The girl stared at it. Evelyn glanced up the staircase, but none of the men had yet emerged. They wouldn’t, not for at least another hour. Her departure always had the same effect as the ladies of the house repairing to another room after a dinner party. The brandy would flow more heavily, the tobacco clouds grow larger overhead. They would tell themselves they deserved to relax, now that she was gone.
She didn’t mind that part of it. Tobacco was a noxious weed. Evelyn leaned in, pressing the vial into the girl’s hand. “It will not be pleasant.”
“Real plague isn’t pleasant,” the girl responded, voice wavering. “It will be convincing enough? They’ll send me to one of the border hospitals?”
And from there to escape, no doubt. A bold plan, if a foolish one. She was just as likely to sicken for real inside those fetid buildings. “Take no more than two droplets every twelve hours, less if your body reacts strongly. You will need the rest periods. It will be very bitter, and is caustic to the skin, so make sure to take it with as much water as you can stand.”
Evelyn waited for the girl to ask for more: more help, advice on how best to smuggle it into the hospital, on what to do if she took too much.
Instead, she reached for the small coin purse hidden in the folds of her skirt.
Evelyn stepped back. “No need,” she said. “Just be gone from this place. You do this to yourself. I had no hand in it.”
“Of course, ma’am.” The girl curtsied. Evelyn closed up her case, drew her cloak over her shoulders, and stepped out of the building.
Her assistant, Violetta Fusain, waited in the high-wheeled carriage parked down at the corner. The footman opened up the carriage door for Evelyn, and provided the block to step up. She took her seat across from her white-clad attendant, so different from herself, but with no less quickness in her lowered eyes.
Violetta’s pale hair was drawn back from her cherubic face. She looked like a delicate doll, except for the sharpness of her gaze.
The door shut behind her. “I have met with your girl,” Evelyn said. “It is done. I have delivered her poison.”
Violetta frowned at that. “Poison? She asked for medicine.”
“A medicine that sickens is poison. And she will be lucky if she does not die from it, but she seemed determined.”
Violetta grimaced, but did not argue. The carriage pulled out into the street, passing by the first turning towards home and instead rattling down the hillside, toward the harbor below.
Something had happened, then. “The Verity?”
“Has encountered a problem, my lady.”
“A plaguing problem?” She thought of burning masts, great beacons of blazing failure upon the water. She could afford to lose a ship, but not her reputation. But when she searched Violetta’s face for pain or frustration, she found neither.
Instead, she found fear. “No, my lady,” Violetta said. “Something else entirely.”
The ship rolled gently below her feet, wood creaking on all sides. With the sun long set, there were no calling gulls to hear, and on the first night in dock, there were few sailors aboard. She was left with only the wash of the water and the drum of the rain that had started up halfway to the harbor.
“Should we call for a doctor, my lady?” the captain asked. Evelyn looked down into the staring eyes of the first mate of The Verity. Behind her, Violetta lifted the small oil lantern she carried a few inches higher. The light danced across the man’s pupils, but nothing in his face responded in the slightest. His eyes did not narrow, his jaw did not twitch.
And yet he breathed. “How long has he been like this?” Evelyn asked, mind racing. She had heard of catatonias before, but none like this man’s. There was no limb rigidity, no rictus grin; nor was there any torpor, no deep and unceasing slumber. It was as if the soul of him had simply winked out, leaving an otherwise normal husk of a man who breathed, whose heart beat, but who could not move.
A fly landed on the man’s iris. He did not blink.
“Barely an hour, my lady,” said Luc Reynolds, her ship’s captain. “I was with him at the pub when it came over him.”
“How many others?” He hesitated, then said, “Five, my lady. That we know of. Not everybody has been located yet, not the men who went home to their families or other embraces. If you understand me.”
“I understand you, Captain,” she said, looking away from the living corpse at last. Reynolds had his hat in his hand, and he looked scared.
She had never seen him look scared before. “The others are in the brig. Shall I fetch a doctor, my lady?” “Not yet,” she said. “Find everybody. Find anybody else in this state. If I am going to tell the magistrates that my ship has brought an unknown illness onto Delphinium’s soil, then I will have it quarantined before I do so.” Internally, she was cursing, pacing furiously, rending her hair. Outwardly, she was almost as still as the sailor beside her.
“Of course, my lady,” Reynolds said, glancing between her and Violetta. “I...suppose it’s best to tell you now, that before I met him at the pub, he went I don’t know where.”
Worse and worse. The unknown number in whorehouses now were bad enough. “And the other five?”
“The same. They scattered to the winds.” It was almost normal, almost expected, but the timing was off. For the first mate and the others to have gone to their business and come back to the pub so quickly, they must have left immediately after the crews began unloading cargo. The other five sailors had shirked work, and the first mate had barely been better. Understandable, except that meant they abandoned their brothers, the men they had sailed with for months. More than that, it had meant risking the loss of drink, paid for by the officers. It wasn’t like them.
The look upon Captain Reynold’s face said that he agreed with her.
“Something rotten,” he offered, softly. “It looks like witchcraft.”
Evelyn lifted one pale hand, waving off the suggestion. The last witches had been tried centuries ago, and it was her understanding that the Judiciary would have preferred the entire subject disappear into obscurity, a dark blot on their history. After all, the witches slaughtered had been mostly women, mostly widows, mostly orphans. Women alone were always a threat, but to call it magic was...uncivilized.
Better to give them a quiet corner to call their own and move on. Delphinium had certainly benefited from doing as much for her.
“What should we do with him?”
Evelyn thought back to her pay ledgers.
“He is unmarried.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And the others?”
“Two are without a wife.”
“Kill those two, along with him.” The captain went very still, and behind her, she heard Violetta gasp. Her fingers itched, the old scars tightening. She was no stranger to death, but perhaps one to ordering it. They certainly seemed to think it fit her ill.
“My lady—” Violetta began. Evelyn turned and fixed her with a calm look. “We must assume this is some sort of plague. The three unmarried men have nobody to miss them, and so it makes the most sense to end their illness swiftly, to prevent its spread. The others... we may preserve them for the doctors, I suppose.”