Chapter 8 #2
Dorotèa cursed the tear that slid down her cheek. She was too angry to acknowledge it by wiping it away, so she simply squeezed her pinky tighter instead. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I told you. It’s the cowardly way out.”
She remembered what Jeanne had told her in the tavern. “You wouldn’t choose this.”
“I’m resigned.”
“Please be anything but that. Struggling, but not resigned.”
“Semantics, is it?”
“Tell me…” Dorotèa’s voice drifted off. She clenched her jaw when she thought about how to word everything she wished.
This was much harder than kicking over barrels or making cuts with her trusty, boring rapier.
“Tell me what… you need, or… what I can do to… to help you not… be like this. I… thought that daube and a bath would, but…”
Oste shook his head. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“You’re not trouble. I mean, you are, but this isn’t trouble. It’s my job. Saint-Mitre said, ‘take a load off him’, so I am. But even if it wasn’t an assignment and I wasn’t getting a wage, I’d want to, because I like your company. I like your joy.”
“Dorotèa,” he shivered, even in the summer night’s heat. “I don’t know the answer to your inquiry. I have no choice but to plead ignorance again.”
She bit her lower lip. “At least tell me there’s something I can do? Anything? Until you know? I have the opposite problem; I take on a million things until I’m exhausted, and yet you don’t tire me at all.”
“I’ve noticed that about you.” Oste gave her a weak laugh. “Just… hold me accountable.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s easy.”
She hardly knew what had gotten into either of them, only that when Oste gave her wrist a tug and gently pulled her into an embrace, she allowed it to happen.
It was similar to the trick he tried to pull on the duelist, she realized, but she was more pleased with the man he was tonight compared to the man he was then.
She set her head against his chest like she’d always wanted to, unmasked and wholly herself.
His chest had always looked like a warm and sturdy thing, and it was, once her cheek was pushed up against it.
He felt reliable. He felt safe. And if he couldn’t protect himself, that was fine.
She’d protect him. She was so tired of needing to do it for herself, but he was worth it. He was a charge she wanted to have.
Dorotèa, close and comfortable, decided that this was the perfect time to ask him if it was itchy having a beard.
And if that went well, then she’d ask if he had chest hair, and if that itched too.
The moment was perfect, her warmed by his arms and gently rocked like they were out to sea.
Just when she drew her head back to do so, two sets of rapid footsteps raced down the side street they were on with panicked voices accompanying them.
“Doctor! We need a doctor! Help! Please!” a man cried out.
Oste drew back. The spell was broken immediately. His face tightened into focus with great rapidity, now the picture of attentive coolness. Dorotèa noticed how even his stance shifted back onto the balls of his heels, like a fencer at the ready.
“Where?” he barked out to the men, forcing them to skid to a halt. “I’m a physician.”
“Thank God,” the second man let out. “It’s a woman. It’s—this way!”
When Oste took off running, Dorotèa took off after him, and she was proud of his legs for remaining bold, even if his head was an ocean of fears.
Move quickly. Calm your mind. Breathe slower than your hands can work. Look at the entire picture. Use the tools you have. Call for more help if you need. If they’re sweating, you should be too.
Think. Do. Think. Do.
Think…
Oste dashed after the men and went skidding when they turned down a nearby alley.
He realized with some trepidation that it wasn’t far from the route he’d have taken with Dorotèa if they’d continued on their walk.
He’d not have gone down such a narrow path, though.
Respectable people usually didn’t at this hour.
The tableau came to him in fragments, little snapshots like the quick sketches Eflamm would make to establish direction and form.
He noticed the armored watchman kneeling in front of what looked like bundled sheets.
A heavyset woman with her hair bound and her hands stained with blood.
They crowded the bundle—no, not a bundle.
A woman. A girl. Even in the dark, her hair shone like vermilion.
Oste slapped his cheeks and threw himself down onto the ground.
“I need space and a stretcher. A board—something to carry her on,” Oste stammered before he’d even seen what was wrong. His eyes landed on the two men who had found him. “You both!”
He didn’t waste any time on seeing if they followed his command, and he couldn’t hear anything besides the ringing in his ears and the rapid flutter of her heartbeat when he took her pulse.
He needed it to slow. He needed it to fight.
It pumped out too much blood, too quickly.
It was everywhere. He thought her dress might have been light blue. It wasn’t anymore.
“Look at me,” Oste pleaded. “Mademoiselle, look at me.”
The girl’s dark eyes fell on him as he pressed his hands against her throat.
He was certain there were more wounds than the cut there that leaked like the little fountain he’d clean his boots on outside of the hospital.
He’d lamented the small trickle most days, but from a woman’s neck it looked anything but. Too heavy, too fast.
Too everything, except for too much, to him.
Healing was his only tranquility. His fleeting flurries of treacherous thoughts slowed until simple objectives remained.
Diagnosis. Treatment. Prognosis.
The watchman looked at Oste. “I heard a scream. I found her like—”
“Hush,” said Oste. He directed his thumb and index finger against the wound. If he could plug it until it could be stitched, maybe she’d be fine. “Mademoiselle, try to look at me, won’t you?”
She hardly could. Oste had seen that distant stare so many times over.
The wound was warm. He felt it pulse. He pressed carefully; this was his craft.
He was a master tailor of the body’s fabric.
He found the puncture, a tiny eye in a needle that he knew just where to poke the thread through.
But there was more to it than that, he noticed.
More accursed spots down her dress where she’d been scored.
He only had so many hands, and his hands needed to be trained for years…
“You’re safe,” came a woman’s gentle voice; it was Dorotèa’s. She had suddenly come into being next to him, with her striped dress bunched up where she crouched. “You’re with friends.”
“Yes,” Oste affirmed. “You’re safe. It’s a beautiful night, Mademoiselle, and you’ve a perfect view of the stars. There will be time enough to look at them after you—after you please look at me.”
But her pulse was weaker. More gawkers had come without anything to carry her. There was no time. They wouldn’t be here in enough time. But even if they had, oh, God, even if they had…
Prognosis. It was etched in stone before he’d even gotten there.
The girl looked at him, tried to say something, but nothing came out. She soon looked at the stars beyond Oste’s head, took a breath, and expired.
Oste removed his hands from the girl, and only then did his surroundings slowly start to fall back into place.
The veiled woman, and the constable, who, in a voice that sounded muffled to him, was telling everyone to back away on account of it being a crime scene.
There was a cat in one of the lavender planters that he hadn’t noticed before, a long-haired tabby he’d have liked to ask what it was that she had seen.
Green, feline eyes slowly blinked back at him, and then she leapt from the box and vanished into the dark.
He rocked back and sat on his heels behind him.
As his curative trance faded, he felt like he’d gone to war.
His limbs throbbed, even though the run had been brief, and he was convinced based on his fatigue that he hadn’t slept as much as he thought he had as of late.
This girl would sleep for a long time now.
She looked comfortable, as far as victims went, cradled in her fine but worn dress.
Her hand, lifeless now, was still in Dorotèa’s. She’d held it as the girl died.
While he stared at her red hair and let the whirlwind behind him happen to other people, he recalled that Jehan had not told him he’d found his murderer at all yet. There had been no further summons.
Oste’s eyes trailed to the puncture in her neck.
This was no musket; he’d have heard the shot, but her injury didn’t resemble that cause, besides.
Even so, with her hair that Eflamm would have painted so beautifully, and her simple cloth girdle popular amongst the washerwoman, she looked like a mirror.
A second. Another was a word he’d never thought wicked or unfair, but here it was now, echoing in his head like a wretched eulogy. Another, another, another.
He looked over his shoulder and shuddered. Even though his voice was little more than a horrified whisper, the constable snapped to attention after hearing his command. “Get Lieutenant de Filhou.”
Dorotèa then reached for Oste’s wrist. He gingerly drew it back and chided her. “You’ll get blood on yourself.”
“It’s already on me.”
“Oh.”
Dorotèa looked down. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“Maybe, if I’d approached it differently—”
If he’d have kept walking with her. If he’d have studied more about blood circulation. If he’d have pushed the case with Jehan sooner…
“Stop,” Dorotèa breathed. She cupped the sides of his face with her hands. “Stop, Oste.”
“I’m stopping.” Oste nodded, swallowed, and climbed back up to his feet. Another member of the night watch had come running. That was good. More people would be good. He was tired; he didn’t want to have to make arrangements for her all by himself.
The woman in a head wrap, pushed back against the wall, surveyed them both. Her voice came out raspy and unsure. “I think her name was Frances.”
Marie. Frances. Marie. Frances.
Oste stood perfectly still and waited for the law to arrive.