Chapter 2 #2
“You can still confidently read and write?”
“Yes. I’m just not the fastest.”
“That’s fine. Can you scribe for me if I tell you notes?”
“Gladly, but I hope you don’t expect me to write it down in Latin.”
He chuckled. “No. Provencal, preferably.”
Dorotèa sighed in relief. The local patois came more naturally than French and was what they had always used with each other. “Not even French? How scandalous of you. I thought the university required everything to be fancy.”
Oste allowed a chuckle at that. “I’ve always been a little controversial.”
It was not long after that Dorotèa found herself in the company of their subject. The light weight of ‘Marie’ made the short jaunt to the morgue easy, all things considered, but not easy enough to spare looks at Oste for the remainder of her necessary assessment of his condition.
They set their bundle on the table and locked the door. Oste had his tools at the ready, and candles for more light. Only when Dorotèa raised her quill to Oste’s bound journal did he finally pull away the sheets to expose the woman inside.
Dorotèa saw at once why Oste had recoiled from his quick peek underneath.
Marie, forever young, was dressed in nothing but a white chemise and ripped overdress over her underclothes.
The entire front was utterly ruined from large bloodstains that had since dried.
They extended to her skin, ghostly-white from the loss of it and the time that had passed since her death.
Splatters and streaks decorated her left arm and neck, and had even clumped into strands of her hair.
It was a beautiful red, well-cared for with soft, long locks, which had once framed an equally lovely, unwrinkled face.
She couldn’t have been any older than Dorotèa’s twenty-four years.
Dorotèa recoiled despite herself. It wasn’t the blood. It was the violence, and the choice to inflict it upon a woman.
Dorotèa blinked. “She was murdered?”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Why… Why’d she get left in your office, then?” Oste gave her a pointed look. Dorotèa frowned and continued. “I’m just asking. You didn’t say anything about questions.”
“I don’t have the answer to that yet,” said Oste, while he picked up a scalpel. “Cases can be highly sensitive for a number of reasons.”
“That’s why?” Dorotèa tilted forward at her hips slightly, desperate for some justification, some offering. She felt how unsettled she was by it in her stomach, heavy now and roiling. She’d not felt it when the woman was just a hidden body under a tarp. “Because it’s sensitive?”
“Doubtless so. And because it’s one of my job responsibilities to see to these inquiries, and our little friend who sees to them decided I am trustworthy.”
“Ah-ha. Our little friend? I have a guess.”
“Lieutenant Fop? Yes. And though he wouldn’t have given me the run-around unless this case truly did need added privacy, I’ll have words.”
Oste looked Marie up and down. Dorotèa followed his trajectory with her own; looking away felt like an injustice.
She took in how carefully he lifted her stiffened arms and pressed at various points.
She’d not have thought the girl was dead if the only evidence was how the physician handled her.
His probing was so calculated and gentle that she might have been a living patient.
“I’d say she died late last evening,” he murmured, which Dorotèa scrawled. “But not before the day turned, no…”
Oste stepped sideways and turned his attention to Marie’s unbloodied hand. He looked closely at her fingernails and the top of her hands; they both noticed at the same time the bruises on her knuckles and her chipped nails.
“She put up a fight,” said Oste. “Honestly, she looks to be in good shape. Good weight, good presentation. I’m optimistic she made a dent in him.”
“Him?”
Oste inclined his head. “Who else would have done this but a ‘him’?”
Dorotèa had no answer to that, so she wrote in silence.
She supposed there was always the possibility of it being attributed to the commonplace religious violence; Oste had commented before that the university had more cadavers to work with on account of how frequently people were declared criminals and quieted forever on the basis of ‘heresy’.
The Protestant Huguenots weren’t safe, but neither was any other person who could’ve had a finger pointed at them.
Her quill scratched harshly on the next line when she spied Oste taking the bottom hems of Marie’s chemise and pulling it up to her waist. The sanitized handling to expose the dead woman’s most intimate parts made Dorotèa stiffen, even more so when Oste leaned down with little ceremony to inspect her there.
What had she been expecting? Permission?
The woman was dead, and he had no means of asking.
It’s just an exam, Dorotèa told herself, perplexed by how unsettled she had become.
Her breath was stolen when he took one of his instruments and angled it somewhere she couldn’t see. Dorotèa sheepishly realized then that she’d hooked her legs together and was squeezing her own anatomy into a tight ball.
“That ought to feel so very cold,” Dorotèa whispered before she could stop herself.
Oste paused and looked up. His expression of unwavering focus suddenly softened when he took in the sight of her. He glanced down at the tool, then back up. “I suppose it would, wouldn’t it? I can be a clumsy fellow.”
Dorotèa shrugged. “I mean, at this point, she’d not feel it.”
He clicked his tongue. “No, but you do.”
She drew her brows up when he set the instrument down and concluded that part with touch alone.
Her embarrassment for her frivolity was bullied into the corner by her unshaken faith in the decency of Oste’s soul.
He never stopped giving her reasons for counting him as a friend and having made him her sporting rival.
His name alone always gave her an odd warmth she attributed to comfort and safety—even now, when nothing about the situation that brought them together was comfortable at all.
“I don’t see any signs of trauma there.”
“That’s good?” Dorotèa answered brightly.
“That’s good.”
Oste set his hands back on the bloody chemise again, but this time, Dorotèa caught him speaking down at the corpse in a quiet murmur, just loud enough that she could hear from the other side of the table.
“Taking the rest off, now,” the physician uttered. “Sorry for all this, love. Someone will find a better dress for you.”
Dorotèa raised the journal to her heart and squeezed it close. She wasn’t sure if something inside broke or violently surged together. Her breath became a shaky thing, and she admonished herself for it; she’d been so certain she’d manage to be a stone wall.
She didn’t get the chance to thank Oste and tell him that she was sorry for how silly she was, but that what he did meant something.
The right words didn’t come together. He was already cutting away and sliding the ruined dress layers over Marie and freeing them from her rigid body after a moment of light tugging and untangling.
The dead girl was bare, and the moment she was, Oste had resumed his mission.
Dorotèa knew it would only get worse now, uglier, so she supposed she was glad he wasn’t dawdling.
“Obvious wound to the chest,” Oste remarked as he delicately probed at it. “It looks like—damn all this blood—looks like the area around it is burned.”
When Oste suddenly gasped, recoiled, and stumbled, Dorotèa was already there to catch him.
Oste didn’t know how he ended up seated in a chair some paces away from the table.
He looked down, and the ground beneath his feet was closer than last he remembered.
His hands were set atop his thighs, which trembled faintly but hardly garnered a response out of his connected palms and fingers; he barely felt his digits at all, and couldn’t will them immediately to move, either.
It took him too many seconds to even register what, tangled into his short, sharply groomed beard, was cold.
When he realized that Dorotèa was crouched in front of him, arms outstretched, he realized it was her fingers that held his face and kept it up.
“Hello, Oste,” Dorotèa hummed softly. “Would you like for me to find a pitcher of water?”
Hearing his name snapped Oste back into focus.
Mortification slammed into him with the same force that the bullets had six months ago.
His cheeks heated despite the rest of his body feeling wet and cold, and he blinked rapidly at the sight of her, as though it would make her vanish.
She didn’t. She remained right there, close and irritatingly helpful.
Had he fallen? Done something foolish? It made his heart quicken even beyond its already racing state.
He was working, then suddenly was somewhere else.
Oste swallowed. “No, that’s alright.”
Dorotèa removed her hands from his cheeks. “Boudiou! I’m going to defy your order, just this once.”
Oste wasn’t even entirely bothered when she made off.
He felt parched, and only hated that someone—let alone a Saint-Mitre someone that he’d known for most of his life—was fetching it for him.
He’d been so damned determined to prove to her and the rest that their strong-armed assistance was nothing more than folly, and now he was trembling in a rickety chair that exposed his nerves with the occasional rattle or squeak.
Dorotèa was back before long with a cup of water.
She handed it to Oste without speaking, and he took it with the same lack of ceremony.
He drank it in one go, after which she worked it out of his loose fingers, refilled it, and handed it back.
She remained close, her expression almost blank save for the faintest crease between her brows.
He found it a welcome contrast from his mother’s obvious fretting and praying, for as much as he loved her.
Time made Oste realize that Dorotèa wasn’t going to ask him to explain. He didn’t want to. Everyone already knew what had divided his life into another chapter, which was inevitable if such things happened in the open in Aix.
He gave her a simple answer, a passing remark for the notes she agreed to scribe. His statement was explanation enough, he knew.
“She appears to have been shot,” muttered Oste.
“Ah.”
Oste swallowed. “I’m very embarrassed.”
“I won’t mention it,” said Dorotèa, with a shake of her head.
“Thank you.”
“You’ll forget entirely when you bite into the daube I’ll cook up after I’ve tidied your place.”
“I don’t have a kitchen. I pay for meals.”
Her eyes widened in genuine horror. “No kitchen?”
“No.”
“And you live like this?”
He chuckled once. “I can’t cook.”
“You’re going to turn me into a patient, Docteur.”
“I’ll try not to,” said Oste. His voice still bore the faintest tremor and breathlessness, but it had already begun to fade. “But let’s finish up with the first one.”
“Fine, fine, after one more cup of water.”