The yarrow had gone to seed. Else noticed it too late, and with a guilt that served no purpose. The stalks had dried to brittle sticks in the window box, their flat white heads turned to ash-colored ghosts of what they'd been in August, when her mother had been alive to tend them. Now the garden was Else's, along with everything else her mother had left: the cottage, the hearting stones, the bundles of dried comfrey dangling from the rafter like small hanged men, and the steady, unrelenting work of keeping Ashenmere's sick comfortable while they died.
She stripped the last of the usable leaves from the stems and crushed them between her palms. The scent rose bitter and medicinal, alive in a way that felt indecent when the rest of the world smelled of rot and smoke. She scraped the leaves into the mortar, the stone one with the crack along the rim that her mother had refused to replace because it had been her mother's, and her mother's before that.
The crack didn't affect the function. Her mother had said that every time Else suggested a new one: It still grinds, love. A crack isn't a break.
She ground the leaves. The rhythm was her mother's rhythm, wrist, turn, press, lift, and the repetition was a comfort and an accusation simultaneously. Eleanor had stood at this table every morning for thirty years performing this exact motion, and the table's surface was worn smooth in the place where her forearms had rested. The wearing was a record: this woman was here, she worked here, she pressed her weight into this wood ten thousand times. She was not here now. The table remembered her. The mortar remembered her. The daughter who used both was the only living record, and the living record was tired.
Through the window, the churchyard was busy again. Father Aldric stood at the far end of the grounds where the graves had stopped being graves and become a trench, his vestments dark against the pale sky, his mouth moving in words that no longer carried across the distance. He'd said the rites so many times that his voice had worn to a rasp. Else had heard him coughing at Matins last week, a dry, shallow sound that meant nothing, or meant everything. She'd sent a tisane of horehound and honey with Cotter's boy that morning, a small bottle in a cloth, with a note: For the cough. Don't argue.
It came back an hour later, untouched. The note Aldric had tied to the bottle's neck said only: Thank you, but the Lord provides.
Else had held the note over the fire and let it burn. Then she'd put the tisane back on the shelf, because Aldric would need it eventually. The only thing the Lord was providing was an impressive number of corpses. Else did not say this aloud. She thought it every morning, pressing her lips together while she ground the herbs, and every morning it tasted worse in the back of her throat.
"You're making that face again."
Anna appeared at the table's edge, her chin barely clearing the wood, her dark eyes too large for her head. Seven years old and already fluent in the language of adult pretense. She'd been living in the cottage for nine days, since her mother had been carried out of the bakery wrapped in the same flour sacking she'd used to line the bread trays. Else had found the girl sitting on the step outside the locked door, braiding a piece of twine.
"What face?" Else asked.
"The one where you're angry but you don't want me to know."
Else looked at her. The girl looked back. Neither blinked.
"I'm not angry," Else said. "I'm concentrating."
"You're always angry."
Else almost smiled. She covered the mortar instead, pressing the cloth flat over the cracked rim. "Help me with these, will you? Twist them tight. Like your mother showed you with the bread."
Anna took the herb bundle and twisted it with grave focus. Her hands were steady. The hands of a child who had learned that steadiness was what the world required of her, and had decided to provide it without being asked.
Outside, the bells of St. Cuthbert's began their toll. One for each soul committed to the ground today. Else counted without meaning to. Seven. Yesterday it had been five. The week before, three. The numbers did not favor the living.
She wiped her hands on her apron and took the basket from the hook by the door.
"Stay here. Bolt the latch. Don't open it for anyone but me."
"Where are you going?"
"Rounds. The Fentons first, then the Widow Marsh, then I'll stop at the church."
"Can I come?"
"Not today."
Anna didn't argue. She'd stopped arguing about this on the third day, the day Else had taken her on rounds and the girl had seen old Thatch's body in the chair, the broth cup still in his dead hand, and had said nothing and gone pale and hadn't eaten supper. After that, Anna stayed home and twisted herbs and waited. The waiting was its own kind of suffering that Else couldn't fix.
"I'll be back before the bells," Else said. "Bolt the latch."
The air outside was cool for October, carrying the smell of turned earth and something beneath it, sweet and cloying, the scent that had settled over Ashenmere these past weeks. The smell of too many bodies and not enough lime. Father Aldric had taken to burning juniper branches at the churchyard's edge, but the smoke only mixed with the sweetness, creating something that was neither cleansing nor foul but simply wrong.
She walked quickly, keeping her shawl tight against the wind. Maple Street, what Ashenmere generously called its main thoroughfare, was nearly empty. Two months ago, you couldn't cross without dodging carts and children and Goodwife Hatchett's roaming pigs. Now the carts sat wheelless against walls, the children were indoors or underground, and Hatchett's pigs had been slaughtered and salted against a famine that was coming whether anyone spoke of it or not.
The houses she passed wore their grief in small ways. A wreath of dried rosemary on the Coopers' door: three dead in that house, the children first and then the father, the mother surviving for reasons no one could explain and the surviving itself a kind of cruelty. The Whitfield place, shuttered completely, the garden already going wild, the blue shutters fading to gray because there was no one left to paint them. And Morrison's, the undertaker's workshop at the end of the lane, its windows boarded, its sign still swinging in the wind: J. Morrison & Sons, Funeral Services, Est. 1302. There were no more Morrisons. The father and both sons had been among the first to die.
The Widow Marsh was her first stop, a thin woman in a thin house at the edge of the square, whose cough had started a week ago and whose refusal to acknowledge it had started immediately after. Else knocked. The door opened the width of a hand.
"I'm fine," the Widow said, through the gap.
Then the cough took her—deep, wet, the kind that starts in the chest and doesn't stop until it's finished with you. The Widow pressed a handkerchief to her mouth and held it there until the fit passed. When she pulled it away, the cloth was red.
They both looked at it. The Widow's hand closed around the handkerchief, crushing it into her fist, hiding the stain. Too late.
"Let me in," Else said.
The Widow let her in.
The cottage smelled of tallow and old sweat, the staleness of a house whose windows hadn't been opened in weeks. Else checked the woman's throat, her temperature, the glands beneath her jaw. The swelling was there: small, tender, early. The Widow watched Else's face while Else examined her, reading the diagnosis by what the face didn't say.
"How long?" the Widow asked.
"I don't know. It's early. The herbs might hold it."
"Might."
"Might is the best I have."
Else left a poultice and instructions and the tisane that Aldric had returned. The Widow Marsh would use it. The Widow Marsh, unlike the priest, believed in what she could swallow.
The Fenton cottage sat at the village's eastern edge, where the houses thinned and the fields began. Else knocked twice and let herself in.
The stench hit first. Sweat and tallow and the sour copper tang that she'd come to associate with the later stages. Will Fenton lay in the downstairs bed, pushed against the wall where his mother could reach him from the chair she'd barely left in days. He was fifteen. His arms, where they lay above the blanket, showed the swellings at the joints, dark, angry, the size of eggs. His mother, Joan, looked up from her needlework.
She wasn't sewing anything. She was pulling a thread through the same piece of linen over and over, the motion mechanical, a thing her hands did while the rest of her watched her son die.
"Any change?" Else asked, setting down her basket.
"He spoke this morning. Asked for water." Joan's voice was flat and careful, the voice of a woman rationing hope. "Then he went back under."
Else knelt beside the bed. She pressed her hand to the boy's forehead. Blazing. The skin dry as paper. His breathing was shallow, each exhale carrying a faint rattle that she felt more than heard, a vibration that passed through her palm and into the bones of her wrist. She'd heard that rattle before. In her mother. In the Cooper children. In old Mr. Thatch, who'd died sitting upright in his chair with a cup of broth still warm in his hand. The rattle meant the body had made its decision and the soul was being asked to agree.
Else opened her basket. Willow bark, steeped and strained. Comfrey poultice for the swellings. A tincture of elderflower that her mother had always claimed could cool a fever, though Else had never seen it manage more than a temporary retreat.
"Lift his head for me," she said.
Joan set down the linen. Her hands shook as she cradled her son's neck, the tendons in her forearms visible, sharp as wire. Else spooned the willow bark tea between Will's cracked lips. Most of it ran down his chin. She caught what she could with a cloth and tried again. On the third attempt, his throat worked. He swallowed. His eyes didn't open, but she saw a relaxation of the muscles around the jaw that might have been relief or might have been the body conserving its last resources.
"Good lad," Else murmured.
She applied the poultice to the swellings, working carefully around the skin that had gone dark and taut. The heat coming off the boy's body was extraordinary, as if the illness were burning him from the marrow outward. Her mother had known things about sickness that went beyond the herbs, things she'd never fully explained, things Else had learned to accept without understanding. You'll feel them, Else. When it's their time. You'll feel it in your hands before you see it in their face.
Her mother's words, said once, over a body, late at night. Else had been fourteen, holding the lamp while her mother prepared a compress for a man who would be dead by morning.
She hadn't understood then. She was beginning to understand now.
Her hands tingled. Not from the herbs, not from the heat of the boy's skin. Something else. A pressure beneath her palms, subtle as a current in still water, something in Will Fenton pulling away from the rest of him.
She pulled her hands back. Wiped them on her apron. Stood.
"Keep him cool," she told Joan. "Wet cloths on the neck and wrists. The tea every hour, if he'll take it. I'll come back at dusk."
"Will he live?"
The question landed heavy and blunt, aimed at a place Else couldn't protect. She looked at Joan Fenton's face, at the dark hollows beneath her eyes and the raw patch on her lower lip where she'd been chewing it, and she said what she always said, because the truth was a luxury the dying couldn't afford.
"I'll do what I can."
She stopped at the church on the way home. The nave was dim, the windows admitting what light October offered, which wasn't much. The pews held the sick instead of worshippers, the space already tilting toward the infirmary it would become. Two women lay on pallets near the altar, attended by Aldric's housekeeper, a capable woman named Mary who had the constitution of an ox and the bedside manner of a fence post. She nodded at Else without pausing her work.
Aldric was in the vestry. She found him at his desk, writing in the parish register, the death log, the long column of names and dates that had filled three pages since August. His hand moved with careful penmanship, each letter placed as if the recording mattered even when the recorded did not survive.
He looked up. The face that met her was the face she'd been watching erode for weeks. The hollowing beneath the cheekbones. The capillaries in his eyes. A man who slept in his cassock because changing clothes required an energy he'd reallocated to prayer.
"Your cough is worse," she said.
"My cough is my concern."
"Your cough is this village's concern. You're the only priest. If you die, who says the rites? Who buries the dead? Who tells the grieving that God has a plan while God is apparently deaf to their suffering?"
Aldric set down his pen. He considered whether the argument was worth his strength. He chose to have it. "The herbs are for the sick, Else. I'm not sick. I'm tired. There's a difference."
"The difference narrows daily."
"Then let it narrow." His voice was gentle, which was worse than shouting. "I have enough, Else. The herbs, the medicines—there are people who need them more than I do. The Widow Marsh. The Fenton boy. The women in the nave. Give it to them."
"I have enough for all of you."
"You have enough for none of us. You're running low on everything. The yarrow's gone to seed, the comfrey's nearly out, the elderflower is finished. I've watched you stretch the tinctures for weeks. Diluting them until they're more water than medicine and hoping no one notices." He smiled, thin and worn. "I notice."
Else said nothing. He was right. The supplies were dwindling, the garden untended, the autumn harvest she should have gathered in September missed because September had been spent burying her mother and taking over her mother's practice and learning, in the fastest possible way, everything Eleanor had known and hadn't taught.
"Take the tisane for the others," Aldric said. "They need it. I need prayer, and the Lord—"
"If you say the Lord provides, I will put the horehound in your communion wine."
"The Lord provides," Aldric said, with the defiance of a man calling a bluff he understood perfectly. "Even now. Even here. Especially here."
Else didn't argue further. The argument was an old one, had been old even before the plague, back when her mother was alive and the disagreement was theoretical rather than urgent. Eleanor and Aldric had maintained a respectful, low-grade friction for years: the healer and the priest, the herbs and the prayers, the medicine of the body and the medicine of the soul occupying adjacent rooms in the same house and disagreeing, quietly, about which room was more important.
The disagreement had been settled by the plague. The herbs kept people alive. The prayers did not. The settlement was not satisfying to either side.
At the church door, she paused. "Father."
"Yes?"
"The Fenton boy. Will. If he—when you see Joan. Be gentle with her."
"I'm always gentle."
"Be gentler."
She left. The churchyard was emptier now, the trench at the far end dark and still, the crosses casting long shadows in the late afternoon light. She walked past them without counting. She'd counted this morning. She didn't want to know if the number had changed.
At the cottage, she unbolted the door and found Anna exactly where she'd left her, sitting at the table, twisting herbs with steady hands. The bundles were arranged in neat rows, sorted by type, by size, by some organizational principle that the girl had developed on her own and that Else couldn't decipher but didn't question. Anna organized things. It was how she made sense of the world: by arranging the arrangeable while the unarrangeable happened around her.
"The Fenton boy?" Anna asked.
"Resting."
Anna nodded. She didn't ask for more. She knew what resting meant in Ashenmere.
Else hung her shawl and washed her hands in the basin, scrubbing until the skin reddened, though there was nothing visible to remove. The water turned faintly gray. It always did, these days, as if the sickness clung to her even when she hadn't touched it directly.
She made supper: bread and cheese and the last of the dried apples. The bread was three days old and the cheese was sweating and the apples were more wrinkle than fruit. The meal was precisely what the village could afford, which was almost nothing presented as almost something.
She set Anna's plate first. The girl ate with no wasted motion, no crumbs left on the table. The child had grown up in a bakery and understood that food was labor and labor was not to be squandered.
They ate in the quiet that had become their custom. Not silence, exactly. The companionable hush of two people who had lost enough that words felt like an extravagance.
"My mother talked to bread," Anna said.
Else looked at her. The statement had arrived without preamble, fully formed, as if the thought had been assembled in private and was now being presented for inspection.
"She talked to bread," Anna repeated. "When she was kneading. She'd say: rise, rise, don't be stubborn. And it would rise. Every time."
She turned a piece of cheese in her fingers, examining it.
"Do you think the bread heard her?"
"I think the yeast heard the warmth of her hands. And the time she gave it. And the care."
"But she talked to it."
"Yes. She talked to it."
"Is that the same as praying?"
"I think it might be," she said.
Anna nodded. She ate the rest of her cheese. She didn't ask anything else.
After, Else put her to bed in the small room that had been her mother's sewing corner, now fitted with a straw pallet and a quilt that smelled of lavender and someone else's childhood. Anna curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, and was asleep before Else reached the door.
She stood in the kitchen alone. The fire had banked to embers. Through the window, the churchyard was dark, the trench invisible, the dead finally, temporarily, quiet.
Her hands still tingled. They'd been tingling since the Fenton cottage, since she'd pressed her palm to Will's forehead and felt the current, the pulling, the sensation of something inside the boy drawing away from the rest of him.
She'd been feeling it for weeks. Since her mother's death. Since the weight of the practice had settled on her shoulders and a strange awareness had taken up residence in her body, occupying the places her mother's knowledge should have filled.
She pressed her hands flat on the table and stared at them. Work-roughened, herb-stained, the nails clipped short. Her mother's hands. Eleanor's hands, copied in younger skin, performing the same motions at the same table in the same dying village. The hands of a woman who healed and a woman who saw, and who had spent her whole life keeping those two truths in separate rooms.
The tingling moved up her wrists. Not painful. Insistent. A sensation she'd been ignoring, suddenly sharp now that the rest of the world had gone still.
Her throat tightened. She coughed, the sound loud in the empty kitchen. She pressed her hand to her mouth. When she pulled it away, the palm was wet.
She looked at it. She already knew. She looked anyway, because the body demands confirmation of the things the mind has already accepted, and the confirmation was there: red, bright, vivid against the herb-stained skin.
She wiped her hand on the cloth she kept at her belt. The cloth came away stained. The same cloth. The same red. The same stain she'd seen on the Widow Marsh's handkerchief that morning, the stain the Widow had crushed in her fist as if hiding it could undo it.
Now the stain was hers.
The tingling in her hands had stopped. In its place: a heavy, spreading warmth, starting at her throat and moving downward, slow as honey, inevitable as evening.
She had three days. She knew this from watching. Three days from the first swelling to the last breath. She had watched it happen eleven times in the past month. The progression didn't vary. The disease had no imagination.
She thought of Anna, asleep in the next room with one hand beneath her cheek. She thought of the yarrow gone to seed in the window box. She thought of the mortar with the crack in the rim, and her mother grinding yarrow in the same bowl every morning for thirty years, and the table worn smooth by the weight of her forearms, and the tisane that Aldric wouldn't drink, and the Fenton boy whose soul she'd felt loosening beneath her palms.
She thought: I should have tended the garden.
Then she banked the fire and climbed the stairs and lay down in her mother's bed and waited for the fever to find her.