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Gideon starts questioning her, but his voice fades into the background as the pigeon shifts beneath my arm and my eyes dart to the black leather covering Iscairn’s hands.

Yesterday, one of those hands had been against Billy Mercer’s throat. I can still hear him calmly explaining the little bone beneath his tongue, how easily it might be damaged if somebody applied enough pressure in the right place.

No. Surely not...

Gideon straightens, Nell’s hands still in his. “He cannot have gone far. We will search the road to the woods first, then the fields beyond it. Brother Leon can fetch lanterns and rope from the vestry. Brother Matthias can take two men along the eastern track, and I will gather the rest from the church. God willing, we will have him home before dark. Nell, go home to your children and pray.”

She wipes her face quickly with the heel of her hand and gives a shaky nod. “Thank you, Brother Gideon.”

Then she hurries back the way she came, disappearing towards Butter Lane with her shawl clutched tight around her shoulders.

Gideon watches her go before turning to me. “You and the doctor can take the northern lanes.”

“No. I can’t.” I shift the pigeon beneath my arm. “I have to return this before Mr Langford notices it missing, and we still have patients waiting. People are sick, Gideon.”

His mouth tightens. “I had hoped you might put aside your usual stubbornness for once, Ophi. But fine. We’ll begin without you. Come when you can.”

Stubbornness.

I almost laugh. Yesterday, he put his hands on me. He forced me down onto the church steps to repent, and now he speaks to me as though I am the difficult one.

He’s already turning away before I can retort, calling for the Brothers as he strides back towards the churchyard, and for one ugly second I consider hurling the pigeon at the back of his head. But I don’t; I just wait until he’s far enough away that he cannot hear me, then turn to Iscairn.

“Who did you see while I was asleep last night?”

“A number of people.”

“Billy Mercer?”

“No.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Iscairn. If you saw him after you left me—if you went looking for him after what happened yesterday, or did anything to him⁠—”

“I did not see William Mercer last night, nor did I do anything to him.” He adjusts the strap of his satchel and starts down the lane. “Now come. You have a pigeon to return, and, as you so rightly reminded your brother, we have patients to see.”

11

OPHELIA

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,” Gideon calls across the graveyard, his breath whitening in front of him. “He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.”

Three days of searching turned up nothing, and now, the people of Beswick are gathered in the churchyard to mourn a man nobody has found.

There’s no coffin. No grave either. Just Nell and the children standing near the old stone cross while the rest of us crowd around them in the frost and try not to look towards the empty patch of ground where Billy ought to be.

The plague dead are still going into the pit behind the southern wall, but Gideon has brought everyone here for Billy.

I’ve barely spoken to him since he forced me onto the church steps. We’ve passed each other twice in the lane and managed a stiff nod both times, which suited me perfectly well. Now I’m standing close enough to see his fingers curled around the little book in his hands.

I’m trying to listen. I really am. But every time he lifts one hand from the page, I remember it pressed against the back of my head.

So I turn my thoughts to the body that isn’t in the ground instead, trying to dredge up some semblance of mourning for the sake of his children and his widow. I do feel bad. A little guilty, perhaps, but only for them. Before the pestilence, Billy was better acquainted with the old alehouse than he was with his own children, and his fists had always been far too quick whenever his temper flared.

I’ve carried what Billy Mercer did to me every day since I was twelve. He gets to vanish into the woods and become a tragedy, while I still have to drag the leg he ruined through the mud every morning and remember exactly how it came to be that way. Perhaps death ought to make some difference to that, and I ought to look at Nell weeping beside the cross and discover that twenty years have been long enough to forgive him.

It hasn’t.

If Billy truly is dead, then for the first time in my life there is no chance of turning a corner and finding him there.