ, no. I didn’t tell him about you.”
“Then why was he telling you how demons ensnare dying men?”
“I told him I wanted to understand what the church believes preys upon people when they are weak or dying. Demons. The Devil. All of it.” She grimaces. “He thought I’d finally developed an interest in religion, so I let him believe it. He was… very pleased. Regardless. I’ve helped you. I have let you into my home. I’ve worked beside you, and every time you do something for me, I’m left wondering whether that is another mark against my name somewhere.”
“You think I am keeping tally?” I ask.
“I don’t know what you’re doing. That is the problem. I didn’t even fully know what you were until today. So what is it?”
What I want, if she must have an answer, is for her to keep asking. For three centuries, people have preferred not to know, or just never asked.
“There is no it. No bargain, Ophelia. No debt. No favour I intend to drag out of you when the pestilence has finished with this village.”
“And my soul?”
