“Foxglove,” Mistress Una said, not as a greeting, the moment he was three steps through her door.
“What’s it good for, and what’s it good for killing.”
Walter had expected questions.
He hadn’t expected to be mid-examination before he’d finished crossing the threshold, but he adjusted without breaking stride, the way he’d learned to when a supervisor pulled him aside mid-shift with a case file already open.
“Slows a hard-galloping heart, given carefully.
Too much of it, and the heart stops galloping altogether permanently.
It wants a steady hand and a light one.”
She was a square, weathered woman somewhere past fifty, sleeves pushed to the elbow, hands stained faint yellow at the fingertips from years of work he could only guess at.
She didn’t nod.
She moved instead to a shelf and lifted down two jars, setting them on the counter between them with a small, precise thud.
“And these.”
“Meadowsweet.” He touched the first jar without opening it, more out of instinct than need the pale, papery flower-heads were unmistakable even through glass.
“Eases pain, settles the stomach, gentle enough for a child.
Willow-bark” the second jar, darker, coarser “does harder work.
Fever, ache, the kind of pain meadowsweet won’t touch.
Rougher on the stomach, though.
You’d not give both to the same patient without reason.”
Something in her face shifted, not warmth exactly, but the recalculation of a woman revising a low estimate upward.
“Ye’ve had training.”
“A year in London, under a man who didn’t suffer fools.” Not entirely a lie.
Not entirely the truth either.
It was, he’d found, the most useful kind of sentence.
She might have asked more he could see the next question forming, something sharper, something designed to catch him out but a sound cut across it from the street: a low, fretful crying, a man’s voice underneath it, pitched anxious.
Through the open door, a broad-shouldered crofter stood with a bundled shawl in his arms, shifting his weight foot to foot the way men do when they’ve run out of ways to be useful and hate it.
“Tam Murray,” Una said, half to herself, already moving toward the door before catching herself and turning back to Walter instead testing him one more time, he understood, in the space of a single decision.
“His lass has had the fever three days running.
Well?”
The word sat in the air between them like an offered blade, handle first.
Walter felt the pull of it immediately the old reflex, four years deep, the part of him that had once run toward exactly this kind of sound without a second thought.
He wanted to look.
He wanted, badly, to put his hand against that child’s forehead and read what her fever was telling him, the way he’d read a hundred fevers before in a world with thermometers and clean protocols and nothing at stake but the truth of the reading.
He didn’t move toward the door.
“I’ve not seen the child,” he said instead, level.
“I’ll not guess what I haven’t examined, and I’ll not put my hand on a bairn I’ve no standing yet to touch.
That’s yours to do, mistress, not mine not today.”
For a long moment Una said nothing at all, and the crying outside filled the silence in her place.
Then she turned, brisk, already reaching for a satchel behind the counter.
“Mind the shop.
Touch naught in the locked case.
I’ll not be long.”
She was out the door and crossing to Tam Murray before Walter had fully processed that he’d just been left, alone, in charge of a room full of things that could kill a person in the wrong hands which was, he understood with the dry clarity of a man recognizing his own life’s shape rebuilding itself in a new century, more or less the only job he’d ever wanted.
She came back forty minutes later, satchel lighter, expression unreadable, and found him exactly where she’d left him counter swept, jars untouched, the crofter’s daughter apparently settled enough that Una’s face had eased by a fraction most people wouldn’t have caught.
“Ye didn’t touch the case,” she said.
Not quite a question.
“You told me not to.”
“Aye.” She set the satchel down and looked at him properly for the first time since he’d walked in not testing now, weighing.
“I’ve had three apprentices in five years, Master Bryce.
Two of them helped themselves to more than their wages, and I caught the both of them the same way I’d have caught ye, had ye gone rummaging while my back was turned.” A pause.
“Ye didn’t.”
“No,” Walter agreed.
“I didn’t.”
“Sixpence a day,” she said, abrupt, the way a woman says a number she’s already decided rather than one still open to negotiation.
“And the corner of the back-room, if ye’ve a mind to keep a bench of your own.
I’ll not pay London wages for London training I’ve no proof of beyond your own word but your word held today, and that’s worth something in this parish.”
It was less than half what he’d have been owed anywhere he’d trained, and it was, he understood with a small private satisfaction he didn’t let reach his face, exactly enough.
A reason to be here.
A bench.
Access to a stock of herbs he’d need before the year was out, and a name in the village that wasn’t attached to a letter nobody trusted.
“Sixpence,” he said, “and the bench.
I’ll take it.”
Una studied him one more moment, then extended a hand roughened by decades of exactly the work he was about to inherit a corner of.
Walter shook it her grip harder than he’d expected, dry, sure and somewhere behind them, through the propped-open door, Tam Murray’s daughter had gone quiet at last, her fever, for tonight at least, somebody else’s careful work and not his.