Read Chapter 2: The Little Black Book

Agnes lit the candle herself, though her hands shook with an ague that had nothing to do with the cold. The flame caught, steadied, and threw long shadows across the infirmary's low rafters. She set the tallow stub on a shelf beside a mortar dusted with dried henbane and regarded Thomas with eyes the color of river stones.

"You'll sleep here," she said. "The back room. It was the priest's, before he took ill and died of the sweating sickness. His soul's long gone. The bed's sound."

Thomas looked past her to the narrow door at the rear of the hall. A pile of soiled linens lay heaped against the wall—too many for a village that claimed no deaths. He did not ask. The stench of the place, the copper-tinged reek of blood and the sweeter undertone of rot, told him more than any ledger could.

The dying man—John, Agnes had called him, though Thomas had heard the name passed from the constable's mouth like a curse—wheezed in the corner. The girl sat beside him, her fingers wrapped around his. She had not moved in hours. Her face was pale as tallow, her eyes fixed on her father's chest as it struggled to rise and fall.

"What of him?" Thomas asked.

Agnes followed his gaze. "What of him? He dies. You've seen the swellings. You know the signs as well as I."

"You said the village was clean. No contagion. The constable said it too."

"The constable," Agnes said, and the words carried a weight of bitterness that surprised him, "has not changed a bedpan in thirty years. I have." She crossed to a shelf of clay pots, ran her fingers along their necks, and selected one sealed with wax. "I'll make a poultice. It won't save him. It might ease the end."

Thomas watched her grind herbs with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The fire crackled. Behind him, John's breath rattled in his throat, a sound like stones rolling in a dry creek bed.

"You keep records," Thomas said. "A village physician—a village healer—she would know the names of the dead. Their numbers. Their causes."

Agnes paused. The pestle hung in her hand, dripping a green smear across the mortar's lip.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because I saw bodies last night." He said it plainly, watching her face. "A procession of them, wrapped in shrouds, carried toward the churchyard. You cannot bury that many men without it touching your records."

Agnes resumed grinding. The pestle struck the clay with a dull, rhythmic thud. "You saw what you saw."

"I saw corpses. Men don't imagine death in a place like this. Not with the air so thick with it."

She set the pestle down, wiped her hands on her apron, and crossed to a small oaken chest bolted to the wall beside the hearth. From a chain at her waist she drew an iron key, worked the lock with a dry click, and lifted out a book bound in cracked black leather. It was no larger than a missal, its pages heavy with use.

She thrust it at him. "The register. Every death in Blencarn since the plague came. Names, dates, causes. Keep it if you like. You'll find it makes for grim reading."

Thomas took the book. The leather was warm from the fire, the pages soft with handling. He opened it near the middle and read entries in a neat, sharp hand—Agnes's own, he guessed, or some clerk's before her.

*Elsbeth Mowbray, aged forty-two. Died of a fever. Buried 12th October.* *Walter Hale, aged sixty-one. Died of a broken back after falling from his roof. Buried 19th October.* *Margery Fynch, aged three. Died of a winter chill. Buried 23rd October.*

The entries went on. The causes were varied, mundane, almost reassuringly ordinary. A drowning. A child gone to the bloody flux. A man crushed by a cart. The dates were regular, spaced across the weeks, no more than one death in any given week, sometimes fewer. The last entry was from a fortnight past: a woman named Cecily Ward, dead of childbed fever.

Thomas turned the pages back and forth. The numbers were too neat. The causes too tidy. No mention of swellings. No mention of the plague. No mention of the three days at the end of the month when no deaths were recorded at all, followed by a cluster—a sudden excess—that the register accounted for with a single line: *Several souls taken by the storm, buried in the common grave.*

"Is this all?" Thomas asked.

Agnes did not answer. She had turned back to her mortar, now scraping the poultice into a small clay dish. The girl in the corner had begun to hum, a low, tuneless sound, rocking her father's hand in hers.

"There were more bodies than this," Thomas pressed. "I counted eight shrouds outside my window. Only last night. Where do they appear in this book?"

"You counted shrouds in the dark?" Agnes laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "A physician who counts corpses from his window. You'll drive yourself mad before the week's out."

"Then the book is false."

"The book is complete." She carried the poultice to John's bedside, knelt beside him, and began to unlace his shirt, revealing the dark swellings beneath his collarbones—black, fist-sized, already weeping. The girl turned her face away.

Thomas turned to the back of the register and ran his finger down the final entries. A half-page was blank. He was about to close it when he noticed the handwriting change. The last entry—the woman dead of childbed fever—was written in a different hand, sharper, more hurried, the letters slanted as if the pen had been held too tight.

Thomas looked up. "Cecily Ward. Who wrote that entry?"

Agnes paused over her patient. Her face was hidden in shadow, but Thomas saw her shoulder stiffen. "I did. I write them all."

"The hand is different. Less practiced."

"I was tired."

Thomas did not argue. He slipped the book into his coat, beside his scalpel case, and stepped toward the back room. He paused in the doorway, looked back at the girl. She was still humming, her cheek pressed close to her father's shoulder, her eyes closed, as if she could will him into rest.

"Your father," Thomas said quietly. "What illness does he have?"

The girl did not open her eyes. "The same as the others."

"What others?"

She shook her head, a minute movement, barely visible. "The ones they don't write down."

Thomas felt the words lodge in his chest like a fishhook. He looked at Agnes, but the old woman had turned away, her hands busy with the poultice, her lips moving in a prayer or a curse. He could not tell which.

---

He slept in the priest's bed that night, the black register on the floor beside him, his hand resting on the scalpel case. The mattress was lumpy, the straw damp with old sweat, but exhaustion took him quickly.

He woke to the sound of wheels.

The groan of wood, the squeal of an ungreased axle. Hooves—one horse, slow, heavy. Somewhere beyond the infirmary wall, closer than he expected, moving toward the gate.

Thomas rose, crossed to the window, and pressed his face to the cold glass. The frost had blurred it, but he could see the outline of a cart in the darkness, a lantern swinging from its tail. Two figures stood beside it, black shapes against the pale ground. They were hauling a burden together—a long, wrapped thing, stiff as a board—and heaving it up onto the cart's bed.

The lantern swung. The light caught the shroud cloth. White linen, soiled dark along one seam. The shape of a body beneath, the contours unmistakable.

Thomas watched them lash it down. The two figures moved without speaking. One of them raised his head, and the lantern light fell across his face—lean, weather-bitten, familiar.

The constable.

He stood there a moment, one hand on the body, the other shielding his eyes against the wind. Then he climbed onto the cart, gathered the reins, and set the horse walking toward the churchyard.

The cart creaked past the infirmary window. Thomas counted the bundles on its bed. Four. No—five. Five bodies wrapped in white sheets, stacked like cordwood, their feet jutting up against the tailgate.

He snatched the register from the floor and opened it to the blank page. There was a fresh entry, written in the same sharp, urgent hand as Cecily Ward's. It had not been there before he slept.

*5 souls. Died of the flux. Buried the common grave, 14th November.*

But the date. It was tomorrow.