Domhnall Bain’s shoulder gave under Walter’s palm like a door easing off a swollen frame resistant, then suddenly, cleanly, not.
“There,” Walter said, and the word came out with more surprise in it than he’d meant to let through, because the shoulder that should have taken three sessions to loosen this much had done it in one, the comfrey-and-heat working into the joint at a rate that had nothing ordinary about it.
Domhnall rolled the arm through its full circle, face caught somewhere between disbelief and the relief of a man half-resigned to a summer’s haymaking done one-armed.
“That’s Master Bryce, that’s better than it’s been in a twelvemonth.”
“Keep the poultice on through tonight regardless.
Don’t test it against a full hay-fork until tomorrow.” Walter was already reaching for the next preparation, because the pressure in his chest hadn’t stopped its climb since dawn, and somewhere behind it sat a number he didn’t need Margaret to confirm was well past anything he’d felt two days ago in Eoin Forbes’s yard.
Ninety-six percent, she’d told him at first light, and there’d been something almost bright in the flatness of the number, the live energy of a woman watching an experiment finally reach the conditions she’d designed it for.
Young Tom came next, the weaver’s apprentice, fever-flushed and apologetic about missing a day at the loom he couldn’t afford to miss, and Walter’s doubled sight found the infection settling in the boy’s throat before Tom had finished explaining it the modern register naming what the fever actually was, the period register offering feverfew and honey and a gargle of salted water that would, at this rate, clear it faster than either of them expected.
The taste at the back of his throat sharpened with each patient now, layering, a low ache joining the fever-warmth joining a faint queasiness that hadn’t fully cleared from Domhnall’s session before Tom’s arrived on top of it.
Walter kept working anyway.
A compounding cost was still, arithmetically, a cost he’d agreed to pay the moment he’d cleared his whole day with Una for exactly this reason.
Beathag Ross took the longest, and cost the most.
She was well past seventy, small and stooped with the particular patient dignity of someone who’d carried pain so long it had become a kind of furniture in her life rather than an emergency, and she sat very still while Walter’s attention settled over the joints of her hands and hips.
“My granddaughter marries next month,” she said, into the silence of his examining, “and I’ve told her I’ll dance at it.
I’d not have said such a fool thing if I’d known how the winter would sit in my bones after.”
“You’ll dance,” Walter said, and meant it with a confidence the doubled sight had just handed him the bone-pain readable now in both registers, arthritic and old, and the period treatment overlaying it clean: a stronger willow-bark preparation than he’d have risked on an ordinary day, a warming liniment worked deep into the worst joints, movement encouraged rather than rest. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
The ache from Domhnall’s shoulder-fragment and the low fever from Tom’s throat were both still sitting in him when Beathag’s pain arrived on top, and it landed differently than either deeper, structural, a bone-deep complaint that made his own knuckles feel forty years older than they’d woken up that morning.
His hands, mixing the liniment, had picked up a fine tremor he hadn’t given permission for, the same one that had shown up once before over a boy’s infected leg, and he worked through it as he had that first time, because a shaking hand still poured a measured dose if the man attached to it made it do so.
Beathag left an hour later with the liniment wrapped and a promise from Walter sincere, if slightly more effortful to deliver than his morning self would have managed that she would indeed dance, granddaughter’s wedding or no.
He sat on the back-room bench afterward with three fragments layered inside him at once, and thought, with the particular dry clarity fatigue sometimes produced, that he had never in either of his lives felt quite this specific combination of proud and wrung-out.
Sileas arrived at half past three with a child wrapped tight against the afternoon chill, a persistent, wet cough rattling out of a chest too small to be making that much noise, and Una mid-restock at the front counter, one eyebrow already lifted in Walter’s direction asked the question with nothing but the eyebrow, leaving the actual decision entirely his.
He felt the pull immediately, old and familiar, the same reflex that had once sent him running toward that sound without a single thought spared for his own reserves.
He wanted to look.
Three fragments in, hands still faintly unsteady, and some stubborn, useful part of him was already halfway toward reaching for a fourth.
No, Margaret said, before he’d fully decided either way, and there was nothing brisk about it this time something closer to concern, carefully rationed.
You are compounding past what any single day should carry.
A fourth diagnosis on top of three is not dedication, Walter.
It is a debt you cannot see the size of until it comes due.
He held the thought a moment longer than he needed to, weighing the sound of that cough against the tremor still faint in his own hands, and set the pull down as he’d learned to set things down.
“I can’t examine her properly today,” he told Sileas, gentle, direct, no apology dressed up as more than it was.
“Not safely not for her sake or mine.
But I can give you valerian and a honey-and-onion syrup that’ll ease the worst of the cough tonight, and if she’s no better by tomorrow, come first thing and I’ll look at her properly, rested and right.”
“Tomorrow, then.
First thing.”
“First thing,” Walter agreed, and measured out the syrup with hands that had gone, if not steady, at least steady enough, and watched her go with the child’s cough already softening under the syrup’s first spoonful.
Wallace would have found today interesting, Margaret said, once the shop bell had settled and Una had drifted back to her stock, and the sentence carried a texture he hadn’t heard from her before smaller, more private, offered rather than delivered.
He never trusted a system that didn’t cost something either.
He’d have liked watching you refuse that fourth patient rather more than he’d have liked watching you take it.
“Wallace.” Walter turned the name over, careful, the way you turn over a stone you suspect is load-bearing to something you can’t yet see.
“Someone I’ll be hearing more about?”
In time.
The door closed on the subject as gently and as firmly as every door she’d closed before it, but something in the closing this time felt less like deflection and more like patience a woman deciding, deliberately, what a man could carry on a day that had already cost him this much.
Walter let it go, filed the name somewhere it wouldn’t rattle loose, and sat a while longer on the bench with three fragments still fading unevenly through his body and one refused patient’s grateful, tired face still fresh enough to weigh more than any of them.
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