Dr. Pembrook's surgery was a ten-minute walk from the baron's house, through streets that were very quiet for the middle of the day.
Not empty. There were people. A woman drawing water from a well who stopped when she saw them and watched without pretending not to. Two men standing in a doorway who fell silent as the group passed. A child sitting on a low wall with her feet dangling who did not move or speak but tracked them all the way to the end of the lane with her eyes.
The village was watching. It had been watching since the gate.
Henrietta kept pace with Oz. The baron walked ahead with his hat back in his hands, turning it again. Father Carne walked beside him and said nothing. Corvin trailed at the rear, his footsteps quiet on the wet stone.
The surgery was a narrow building, two storeys, with a painted wooden sign above the door that had started peeling at the corners. The ground floor served as both the consultation room and, as of six weeks ago, the room where the dead were kept until burial.
Dr. Pembrook was waiting.
He was not what Henrietta had expected from the letter. The handwriting had suggested someone unravelling. The man at the door was composed, formally dressed, with the careful bearing of someone who had decided how he intended to be perceived today and had dressed accordingly. He was perhaps forty, lean in a way that suggested constitution rather than hardship, with close-cropped grey at his temples and the steady eyes of a man accustomed to being the only certain thing in a room.
He looked at Oz.
Then he looked away, adjusted his expression, and invited them inside.
"I'll say again what I said in the letter," Pembrook announced, before anyone had spoken. "There is nothing here that medicine cannot eventually explain. These were not healthy people in a healthy season. The harvest was poor. The winter came early. People in this condition are vulnerable to sudden organ failure, to cardiac events, to conditions we do not yet have the vocabulary to name. Ten deaths is a tragedy. It is not a mystery."
"You wrote to the baron asking for help," Henrietta said.
"I wrote to the baron because the village was frightened and I had exhausted my resources. Not because I believed in..." He stopped. Glanced at Oz again. Corrected his course. "I wrote because the situation required additional attention."
Oz had already moved past him into the room.
They were laid out on long tables along the far wall.
Six of them. The other four had already been buried, the baron explained from the doorway, his voice careful and even. The physician had retained these six at Oz's request, relayed through the baron's letter two days ago.
Six bodies. Six faces turned to the ceiling with expressions of extraordinary peace, the kind of peace that sat wrong on a dead face precisely because it was too complete. No sign of struggle. No final contortion. They looked, each of them, like people who had simply decided to stop.
Oz moved to the first one.
He did not use gloves. He pressed two fingers against the dead man's temple, then the hinge of the jaw, then drew a slow line along the hairline from the ear to the crown. He did so without ceremony. Without expression.
Pembrook watched from three feet away with his arms crossed.
"What exactly are you looking for?"
"I'll tell you if I find something you don't already know," Oz said.
Pembrook's mouth thinned. He said nothing.
Henrietta stood to the side and watched. She had learned early on that her role in these moments was not to assist but to observe what Oz observed, because he rarely explained his process and the explanation was often in the looking. She watched his eyes. She watched where his hands stopped, however briefly. She watched what he returned to.
He returned to the hairline.
On each of them. He was careful about it, deliberate, a slight lean-in that he did not perform on any other part of the body. The third time he did it she understood. He was checking for something in the hair.
She waited until Pembrook's attention shifted to the baron and she leaned forward herself.
The hair of the body nearest her was clean. Dry now. But at the roots, caught in the fine hairs behind the left ear, there was a faint white residue. Crystalline. So faint it would not have registered in dim light, but the surgery had two large windows and the afternoon grey was doing its work.
Salt. Mineral-dense. The specific kind that dried water left behind.
Not sweat. The pattern was wrong for sweat. This was something that had been applied, or had fallen, or had been present at the time of death and had dried in the hours since.
She looked up. Oz was already at the next body. He had already found it.
"The time of death," Oz said. He had reached the end of the row and turned back to Pembrook. "You recorded it for each of them?"
"I recorded my best estimate. Death was not always witnessed."
"Give me the range. Not the exact times. Just the hours."
Pembrook did not have to consult anything. He had clearly reviewed these records often enough that the facts had settled into him. "The earliest would be the second hour of the morning. The latest, the fourth. All of them fall within that window."
Oz was quiet for a moment.
"All ten?"
"All ten."
Oz looked at the window. Looked back. "Thank you," he said, which was not a phrase Henrietta heard from him often. It sounded genuine, which meant it was not courtesy.
He had found something in the hours. She did not know what yet.
She wrote down: second to fourth hour, all ten, without exception. The notebook was in her hand before she had consciously decided to reach for it.
Pembrook walked them back to the door. He had relaxed slightly, in the way people relaxed when they decided the conversation had not gone as badly as they feared. He was answering Henrietta's questions about the burials easily now, professionally, with the cadence of someone who had found their footing.
"Father Carne conducted the rites. Standard procedure for the parish. I attended one myself, the fourth burial. Out of respect." A pause. He had moved to his desk and was straightening papers, the habitual tidying of a man who thought better with his hands occupied. "I noticed he used water from a bottle he carried rather than from the font. I assumed it was a second consecrated vial. Some priests keep a personal one for field rites. I didn't inquire."
He said it the way people said things they had already told themselves were unimportant.
Henrietta wrote it down.
She did not look at Oz.
She could feel, in the peripheral way she had developed for exactly this, that he had gone very still.
Outside, the fog had come down lower while they had been inside.
The baron and Father Carne were waiting in the lane. Corvin stood slightly apart, closer to the narrow alley that ran between the surgery and the building beside it, looking toward the far end where the lane bent away toward the river. He had his hands in his coat. His face was neutral.
Oz looked at him.
Just for a moment. The look was brief, the kind of brief that was not casual.
Then he turned to the baron.
"One of the bodies inside," Oz said. "The third from the left. His hands."
The baron went still. His hat stopped moving.
"Tell me his name," Oz said.
It took the baron a few seconds. Not because he didn't know. Because saying it required something from him.
"Aldren," he said. "Aldren Holt. He was my groundskeeper. He had been with the house for twenty-two years."
Henrietta heard what was underneath that. Not just the length of service. The other thing.
"His hands were different from the others," Oz said. "The others died with open hands. His were closed. Almost a fist."
The baron looked at the ground. "I noticed. The day after he died, when I went to see him, I noticed. I did not know what it meant."
"It means he was harder to take," Oz said. "It means whatever is doing this had to work against him. It means it is growing."
Nobody said anything to that.
The fog moved through the lane and the River Maren made its low sound somewhere below the village, steady and cold and without any particular concern for what was happening above it.
Henrietta looked at Corvin.
He had not turned around. He was still looking toward the bend in the lane, toward the direction the river sound was coming from. His hands were in his coat and he was very still, and he had the expression of someone listening to something no one else could hear.
Then Oz said his name.
Just his name. Quietly.
Corvin turned. His expression was blank. Normal. He looked at Oz and waited.
"Nothing," Oz said. "Stay close."
They walked back through the village in silence.
That evening, in the two rooms the baron had arranged at the back of the house, Henrietta sat at the small writing desk and went through her notes.
The residue in the hair. The hours. The priest's bottle. The closed fists.
She wrote them all down. Then she turned to the back page, the one she kept for the other kind of note, and wrote: He knows something about the boy. He will tell me when it is time.
She closed the notebook.
Down the hall, she could hear nothing. Oz made no noise when he moved through spaces, and he never slept. He had told her this once, in the flat way he told her things he considered factual and unremarkable: I rest. I don't sleep. There's a difference. She had written that down too.
She put out the lamp.
Outside, the Maren was still moving.
It would still be moving at the second hour of the morning. And the third. And the fourth.
It would be doing what it had been doing for six weeks, patient and cold and very thorough.
She lay down and did not sleep well.