Chapter 11
Eleven
Lead
Oste had never sailed before, but through hazy wakefulness he assumed this was how it felt to drift across the seas.
He could have sworn his cot rocked its way through an unseen ocean in the room, with air too thick to be comfortable.
Every noise and sight seemed to happen so far away, little more than distant dreams on even more distant shores.
He felt that he’d rarely been so tired in his life, and was aware enough to realize it was, in part, due to the opium-laced laudanum he’d been slipped.
His vocation made him know too much, and recognize every bottle, from blended opium concoctions to digitalis tinctures.
But Oste had chosen to swallow; his old injuries throbbed something awful, and he knew similar medicines were the only thing that stopped him from screaming when he first became decorated with those scars.
He was already accustomed to numbing his pains and melancholia with wine, so he let Balac do unto him as he wished.
Yet, even in the bleakest windows of his consciousness, Oste was aware that he was never alone.
When his fever burned, he’d see a slender hand dab his face with a cold rag damp from Aix’s spring waters, which he recognized from their mineral scent.
A dry cloth would touch the sides of his mouth and lips when he’d cough, then be replaced by cups of water to drink.
It was a different presence from Balac’s or al-Anezi’s, who were there to force him to take less pleasant things or prod him where it hurt.
They’d vanish again, but the other presence never did.
Oste wasn’t aware how much time had passed before his vision sharpened just enough to process who his ghostly caretaker was, and where he’d been laying.
His eyes trailed over to her face, pink-cheeked and focused as she used a cloth to clean the rest of his body but paused with it hovering over his chest. She bit her lip and started to withdraw it, and in that momentary, animated fluster, caught him staring and straightened.
“You’re a restless sleeper,” Dorotèa stammered, “even with their medicines.”
Oste’s response was a glorified whisper, no more than his body let him manage. “Used to be worse. I heard I was a terrible baby.”
“Mmh. Seems you were tolerable enough for your parents to survive you.” Dorotèa then swallowed and grabbed back at his blanket. “Sorry, I—when I’ve had fevers, I’ve felt as grimy as the Camargue swamps, so I just…”
He moved his head side to side atop the pillow. “I do feel as grimy as the Camargue swamps. Have you been here this whole time?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nurses.”
“I know.”
Dorotèa began to roll the blanket back over him. He didn’t miss her hesitation and gaze straying back over his scars. He realized she’d not have seen them before, not beyond the moment he received them.
“Perhaps we should not have invented the firearm,” he murmured. “I do not mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“Oh. Oh, no, I’m not,” she said with a rapid shake of her head. “I didn’t mean to stare. I wonder how you’re not less comfortable. I’m a little fascinated, in truth.”
Oste raised a brow. “Fascinated?”
“That definitely came out… not as I wanted it to.” He heard the traces of exhaustion in her voice despite her dithering. “I’m intrigued by your resilience. You… pushing the limits of yourself? Man’s endurance. Yes, there it is.”
He coughed once and quirked a weak half-smile. “Very scientific of you.”
“I didn’t know it would be so… I didn’t know.” Dorotèa clamped her jaw shut and shook her head again. She started to reach out to brush her fingers over his shoulder but froze, catching herself in the act. “Balac told me what they had to do.”
Oste reached out with a shaky hand and closed it over hers. He moved it to the spot she wanted to touch, and tiredly, clumsily, directed her finger over the tight, jagged scar from the excision. As sore as it was, he let her feel it.
“It was ugly business. I don’t remember it fondly.”
Dorotèa slowed her finger smoothing over the bumpy plane of tissue. Her brows shot up. “You remember it? When they…?”
“Pieces,” Oste mumbled. “I was actually grateful to have taken a knock to the head. There are methods we have to lessen the agonies of surgery and dampen awareness, but it’s not always precise. Anyone who manages to sleep through it is a lucky one.”
“Good Lord. And it was Balac?”
“As well as al-Anezi, and several medical students.”
“That many? Why?”
Oste allowed another smile. He let his eyes flutter nearly closed as those brief memories began to play again.
“I’m a strange fellow,” he rasped, mustering a cheeky glint in his eye despite the heat and the aches.
“I’ve already had a will measured up, and I’m a physician, Dorotèa.
A—” He coughed. “A physician, and damned committed to it. Surgical procedures usually require the consent of a family member if incapacitated, and again for it to be—be done in a learning environment, even though those procedures are almost always free. I had written to go ahead and do it anyway, students and all, for their education. Should my life be in jeopardy, they are not to hold back, for the good that might be gleaned. Paré’s great findings came from careful experiments.
And that if I do perish, to allow for them to study my body—within reason—before I am buried. ”
Dorotèa’s chestnut brows shot up. “Most anyone would consider that madness.”
“Higher education can be.”
“So everyone we’ve passed in the hall has seen your insides?”
Oste blinked. That was… not the response he was expecting to receive. It floated around in his mind like pollen in the Mistral breeze. He narrowed his eyes and turned to look at her. “Many, I think?”
“Now that’s incredible!”
His disbelief and excitement only deepened, and he began to think the sensation was chasing away the rest of his fever. “Well, God, I’m glad someone actually thinks so.”
“The circumstances are still rather horrible, though.”
“I’m a little jealous of them,” he added, tiredly, as he folded his arms over his chest. “I should like to be able to see my bones and sinew without the involved unpleasantries.”
“If it happens again, we could have Eflamm paint them for you.”
“You’re brilliant.”
“It’s best if we avoid that, though. I’d be quite put out.”
“Mmh.”
“I’m going to recommend we avoid continuing just now, because I anticipate you’d be able to discuss it all day,” said Dorotèa.
She picked up the cloth. “You’re looking very tired again; you need your rest, and I need to resume using my feminine charms to coax your illness into hiding, or what-have-you. ”
Oste frowned. “I never got sick as a child.”
“A sadist and a braggart,” she huffed, but he had no rebuttal while he drifted back to sleep.
The problem with parents who love their children is that they don’t always listen to them.
They weren’t Jeanne and Eflamm, who heard Oste even in Dorotèa’s diction, and understood to keep away.
Those two sent along a basket of books and treats with a letter asking to be informed immediately if anything changed.
But Martin and Clotilde Lézin were anything but restrained with their son, the only one they had, who took up an impossible amount of space in their hearts.
They’d roused Oste’s sisters from their city homes and went headlong to his office after hearing the news, when they ought to have been at mass.
Dorotèa pitied him, not for all the love they had for him—this she found nothing short of expansive and beautiful—but because his stubborn self couldn’t take it charitably.
As soon as she’d warned him they had arrived and were coming up, Oste adopted a newfound bravado, neatened his hair, and straightened his back.
She was mortified by how much air he was pushing out to make his voice carry more, since, doubtless, he’d lose that same voice after they left and complain of the ache in his chest. So, too, was she taken aback by his gesturing hands and expressions that were, at times, downright flamboyant.
This stupid man was going to crash later.
She knew he was putting on an act, pouring everything into the moment he had to assure them that he was alright, and would continue to be. As ridiculous as it seemed, she couldn’t fault him, knowing she’d be doing the very same.
Dorotèa watched them engage. Oste’s sisters, Clemenca and Audisia, looked more like their father, she realized, but carried themselves primly like their mother.
It didn’t surprise her; Clotilde had spent plenty of time teaching herself Aixois mannerisms befitting the bourgeoisie.
It was little wonder she’d succeeded in shaping her daughters, too.
They doted over Oste and relayed him all the gossip from the parish and the ridiculous things their husbands had gotten up to, and when the oldest lamented her newborn’s teething, he offered a physician’s advice.
She imagined tight strings knotting them all together.
There couldn’t be a closer family. They loved, each of them in their own way, and Dorotèa knew that even if he did breathe his last and die, the cathedral lamentation would be truthful when it sang that he was adored.
It manifested in their parting gifts, fresh new socks they made themselves, and more ink for his notes in an array of different colors.
When the family piled back out, Clotilde hung back and told them she’d be along.
Dorotèa, hovering in the doorway, snapped her neck around and met the woman’s eyes.
Oste’s mother only gave her a knowing smile, ambled back and forth for a few minutes, then peeked her head back into the office. Oste was already sound asleep.
“That boy has made me worry since the day he was born,” Clotilde sighed.
Dorotèa returned a sheepish shrug. “If it’s any consolation, he’s already improved.”