Chapter 5
Five
Long Shadows
Oste had only just gotten his bearings back by the time they engaged in cleaning up after the meal.
Well, he mostly hovered uselessly, because when he tried to step in his mother tapped him with her wooden spoon.
He presumed she still saw him as he was months ago, as fragile as glass and reliant on them all over again.
It was only after he and Dorotèa were back at the table again, and Clotilde off to pick garden herbs, that Oste finally brought up the main reason for his visit. He pulled his satchel off his belt and set it on the table. Dorotèa’s bright-eyed joy, which had been abundant, fell off her face.
“Papa,” Oste began with no shortage of hesitation. “I need your advice on something. Your insight.”
Monsieur Lézin snapped back to attention. He drew his greying brows up. “I don’t think there’s much you don’t know more than your old man about. What is it?”
He returned a weak smile at the compliment, then reached inside to pull out the contents. The battered lead ball, cleaned now, grew visible in the light when he raised it between his fingers. “This. Here.”
Oste slid it across the table. His father picked it up with visible trepidation; his lips were no longer pressed together, and he surveyed both Dorotèa and Oste uneasily.
He hardly looked at the bullet, engrossed instead on his son, and why he ought to have had such a thing.
He regretted having to ask his father, and if he thought anyone else knew more, he’d have gone to them instead.
Oste wasn’t the only person who left that night a different person.
His father spoke slowly. “What’s this about?”
“It’s a case,” Oste relented. “One that Dorotèa is already familiar with, so there’s no need to guard anything on her behalf. I pulled that out of a dead woman. There aren’t many leads, but I figured that if anyone can glean something out of a single bullet, it’s you.”
“I thought you were just taking patients,” his father mumbled. He escaped into the sight of the bullet and turned it over between his fingers with a trained precision and grace. “The occasional inquiry, as needed.”
“You know my job involves more than that. And if someone needs your expert opinion, I think you’d rather I come than Lieutenant de Filhou.”
“Were you put up to this? Is someone involving you in more than you want? If it’s Filhou, I’ll—”
“Papa,” Oste chided gently. He offered another sad smile. “No one can force me to do anything. A woman died. I pulled the bullet out of her. I offered to help. It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” said Martin. He pressed his hand against his face and rubbed his brow. “The more involved you get in things like this, the more dangerous it is. The Palais can’t do without a wolfcatcher in Aix; if Filhou is pushing you, I’ll make my way to the viguerie myself—”
“Chasseur,” said Dorotèa softly, addressing him formally with respect for the position he had just recited the weight of.
She looked at Oste, then back at his father, and gingerly put a hand on the aging man’s shoulder.
“I’m keeping a very close eye on Oste myself, and believe me, Saint-Mitre will tie him down if he gets into any funny business at all.
I’m making things so boring he wants to throw me out.
” She smiled and pulled her hand away. “You needn’t worry.
No one is taking advantage of his good nature while I’m around. ”
Oste bit his lower lip. He felt some of the tension leave his shoulders, even the bad one, when Dorotèa interjected.
It seemed to have some sort of effect on his father, too.
The old man frowned, but he seemed more resigned than angry now.
A few seconds had aged him another few years, and his exhale came out in a weary sigh.
Oste continued quietly. “I… thought this could be good for me, too, Papa, if I get patients like this. If I—I just think it’s about time.”
“You haven’t been back at work very long at all.”
“But I want to be the best physician I can be, don’t I?”
“I’d just thought that you getting a medical license would have been safer than following in my footsteps.”
“It is, it definitely is. The problem is that I’m, well, me.”
“A little scoundrel,” his father sighed.
“Quite.” And Oste smiled warmly.
The wolfcatcher raised the damaged bullet up to his eyes and started to inspect it again.
He turned it over several times, running a finger over every point, and even deigning to smell it.
Dorotèa and Oste looked at each other while the expert went about his business.
She raised a brow, and he shrugged. He felt so much more at peace with her here, with his family and a murder case, than he did with her making his bed and sweeping his floors.
The latter was much more ordinary, but it didn’t lend itself to having her there as a friend just as she’d always been.
That would be impossible.
“The city armorers wouldn’t have known what to do with this,” said Martin, after a minute had passed. “And that’s a crying shame, because it’d have come from under their noses.”
“Oh?” Oste remarked.
“This—” His father set the bullet back down and slid it to the center of the table, “—came out of the garrison. Same bullet they use for the requisitioned arquebuses they use with the militia and the watch. Single lead balls are nothing out of the ordinary—mmh, you’ll see them everywhere—but this appearance, and the patterning coming out…
I think there’s little room for doubt. I’ll still leave some, though. Best to have some conjecture.”
“The garrison?” Oste repeated with heightening alarm. “You’re saying someone on the city bankrolls could have done this?”
“Or a volunteer; the night watch has plenty. Also could be a thief.”
Oste pinched his nose. “Is there a difference between the arquebuses you’re speaking of and the usual muskets?”
His father huffed. “I know France uses both names interchangeably, but they’d have referenced different guns until very recently—”
“Don’t worry, I remember this talk.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Regardless, that looks like a city arquebus—musket—shot.”
Dorotèa had gone very quiet and still.
Oste himself had lost some color. “And you’ve not seen something just like this come from another gun? And do they not use other kinds of shot?”
“It could very well be from another workshop and another firearm. It’s just my professional opinion,” said Martin. He then frowned. “But the only other kind of shot they use is small shot, and it’s clear that this isn’t that.”
Oste shuddered. He felt his very skin crawl.
Itchy pain worked its way into his right side, clawing down his shoulder, his arm, his chest, spiraling until it got to his opposite leg.
He unconsciously reached at the discomfort with his hand and felt the little dip where his rib had snapped, and the firm scar tissue that obscured, deep inside, the fragments that couldn’t be drawn out.
He imagined them leeching from him, and on some days, he was sure it was the truth.
His recovery could never be complete. It was difficult to breathe as he felt, and remembered, his windows of lucidity where that became apparent.
The moments when he felt tools digging under his skin.
His parents, his friends, begging, pleading…
“Papa,” he’d choked out at the time. “I’m sorry, Papa.”
‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ had always meant the same thing from a remorseful child such as he.
Oste rubbed his palms into his eyes and shivered when he breathed. He felt so foolish again, unraveled by the briefest hints of his memories. He squeezed his chest and refused to exhale again, because if he did, he feared it would turn into a sob. “I appreciate the help.”
“Oste,” his father uttered. He was suddenly on his feet and crossing to the other side of the table. “Look at me, Oste.”
The physician shut his eyes, but when he felt his father’s long-limbed, warm hold, he heard from further away Dorotèa’s light voice: “I’ll go help Clotilde.”
Several steps followed. The door closed. Oste finally allowed himself to let his breath escape, wretched and labored, when father and son were alone.
“I’m fine,” he mustered. “Honest, I’m fine. My body and my mind aren’t in agreement. My body remembers. That’s all.”
“Oste,” Martin repeated, and he knew his father didn’t believe that lie for a second. He pulled his boy into an embrace.
He dropped his head onto his father’s shoulder, then raised his trembling arms around him.
He was never too old for that. He was his father’s son as much as he was his mother’s.
He had grown, but was still someone’s son, and the state of the world was too frightening for anyone to feel like they could go about living on their own.
He still didn’t feel ready for it, and now he had even less independence than he did ten years ago.
Oste’s arm throbbed. Had it been like that all day? Did he only notice now that he remembered?
“I’ll be fine,” Oste shuddered. “I’ll be fine. This is why I wanted to do this. I need to—I need to do this.”
His father kissed the top of his head. “I’ll always believe in you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t. I have bad ideas a lot of the time.”
“I know, but they’re your ideas, so I’ll stand by them.”
“Papa…”
“It’s alright, Oste. I think they’ll be gone for a while. Let it out.”
So his son did. He dug his fingernails into his father’s shirt and allowed a handful of angry sobs to spill, and fright to slowly trickle out through the restless pounding of his quickened heart and burning tears.
The release was quick; it was the wake of it, the tired hangover of anxiety, that sapped Oste of his energy all over again.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I want to be better for you and Mama so badly. I wish I could’ve been a hunter like you, and I’ve no business being like this now. I’m not a little boy. I—”