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I force a cork into the still-warm bottle, swaddle it twice in wool, and tuck it beneath my arm before stepping outside.

The lane is almost deserted. The penitents’ hoarse chanting carries from the churchyard—thinner now than it was in the dark, but apparently no closer to ending—and I suspect most of the parish is still asleep after listening to them all night. I would dearly like to be beneath my own blankets with them. My eyes feel full of sand, and I’ve reached the point where closing them for longer than a blink feels dangerously inviting.

Just beyond my door, three small figures are crouched together in the freezing muck with their backs to me, so intent on whatever treasure they’ve found that none of them even looks up as I approach. One boy has a stick gripped in both hands and is prodding the swollen belly of a stinking, dead rat.

“Drop it. Now,” I say.

Their heads whip up, eyes wide beneath layers of filthy wool. The rat lies between them, teeth bared in a frozen grimace, its fur matted with gutter-sludge.

“But Miss Ophelia,” the eldest protests, his nose running freely into his mouth. “We’re poking it to see if it’s truly dead.”

“If it’s dead, then it’s already rotting, and the three of you are crouched close enough to breathe every foul thing coming off it.” I step nearer, looking between them. “And if any of you so much as cough tomorrow, I shall make you a draught of wormwood and horehound myself.”

The youngest shrugs. “We like that one.”

“Without honey,” I warn.

The stick clatters into the mud.

“Inside,” I order, pointing a stern finger towards their houses. “And wash your hands with vinegar. If I catch you so much as looking at another corpse—man or beast—I will come back and feed you to it.”

They scramble away like frightened beetles, disappearing through three different doorways, and I sigh.

There was a time when three children finding something dead in the lane might have been unusual enough to occupy them for an afternoon. Now Beswick produces corpses so regularly that apparently even the rats have become toys.

“Still spoilin’ everyone’s fun, Sour Ophi?”

Every muscle coils tightly. Twenty years, and that voice still has my bones aching before I’ve even seen his face.

“Good morning to you too,” I say, turning slowly.

Billy Mercer stands several yards away, his coat fastened into the wrong holes and his great bald head bare to the cold.

“T’doctor,” he grits out. “I hammered at t’dead man’s cottage and got nowt.”

“He’ll be on his rounds. He goes to the crossed houses first every morning, and there are⁠—”

“I didn’t ask for t’tale of ‘is whole mornin’,” he barks. “Where is ‘e?”

“I don’t know which house he’s in at this hour. If you tell me what the matter is, I can⁠—”

“Thee?” His lip curls away from his teeth. “What use art tha? Boilin’ weeds for pennies and pretendin’ it makes thee a physician. Tha’s nowt but a spinster with a pestle, and I’m not wastin’ what breath I’ve got on t’crooked woman when there’s a proper doctor in this parish. Tell me where ‘e is. Now.”

The chanting beyond the churchyard fades. And as a gust of wind kicks up, whistling between the houses, I fall into the skin of my twelve-year-old self again.

Rope burns through my palms. The bucket strikes the stone on its way down. Black water closes over my chest before I can draw enough breath to scream, and when I wrench my face towards the circle of white sky above me, Billy’s there at the edge of it, peering down with that same wet, grinning mouth.

For years afterwards, he seemed to turn up wherever I least wanted him, just to make an observation about my leg with enough companions around him to ensure somebody laughed. Even after we were grown and the cruelty had become less inventive, he could still reduce me to that freezing little girl with a word and a look. Mercifully, the pestilence has kept him mostly out of my path these past months, and the last time I properly saw him was before winter, when he blocked the shop doorway to ask whether the limp had finally worsened enough that I might consider staying indoors.

Perhaps absence has done me some good. Or perhaps after a year spent elbow-deep in rot and burial cloth, there’s simply less room left in me for Billy Mercer.

It is not courage. I know myself too well to call it that. But something in me refuses to stand here and let him drag me back down that well again. So I turn away.

“Nell’s sick.”

I stop.

“She’s been sickin’ up since midnight.” The words topple out of him. “She were well at supper. We both were. It isn’t t’pestilence. But she’s burnin’ up, and she can’t…” His face twists as he drags a breath through his nose. “She can’t catch ‘er breath between bein’ sick.”