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The man neither turns nor attempts to pull away. He simply stands there while I struggle to get my feet beneath me, and as I straighten, still clutching his cloak, it occurs to me that grabbing the only other living person in a village full of corpses might not have been one of my finer decisions.
Then, very slowly, he turns.
The sight of him steals the breath from my lungs, and I recoil instinctively, though my white-knuckled grip on his cloak prevents me from retreating very far.
Doctor Taylor had seemed tall, but this man rises over me like a church spire. His long black cloak falls from the breadth of his shoulders to his boots, its waxed fabric buckled close across his chest and stained dark around the hem. Thick leather gloves conceal his hands, and beneath the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, not an inch of skin remains exposed.
The mask hiding his face is utterly unlike the battered, sweat-softened leather Doctor Taylor wore. This one is smooth and bone-pale, with amber lenses and a long, sweeping beak curving elegantly between us.
“You are holding my cloak,” he says, the words low and rough beneath the mask.
“So I am.” I loosen my fingers, though only enough to relieve the pull in my shoulder. “But in my defence, I called after you twice, and you ignored me.”
“I did not realise you were addressing me.”
I glance back at the pit, my breath misting in the air. “There’s nobody else here. Who else would I be addressing? The whole village is in the ground.”
His gaze follows mine—I think. “Not all of them. Some fled to other parishes when the first households fell ill.”
Beswick was no different. Eighteen families loaded what they could onto carts and disappeared within the week our first household fell sick, and I still sometimes wonder where they ended up. Whether they found somewhere untouched by pestilence, or merely carried ours with them.
I can only hope none of them came here.
“But you stayed,” I say, looking back at him. “Why?”
“Death is what I deal in.”
Not an answer I particularly care to examine while stranded alone with him in an empty village.
“Right. Well… Animals, then,” I say. “Were any left behind? A horse, a mule, anything with four legs. I had a mule, but she fled with my provisions. I could make use of one.”
“There is nothing for you here. Those who escaped took the horses and carts. The cattle were slaughtered when the grain ran out. There is only fowl, and those are not to be ridden.”
I worry my lower lip between my teeth. Miles upon miles of road remain between here and the city. On foot, in this skirt, with my thigh already screaming its objections, I would be fortunate to reach the gates by tomorrow evening.
“If you have finished detaining me, I should like to continue my journey,” he says.
The cloth slides through my fingers as he turns away, but I tighten my grip before good sense can intervene.
“No, no, no—wait. Continue where, exactly?”
“South.” His masked head turns back towards the lane. “Wherever the sickness is spreading. I will walk until I find a parish in need of a physician.”
“Then save yourself the walk,” I tell him hastily. “Go eleven miles east instead. Beswick. We have two hundred and eighty souls, give or take. Our physician went into the ground a fortnight ago. I was on my way to the city to wring a replacement out of the diocese, but you’re here, so I don’t see the point in going further.”
“And so your solution is to recruit the first stranger you encounter?”
When phrased aloud, it does sound like an excellent way to have my throat cut in a ditch.
“A fair point,” I concede. “But you are dressed as a physician. Do you have your papers?”
He reaches into his satchel and produces a sheet riddled with creases, the broken remains of a red wax seal still clinging to one corner.
I finally release the cloak and take it from his gloved hand, smoothing the paper open between my fingers.
To all magistrates, ministers, churchwardens, and officers whom these presents may concern,
Be it known that the bearer, Doctor Iscairn, rendered necessary service to the borough of Fellmarsh during the late visitation of pestilence in that place, attending upon the afflicted and advising in the ordering of the sick and the preventing of further infection.
