The water-glass sat untouched on the parlor’s side table, condensation beading down its side, waiting on a summons that hadn’t come yet, and Geillis’s eyes kept finding it every few minutes the way a woman’s eyes find a clock when she’s expecting bad news on a schedule she doesn’t control.
“Arthur’s headache again,” she said, not quite an explanation, pouring Walter’s claret with a hand steady enough that only someone watching for the specific tremor would have caught the effort behind the steadiness.
“Third this fortnight.”
“I know.” Walter set his own glass down without drinking from it.
“I’ve been carrying the shape of it in my notebook a while now, Geillis.
I think it’s past time we spoke on it plainly.”
Something in her face didn’t change so much as settle, the particular stillness of a woman deciding, in real time, whether the conversation she’d been dreading had finally arrived on its own schedule rather than hers.
“What d’ye imagine ye’ve found,” she said, and the Glasgow underneath her voice was already surfacing, sharp-edged, testing.
“A slow build.
Months, not weeks.
The kind of dosing a careless hand couldn’t manage and a patient one could sustain indefinitely without a single person in this parish thinking to look twice.” He held her eyes, level, the same register he’d once used to deliver a diagnosis nobody wanted from a man with better manners than he’d ever bothered developing.
“A man found dead of no obvious cause, in a household his wife runs alone, six years into a marriage everyone in this village already whispers she settled for that’s not an ending, Geillis.
That’s an accusation waiting for someone to write it down.”
“Three months,” she said, plain, no more deflection left in her once she’d decided the deflecting was finished.
“I’ve weighed every dose myself.
I’ve been careful.”
“I don’t doubt you’ve been careful.
Careful’s not the same as safe.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“Christ in heaven, Walter, d’ye think I haven’t run the arithmetic on this a hundred times over?” The public register cracked clean through, Glasgow flooding out from underneath it whole and unguarded.
“Six years I’ve funded a cause on money I could only ever touch once he was gone.
Six years married to a decent enough man I never once loved, holding still while my whole purpose sat six months, a year, five years further off than I could stomach waiting for.”
“Then let me offer you a way to get there that doesn’t end with a magistrate’s inquest and a rope for the wife nobody in this parish ever fully trusted.”
That landed harder than he’d meant it to he watched it land, watched something flicker behind her controlled eyes that might have been fear dressed up as fury, might have been the first honest crack in six years of careful arithmetic finally admitting it had never once accounted for getting caught.
“Go on, then,” she said, quiet now, dangerously so.
“A death that isn’t a death.
Arranged carefully a fall, a fever, something the parish can grieve and bury without ever looking hard enough to find what actually happened.
You go to Edinburgh after, widowed and respectable, with whatever of the household money you can carry clean.
No poison in the ground for anyone to find in five years’ time.
No trial.
No rope.”
“Master Bryce.” Arthur’s voice carried thin and querulous down the stairwell, entirely unaware of what six feet below him was currently being negotiated on his behalf.
“Geillis, love, is that water coming?”
“In a moment, Arthur.” Geillis’s public register snapped back into place with a speed that would have been impressive under any circumstances and was, under these, something closer to frightening the whole conversation folded away behind her face in the space of four words, nothing in her tone betraying a fraction of what had just passed between them.
She rose, filled the glass properly, and carried it up the stairs herself rather than ringing for Mrs MacNeil, and Walter sat alone in the parlor a moment with the particular dry, unwelcome humor of a man realizing that three months ago his life’s most complicated logistics problem had been sourcing enough foxglove to see a village through the ague season, and now here he sat, calmly plotting a woman’s fake death over claret while her actual husband called down for water two floors above them.
Neither of his lives, he thought, had prepared him for a Tuesday quite like this one.
I once had to tell a colleague his life’s work had already been overtaken before he’d finished writing it down, Margaret said, quiet, into the gap Geillis’s absence left. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
He never forgave the message.
He came, in time, to forgive the messenger.
I did not enjoy being the one who had to say it either, Walter.
Some truths cost the teller nearly as much as the hearer.
He held that a moment, filed it somewhere he’d examine properly later, and looked up when Geillis’s footsteps returned down the stairs.
“Three days,” she said, settling back onto the settee across from him, her public composure fully restored but her eyes carrying something rawer underneath it than he’d seen since the shop bell had first flinched under her hand.
“Give me three days to think on it properly, and I’ll give ye my answer.”
“Three days,” he agreed.
“And Walter.” She met his eyes directly, none of the deflection left in her voice now, only a flat, precise honesty: she had run out of better options.
“Whatever I decide ye’ll not think less of me for the three months already spent.
I’ll not have your conscience sitting in judgment over mine on top of everything else I’m carrying just now.”
“I’m not your conscience, Geillis.
I’m the man who’d rather you were alive and unhanged three years from now than righteous and dead by Christmas.” He rose, set the untouched claret aside for good this time.
“Three days.
Whichever answer you land on, I’ll help you carry it.”
She didn’t answer that, and he let the silence stand rather than push it, and let himself out past a water-glass tray now empty on the side table and a house that, from the outside, looked exactly as ordinary as it had every other evening he’d walked away from it.