Read Chapter 35: The New Plague

The first death came on a Tuesday, three days after the Ashcombe orphans had been given beds in the tithe barn.

Thomas was summoned at dawn by a girl named Hester, one of the rescued, who stood in the doorway of his cottage with her hands twisting in her apron. “The little one,” she said. “The one with the red hair. She will not wake.”

He found the child on a straw pallet, her face the color of old tallow, her lips faintly blue. Her breathing came in shallow, rattling bursts. He pressed two fingers to her neck—pulse weak, thready, too fast. He lifted her eyelid. The vessels beneath were shot with red, like cracks in river ice.

“When did this begin?” he asked.

“Last night. She said her head hurt. I thought it was the dreams catching up with her.”

Thomas mixed his usual draught—feverfew, yarrow, a tincture of willow bark. He held the cup to her lips. She swallowed a few drops and then turned her head away, retching bile onto the straw. He tried again. Same result. Her body rejected the remedy as though it had been taught to.

By afternoon, three more children had fallen ill. By evening, the count was eleven, including two of Martha’s survivors from the marsh camp and one of Blencarn’s own villagers, a ploughman named Wat who had never left the valley in his life.

They all showed the same signs. Fever. The red-shot eyes. A stiffness in the joints that made them cry out when moved. And they all vomited whatever Thomas gave them.

Eleanor found him in the surgery at midnight, surrounded by scattered vials. “The children are saying their mouths taste of copper,” she said. “Some of them are crying about a smell. Like burnt almonds.”

Thomas went still. He had never mentioned the burnt-almond smell aloud. He had only ever encountered it once before, in the surgical tent at the Siege of Calais, where a French physician had treated a knight’s infected wound with a paste of his own invention. The knight had died within the hour.

“Is it plague?” Eleanor asked.

“No,” Thomas said. “This is something else.”

The lord’s alchemist was an old man by reputation, a shadowy figure referred to in Blencarn only as “the apothecary” whenever the manor required powders or salves. But the Earl of Marchmont had rarely visited this manor, and the alchemist had remained in the village’s orbit, a servant without a master. When Thomas had first arrived in Blencarn, the alchemist had been one of the first to deny him access to the manor’s stores.

Now, as Thomas sat with the dying children, he remembered that denial. He remembered the alchemist’s cold, calculating stare. He remembered the way the man had watched the plague processions with an expression not of fear but of study.

Thomas tracked the alchemist to his laboratory in the abandoned mill by the river. The door was unlocked. Inside, the tables had been stripped bare. The furnaces were cold. Only a single scrap of parchment remained, nailed to the wall, bearing a phrase in Latin: *That which kills may be refined to kill again.*

He knew then what the alchemist had done. He had taken samples from the plague dead. He had studied the mechanisms of infection and created a distilled variant—a poison that mimicked plague but moved faster, was harder to treat, and could be deployed deliberately. The deaths in Blencarn were not an outbreak. They were an experiment.

“He means to test it,” Thomas said to Father Aldous, who had come at Eleanor’s summons to help carry the sick. “To see how it spreads without the quarantine. To measure how many die before anyone notices.”

Father Aldous, his cassock exchanged for a labourer’s tunic, looked down at the small bodies laid in rows on the chapel floor. His face was haggard. “The man who helped build the plague trade would never let such knowledge go to waste.”

“He is not working for the earl anymore,” Thomas said. “The earl is in chains. This is something else. A new patron, or a new ambition.”

The peddler appeared the next morning.

He came through the south gate with his cart creaking and his bells silent, his face unreadable beneath his wide-brimmed hat. He stopped Thomas in the lane and said, “I hear you have a new plague.”

“You hear quickly.”

“I heard it in the wind. And I saw the alchemist three days past, moving north with a cart full of glass jars and a sack of feathers.” The peddler’s eyes narrowed. “He was heading for the old abbey at Linthwaite. The one they say is cursed.”

Thomas studied the peddler. “Why do you help us?”

The peddler looked past him, toward the chapel where the children lay. “Because I have seen what he makes. Years ago, in a village called Mardon, I watched a man die of a sickness that smelled of almonds. No one else believed me. They called it a humour imbalance. I have been looking for the man who did that ever since.”

Thomas made his decision. He left Eleanor with instructions—continue the willow-bark draughts, keep the children cool, do not let them drink the river water—and he took Father Aldous and the peddler north into the moors.

The abbey at Linthwaite had been abandoned for decades, its roof collapsed in places, its walls choked with ivy. But as they approached at dusk, Thomas saw light flickering through a broken lancet window. Smoke rose from a chimney that should have been cold for thirty years.

They entered through the crypt, where the flagstones were slick with recent moisture and the air carried the bite of chemicals. Thomas heard a voice ahead—low, methodical, chanting numbers as though keeping count.

“Seventeen drops of the distillate,” the alchemist was saying. “Eleven days of secondary culture. The mortality rate should exceed the natural plague by thirty percent.”

Thomas stepped into the abbey’s nave. The alchemist stood at a workbench built from altar stone, surrounded by glass vessels and copper coils. He was a thin man in his sixties, his beard yellowed by fumes, his eyes bright and empty. When he saw Thomas, he did not flinch.

“The village physician,” the alchemist said. “I wondered when you would find me.”

“You have poisoned children.”

“I have tested a compound,” the alchemist said. “Children are a more reliable medium than adults. Their constitutions respond more predictably.”

Father Aldous stepped forward, his fists clenched. “You have murdered innocents.”

“I have advanced science. The earl understood that. He paid me well to develop his trade. Now that he is gone, I will sell my findings to the next buyer.”

Thomas drew his knife. “You will not leave this abbey.”

The alchemist smiled. He reached beneath the workbench and produced a glass vial filled with a clear liquid. “I have already prepared enough of this to dose the water supply of every village between here and London. You may kill me, physician, but you will not stop the plague I have made. It will outlive us both.”

The peddler moved faster than Thomas expected. He crossed the nave in three steps, seized the alchemist’s wrist, and twisted. The vial dropped and shattered on the flagstones. The alchemist howled and struck out, catching the peddler across the jaw with his free hand. The peddler staggered. The alchemist lunged for a second vial.

Thomas caught him mid-motion, driving his shoulder into the man’s chest and bearing him to the ground. They struggled on the cold stone, the alchemist’s fingers scrabbling for Thomas’s throat. Thomas pinned him and pressed his knife to the man’s neck.

“Where is the formula?” Thomas demanded.

The alchemist laughed, spittle flying. “In my head. Kill me, and it dies with me.”

Thomas met his eyes. He saw no fear there, only a mad kind of triumph. He released the pressure of the knife by a hair.

“Then you will not die,” Thomas said. “You will be taken to London and tried before the King’s council. They will have ways of opening your head that I do not possess.”

The alchemist’s triumph flickered. For the first time, Thomas saw fear.

The peddler bound the alchemist’s hands and ankles with rope from his cart. Father Aldous stood vigil over them through the night while Thomas returned to Blencarn. He carried a sample of the blue liquid from the shattered vial in a leather flask, and it took him three more days, working by candlelight in his surgery, to isolate the counter-agent—a compound of rue and powdered mandrake root, administered slowly, over a week.

The children began to recover on the fifth day. By the eighth, they were sitting up and asking for food. By the tenth, Eleanor was laughing as she chased a red-haired girl through the village square.

Thomas stood on the hill above Blencarn, watching his village heal. Behind him, Father Aldous and the peddler were building a scaffold for the alchemist’s transport. The man who had tried to perfect the plague would face his judgment in London.

Thomas touched the royal decree in his pocket. He did not know what he would do next. But he knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that he would do it here.