Page 22 of Malady

“Arthur,” I hiss down at him, my breath whitening the darkness between us. “Why are you throwing stones at my bedchamber window?”

He stills with one hand braced against the ground, then looks up and scrambles to his feet.

“Oh! Miss Ophelia. Thank God.” He hurries closer, craning his neck towards the window. “Can you come down? Please. I need your help. It’s Mary, she—” He drags a hand over his mouth. “Please, Miss Ophelia.”

I sigh. “Give me a moment.”

I pull the shutters closed and rest my forehead against the wood, keeping my eyes shut until the room stops feeling quite so far away. By the time I’ve dragged on yesterday’s dress and found my boots, Arthur’s banging on the door below.

I make my way down the narrow staircase as quickly as my stiff leg will allow, past the shelves of bundled herbs and bottles catching what little moonlight reaches the shop.

He knocks again, rattling the door in its frame.

“I’m bloody coming!”

I wrench up the bar and barely have time to pull the door open before Arthur comes stumbling through it, pale-faced and breathless.

“Oh, no you don’t.” I stagger backwards, snatching my mask from the hook beside the door and pulling it over my mouth. “Stay there. Exactly there. If the pestilence has found your house, you can’t come charging into my shop and spread it over everything I own.”

“No. No, it isn’t the sickness.” Arthur throws both hands up, his chest heaving. “It’s Mary. She hasn’t slept in two days. There’s a hard knot in her breast, red as an apple and hot as a coal, and the milk won’t come. The babe’s been screaming for hours and Mary—” He drags a shaking hand over his mouth. “She won’t stop weepin’.”

Tentatively, I lower the mask. “Well, did you not think to fetch Doctor Iscairn?”

“I tried. I hammered on his door ‘til me fist went numb, but he wouldn’t answer, so I came to you.”

My brow knits together.

I do not sleep much, Iscairn had told Widow Pike, and nothing about the man suggests he could sleep through Arthur Vance attempting to batter his door from its hinges. Strange, certainly, but Mary is across the village with a screaming infant and a breast swollen hard enough to have her husband throwing stones at my window. I can’t very well stand here dawdling whilst I wonder about another man’s sleeping habits.

“All right.” I set the mask aside and reach for my basket. “Go home and build the fire as high as you can bear it. Put water on to boil, then strip the babe and lay it against Mary’s bare chest. The warmth may settle it. I’ll follow as soon as I’ve gathered what I⁠—”

He yanks open the door and disappears before I can finish, leaving the bell jangling wildly above him.

The thing’s still rattling when I turn for the shelves.

Fenugreek, mallow root, chamomile, clean linen. I gather whatever might ease the swelling and encourage the milk to come, packing jars and bundles into my basket with hands that are finally beginning to feel properly awake. A blocked breast is painful enough, but two days of heat and redness means I have no intention of treating this lightly. If the swelling festers and fever follows, Mary may have considerably more to worry about than a hungry infant.

I exchange my shawl for the heavier cloak by the door, and step out into the night.

Naturally, the Vances live about as far from my bed as Beswick allows, their cottage tucked halfway up the ridge at the far end of the village. I pick my way there through the dark, feeling for firmer ground beneath each step while the uneven rhythm of my own footsteps follows me up the silent lane.

“Useless,” I mutter through chattering teeth when an owl hoots somewhere beyond the hedgerow. “Absolutely bloody useless.”

Let it be known to the moon, the bats, and every owl roosting among the trees: the next time that hulking, bird-beaked man walks into my shop, I shall drop my largest mortar upon his foot and laugh while refusing him so much as a dab of salve for the bruising.

I’m halfway along the narrow lane, still inventing punishments beneath my breath, when my steps slow.

Ordinarily, the sight of a lamp burning at this hour would mean very little. But the light that’s spilling through the cracks in the Fletchers’ shutters isn’t the warm yellow glow of a candle or hearth. Thin beams stretch across the snow-dusted cobbles, so strangely bright that my stomach twists.

When I was nine years old, my father took me all the way to the eastern coast. I remember standing on the shingle beneath the midday sun, staring into the shallows where the water ran clear over pale sand. The sea had been a brilliant, piercing blue-green, almost luminous.

That is the colour pouring from Alice Fletcher’s cottage.

I’ve burned enough minerals, salts and strange powders over the years to know what colours they make when introduced to flame. A good handful of copper salts cast into a fire will burn this same colour. But Alice Fletcher is dying of the pestilence. And unless she’s made a miraculous recovery overnight and chosen to celebrate by taking up metallurgy, there is no reason for such a light to be coming from her hearth.

From beyond the mill comes the faint, miserable wail of the Vance babe. I really ought to be on my way, but instead, my traitorous feet lead me towards the home of a dying woman to investigate impossible colours, rather than minding my own business.

My hand goes instinctively to my face to adjust my mask, only to be met with naked flesh. In my haste to leave the shop, I’ve forgotten it.