His Father Was Dying and Every Pretty Woman Had Failed Him—Then the Town’s Fat Apothecary Opened Her Jar
The man who came into the apothecary on a Thursday night in January did not remove his hat.
He was tall, built for weather, and carried the particular urgency of someone who had already tried everything else and was running out of time to be polite.
“Are you the woman who does wound work?” he said.
Vera Marsh looked up from her mortar. “I am.”
“My father has gangrene. Three days now. The doctor in town gave him a week. I think he has less.”
“What does the doctor say about treatment?”
“He said there isn’t any.” The man’s jaw shifted. “He said to make the old man comfortable and send for the minister.”
Vera set down the pestle. “Has the flesh gone black and soft around the wound?”
“Yes.”
“Then the doctor is wrong.” She began moving. “Cutting will likely kill him before the infection does. But maggot debridement can remove the dead tissue cleanly. Then honey, willow bark, hot compresses.”
The room went very still.
Dr. Clarence Howell, who had been waiting near the door for Vera to finish so he could tell her, again, that her methods were embarrassing the profession, made a sound of pure disgust.
“That,” he said, “is medieval.”
Vera did not look at him. “That is effective.”
The tall man — Seth Crain, she would learn — stared at her with the specific expression of a man who has been trained by the entire world to dismiss women of her size and plainness before they finished a sentence.
She had seen that expression ten thousand times.
She was no longer moved by it.
“Can you make the ride?” he asked. “Truthfully.”
Vera almost smiled. “I can make the ride. The question is whether you can stop wasting time long enough to let me.”
Something shifted in his face.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Livery stable.”
“Ten,” Vera said. “And bring money. I don’t ride to deathbeds out of sentiment.”
For one fractured second, something like startled respect crossed his face.
“Fine,” he said.
Dr. Howell stared at her as Seth left. “You cannot seriously intend to go.”
She was already gathering supplies. “If I don’t go, the man dies. If I go and he dies anyway, he dies with someone trying. Your approach involves neither.”
She left him in the empty shop.
The ride up the mountain should have broken her.
That was likely what Seth expected.
He rode ahead at first, checking back every few minutes with the wariness of a man waiting to be disappointed. Vera followed on Bess, her broad-backed draft mare, a horse built less for elegance than endurance. Bess moved through snow the way determined women moved through crowded rooms — with complete indifference to anything in the way.
The storm turned ugly before they cleared timberline.
Snow drove sideways. The trail disappeared under drifts. Twice Seth doubled back to lead Vera across sections where the path narrowed above ravines. Once, when Bess sank nearly to the flank in a drift, Seth dismounted without comment, planted his boots, and helped haul the mare forward while Vera dug with her gloved hands.