Page 22 of Hemlock & Silver

I nodded. My sister Catherine would always demand sweets at the market and then be reliably sick on the ride home. I assume she grew out of that eventually, but I simply stopped riding in carriages with her. For all I know, she does it to her husband now.

“And you mustn’t think she’s doing it deliberately,” Nurse added.

“I know some girls do—they take these notions in their heads, and it turns into a kind of sickness with them—but Snow was never like that. She tries to eat. When it’s bad, it might take her an hour to eat a piece of toast, but she’ll get it down. ”

I nodded, writing this down. I really needed to see a bout of this illness in person. So far, Snow had been pale and listless and easily bruised, but that could have been anemia… Except that the physicians had ruled out anemia. Damn it.

You hate to wish sickness on anyone, least of all a child, but I had a feeling that seeing it in action was the only way that I was going to get much further at identifying the poison, unless I could waylay it as it was being delivered and it was something I could test for.

I finished my sandwich morosely and realized that I’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“Her sister was a taking little thing,” Nurse was saying. “I don’t say Snow isn’t, but of course she can be willful, right enough. But she’s a good girl at heart.” She gave me a beseeching look.

I had no idea how to answer that. Obviously Snow had been through a great deal and was still suffering the aftereffects. I could be sympathetic to that while still wincing on behalf of the maids.

“A good girl,” Nurse repeated, dabbing at her eyes.

Does she think that I won’t try to stop her being poisoned simply because she’s spoiled?

I wondered if I should be offended or not.

I thought about saying that I frequently treated criminal addicts, but I had no idea how that would go over.

Instead I took another sandwich. Cucumber and watercress, with some kind of spread.

It wasn’t bad at all. (Hopefully not poisoned, but the poisoner would have to plan to take out the nurse and the maids as well, and that seemed unlikely.)

“If she only had some kind of maternal figure,” said Nurse with a deep sigh.

“But you know about her mother, of course, and old Nurse, well…” She gave a self-deprecating laugh.

“Snow got in the habit of ignoring me not long after she left the nursery. I was in charge of Rose. I’m only here now because after the queen…

you know… there wasn’t anyone else. And the king asked, of course, so how could I say no? ”

“You couldn’t,” I said dryly, having some experience with that myself.

“Exactly.” She shook her head sadly. “If only there was someone who could take her in hand…”

“Well, the king will probably marry again eventually,” I said encouragingly, and helped myself to another sandwich. Tasty, but it must be said, not particularly filling.

“Oh… well, yes. But that could take years,” Nurse said. “And you know how sensitive girls are at this age…”

I did not actually know this. At Snow’s age, I had been getting the stomachs of dead hogs delivered from the butcher so that I could see how the internal organs were supposed to look in a healthy animal as opposed to one that had been poisoned.

(The cook made a lot of tripe in those days.

I think everyone was glad when I turned thirteen and was allowed to witness human autopsies.)

I did not say this out loud either.

“If only there was someone the king trusted, who Snow could look up to…”

“Mmm,” I said. What was in this spread? Some sort of cheese, of course, but with something else mixed in. I could taste mint and… tarragon? “Have you asked Lady Sorrel for advice? She seems very sharp.”

“She says that she’s too old to deal with spoiled children that she didn’t spoil in the first place,” said Nurse grimly.

I barked with laughter, tried to cover it, and ended up spraying crumbs into my napkin.

Nurse gazed at me, clearly annoyed but too polite to say so.

“Sorry,” I said, once I’d recovered my voice, if not my dignity.

“Of course you already thought of that. I’m afraid I don’t know anyone in court at all, though, so I’m the wrong person to ask. ”

“I see,” she said, a little coldly. Had I gotten crumbs on her, too?

Well, it had to be unpleasant, being pulled back into service because your former charge’s mother had murdered her.

Anyone would be cross in that situation.

Still, the sooner I could cure Snow, the sooner I’d be out from under Nurse’s feet.

I want to be clear, by the way, that I knew perfectly well what she was suggesting.

(Well, fine, I’d figured it out by the second or third repetition, anyway.) I knew how the story was supposed to go.

I would meet Snow and my woman’s heart would be wrung by the plight of the poor motherless child who had suffered so much, and I would win Snow’s affection as I sought desperately to find the cure.

It was a good story. If I succeeded, people would almost certainly be telling some version of it.

The problem was that my heart did not contain a shred of maternal affection anywhere in its chambers, and even if it had, I didn’t have the least idea how one dealt with children.

They frightened me. I lived in fear that I would say or do something that scarred one for life.

(Generally when I say this, some well-meaning soul pops up to tell me that children are actually very resilient and would find what I do fascinating.

At that point I have to explain that my entire job is deadly poisons and extremely fragile glassware.

This usually shuts the conversation down nicely.)

More than that, the story annoyed me. If I saved Snow, it would be because I had spent the last twenty years researching every poison known to man and staring into the guts of dead roosters.

It wouldn’t have anything to do with women’s intuition or maternal affection. It wasn’t feelings, it was work.

“Your problem,” Healer Michael had said to me once, pouring out a measure of agave liquor, “is that people aren’t real to you.”

It had been so late that it was early again, and we had actually managed to save someone’s life, through no fault of our own.

It was a rough one. Charcoal at both ends for nearly six hours, until their breathing evened out and their heart stopped fluttering at every third beat.

Then we went back to the temple and drank heavily.

It’s strange how winning can be more jarring than losing sometimes.

“People are real,” I protested. “I’m not a monster .”

Michael sighed. “Not like that. Look, a patient is a person with a problem, right?”

I took another slug of agave and allowed as how this was so.

“Right. Except that for you, a patient is a problem with a person inconveniently attached. If you could just have the problem without the person, you’d be much happier.”

There are truths that you can say, drunk, in the small, gray hours of morning, that you can’t say at any other time. I grunted as that truth lodged in me like a cactus spine and began working its way inward.

He wasn’t wrong. Michael was one of the kindest people I knew, and it’s easy to forget that kind doesn’t mean stupid . That was why I wasn’t really a healer. A good healer wants to help the person. Whereas what I wanted was to solve the problem.

Oh, in the abstract, I wanted to help Snow, of course. I genuinely wanted all my patients to be healthy and happy. I just didn’t feel any need to be involved with that beyond solving their current problem.

Even at the very beginning, when Cousin Anthony had been poisoned, my real obsession had been with why there was no cure.

I just want to save people and then have those people go away and, ideally, not take arsenic again. Is that really so much to ask?

“Eh?” I looked up. Nurse had said something, breaking into my woolgathering. I wondered how long I’d been staring into my sandwich and hastily shoved the rest into my mouth.

“I asked if you were finished,” she said. “Snow will be back before long, and we need to tidy all this away.”

She had told me earlier that Snow took a nap in the afternoons. I could not quite bear the thought of sitting in a chair, watching the girl sleep for hours on end. “Thank you for lunch,” I said politely. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Yes, of course,” Nurse said, and managed a brittle smile.

Halfway back to my room, I had a sudden epiphany— Blue cheese! That’s what’s in the spread!

Now, if I can just figure out what’s in the poison so easily…