Chapter 1 #2
“How you—” He ran his hands down his face, but Oste managed to bridle his fury just enough to cut himself off. His voice was lower in volume when he mustered speech again. “I didn’t want help. Not an assistant, or favors. I don’t need it.”
Dorotèa inclined her head. “You agreed to it.”
“After you lot wore me down.”
“A ‘no’ still would have sufficed.”
“I’m certain I included a ‘no’. I think I included several.”
“If you really had, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Then I wish I had,” Oste shot back, “because you’re here, and there’s a dead woman in my office.”
They both fell silent. Oste wasn’t ignorant to the downwards tilt of Dorotèa’s rounded chin, which proved to be one of the only changes in her countenance; she was as still and stoic as one of the many fountains around Aix-en-Provence.
Guilt struck him as easily as his defiance.
Dorotèa didn’t leave ‘Marie’ here. And her charity was the sort of act he’d find commendable in any other situation; the sort of thing encouraged by Saint-Mitre pillars.
He felt the part of a petulant child, which his father still called him now and again.
Oste had earned a new shame in the little time that had passed, and he wondered if other men were as familiar as he was at conversing with disgust. He still hadn’t figured that one out.
Dorotèa answered quietly. “What would you have me do, then?”
Oste swallowed and almost staggered at her resignation.
People were seldom as reliably combative as she.
That she wasn’t spoke to the queerness of this new arrangement, he supposed.
Friendships had the expectation of continuity, not a transformation into ill-made servitude.
Circumstances were reshaping them as roughly as wet clay.
“I can’t rightly throw you out.” His timbre suited the murky sludge of a terracotta throat.
Dorotèa furrowed her brow and answered with a rightful assumption. “I wasn’t supposed to be here for this.”
“No,” Oste agreed.
“Is it… very bad that I’m here? You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”
“I’m in the business of encouraging living, Mademoiselle Galoup, rather than creating the dead.
” If she was to adopt formal address for their arrangement, so could he.
“Which is also to say this is a responsibility of my job, and no, I won’t harm you for having been here, and no one else will.
But when I say certain matters are of the utmost discretion, I’m quite serious, and I’ll say as much now.
This shouldn’t have happened, but it did. ”
He caught the twitch of her neck when Dorotèa swallowed. “This has to do with your commission?”
Oste looked down. He often forgot he even bore it in an official capacity, but attributed that to it having been signed off on the very same day so much fell apart.
He was glad, he supposed, nothing had been revoked; it was more pay, and more tasks he could put his mind to, being an actual civic doctor at last. He just hadn’t anticipated the entanglements.
Being oblivious had been a peaceful thing.
Oste inclined his head. “My duties extend to inquiries. Autopsies, if it’s necessary.”
Dorotèa flashed a sheepish smile. She seemed incapable of breaking eye contact and continued to look on despite the shifting of her feet. “Ah.”
“If it’s a matter of health, or the absence of it, I’m obliged.”
“You’re a model citizen, Docteur. I’d be very put out if my beneficial work, for the good of my city, included such uses of my good mahogany table.”
Oste raised a dark brow. He stayed quiet for a beat until he decided to play along, however brief the banter proved to be. “I think sometimes you find that you have little choice but would still choose to go along with it anyway. A little table usually leads to a worthy payoff.”
“Sometimes a little table can’t be helped.
” Dorotèa shrugged and rotated the broom once in her hands.
“But if it can be helped, a certain confraternity did arrange for a certain young lady to assist a certain esteemed doctor with his day-to-day functions. This young lady understands the demands and, erm… complications of such a position, and is prepared to do whatever is needed—with her lips sealed. Loyalty to the Order of Saint-Mitre, or what-have-you.”
“The esteemed doctor wonders if the young lady knows what that would entail.”
“The young lady knows very little, but she’s nothing if not devoted.”
“He wonders now if the young lady can tolerate the sight of more than dust.”
“The young lady can—erm, sorry, what?”
“Mademoiselle,” said Oste sternly, “I want to clear this up now, on account of how little time a body leaves someone to debate such things. I need to know if I have your discretion, lawful business that this is, and if you have an iron stomach.”
Dorotèa furrowed her brow. “I… think that I do? Jeanne said as much when I said I’d assist you in the hospital, too. I’m very glad to be of help.”
“It doesn’t have to do with help,” said Oste with a bitter shake of his head.
He realized how quickly his frustration proved capable of coming back.
“It has everything to do with efficiency, in that I’d rather get certain matters out of the way sooner rather than later so I can return to my patients. ”
“Of course.” Dorotèa was just a little too quiet again. “That’s good of you.”
Oste sank into something he couldn’t name, and clawing his way out was a tiring thing when he didn’t know which direction held air.
He wanted to get back to his patients, he did, but he was certain if that evening those months ago hadn’t happened he’d have relished in this task.
It wasn’t about this crude drop-off of work, but the necessity of finding something to bear his ire.
There was no ignoring the festering when he was so sick of it, and damn it all, Oste wanted to be able to walk out to the open knolls to the north of the Bourg Gate, find the infamous masked duelist who roamed nearby, and, without the ache in his body or the fragility of his heart, draw his sword and dance.
He’d taken all of it for granted.
He knew, also, that until that time, no one who wore a grapevine brooch ever fell hushed in his presence.
That Dorotèa did, the girl whose very existence was a cacophony of clashing instruments, made him nauseated and dizzy both.
He ought to keep to the morgue; Oste was certain he was no longer suited for living humans.
He opened his mouth to offer an apology, but something else came out.
“Maistre al-Anezi has always told me that I’ve a nervous disposition.
He supposes this is why I have a tendency to pick my words foolishly, drink too much, and find myself involved in fights of the verbal and physical varieties.
Then he usually warns me against getting myself arrested, and I finish off by reminding him that people have tried. ”
“That’s just a Saint-Mitre requirement,” Dorotèa said with a surprised chuckle.
Her body loosened on her exhale, and Oste loathed that he couldn’t pat himself by doing away with some of the tension.
She drew her brows up. “A fellow last market said, while he was buying our plums, that we were being seduced by the Devil and would be hanged. Considering he still made the transaction, I think we give off the impression of being decent enough for threats of gaol to come up empty.”
“Mostly.”
“Fine. Mostly.” Dorotèa gave him one slow, grave nod. “Listen: I’ll not pretend I can give you perfect peace of mind; your reluctance of my coming made that obvious.”
“Mademoiselle—”
“But let me quell a nerve. Just one,” she remarked, cutting him off with wide, dazzling eyes.
Oste never missed the flecks of gold in them, same as their quarries during those summer nights so long ago.
“I can match your loyalty to our cause and our companions, Docteur, I swear it. I know your loyalty, and I’d like for you to allow yourself to see mine.
I can keep a secret; I can serve you as needed.
God knows you’ve never had me and so many of the others do much of any consequence, but no matter what, I’ll give it my all, I swear it.
I swear on my life, I do, and proclaim that God can and ought to strike me down if I defy an order of yours or make a mockery of a task. ”
Oste’s jaw slackened, and he watched her, dumbfounded into silence, as she balled a fist and thumped it over her heart.
“You have my discretion,” Dorotèa insisted, “and you have my skills! I promise. Hate me all you like. Hate the job our club is having me do. Just let me do it, at least for a time.”
“Your second point is a given. It’s bad enough without needing to tolerate a friend being burdened for it.”
“I’m familiar with burdens. I’ve room enough for yours.”
He continued to stare right back at her, silent and stewing.
It was warm outside, a fresh Aixois summer, but his office seemed to have let in more heat in the last minute.
It braided itself into the vessels connected to his pounding heart, and he noticed how similar the sensation was to that which he felt at the commencement of confraternity meetings.
Pride, Oste realized. He was guilty in some part for the degree of her commitment, for he always wrote service as their first pillar.
Oste swallowed and spoke, in a soft voice, “Walk with me, Mademoiselle.”
Dorotèa’s nod was so overdone it bordered on absurdity. “Of course. Shall I carry anything for you?”
“No. No, thank you.”
“Will she—” she started as she glanced at the covered body. “Will she stay?”
“We’re seeing to that right now. Come.”
We’ll see how devoted she is soon enough, Oste thought to himself as he opened the door and quickly beckoned her back out.