Being the private notebook of Dr. Amброise Verrin, physician of the parish of Saint-Roch, kept against the express instruction of the magistrate

14 August

Six houses marked today. The chalk crosses do not wash off in rain the way the parish clerk promised they would. I noticed this on my walk home and stood in the street looking at one for longer than a sane man should, as though the mark might explain itself if I waited.

I bled the miller's wife at dawn. She died at noon. I do not know if the bleeding hastened it or slowed it, and I have stopped pretending to myself that I know. The blood came out dark and thick, almost black, and my assistant said this proved the corruption was leaving her body. I said nothing. If I told him the truth — that I chose the vein because it was the vein I always choose, and the darkness of the blood tells me only that she had not eaten — he would lose faith in me, and I need his hands more than I need his understanding.

The beak of my mask is stuffed with dried lavender, rue, camphor, and a clove of garlic my mother would have recognized. I tell my patients the herbs purify the air I breathe so that their sickness cannot pass into me. I do not know if this is true. I have never known if this is true. I wear the mask because the smell of the dying rooms would otherwise put me on my knees, and because a man in a leather beak and a wide black hat is easier to trust with your children's lives than a man in his shirtsleeves who admits he is guessing.

16 August

A physician from Lyon passed through today, a Doctor Chastel, full of new theory. He says the sickness travels in the air itself, in bad vapors rising from swamps and unburied bodies and the breath of the sick. He says my herbs are correct in principle if wrong in particular — that any strong smell will do, that the nose only needs to be tricked into believing the air is clean. He also says, quietly, over wine, that he has begun to doubt the vapor theory altogether. He has seen the sickness pass between two houses with a stone wall and no shared air between them, and cross an open field to strike a farmhouse a half mile off while sparing every cottage between. He has no better theory to offer. Neither do I.

We agreed, both of us a little drunk by then, that the honest answer is written nowhere in either of our books. We are guessing in Latin, which sounds like knowledge and is not.

19 August

I lanced eleven buboes this week. The lancing gives relief, of that much I am certain — the swelling eases, the fever sometimes breaks for a day. Whether it saves a life or only makes the dying more comfortable, I cannot say, and I have stopped asking my patients' families to thank me for it, because I no longer believe I have earned the thanks.

A boy of nine, the tanner's son, asked me today if the black spots meant he was rotting from the inside like meat left in the sun. I told him no. I do not know if this was a lie. The spots are dark and they spread the way bruising spreads, and when I cut into one last month on a corpse the magistrate permitted me to examine before burial, the tissue beneath was the color of a plum gone soft. I did not tell the boy this. I held his hand, which was hot and small, and I told him the spots were only blood finding its way to the surface of the skin, the way it does after a fall. He believed me. He died three days later. I do not know what good the lie did him, except that it let him sleep the night I told it.

22 August

My assistant, Marcel, asked me plainly why some houses are struck entirely — mother, father, every child, the cat even found dead in the yard — while the house beside them, sharing a wall, sharing a well, sharing the same foul canal at the end of the street, goes untouched. I told him it was a matter of the humors, that some families are constitutionally weaker. He accepted this because I said it in the voice I use for facts rather than the voice I use for guesses, and he has learned, over two years at my side, to hear the difference without knowing he hears it.

I have no answer for him. I noticed, and did not say aloud, that the untouched house keeps a great many cats, and that the struck house has none, and that I do not know what to make of this, if anything.

25 August

There is a rumor moving through the poorer streets that the doctors themselves carry the sickness on their robes and beaks, going from house to house like carrion birds spreading what they claim to cure. A woman spat at my mask this morning and called me a crow. I did not correct her. I have begun, in the private hours after midnight, to wonder if she is right — not that I carry the sickness by design, but that I carry it in truth, on the wax coating of my robe, in the folds of my gloves, from the dying to the not-yet-dying, a courier of exactly the thing I am paid to keep out.

I have started washing my hands in vinegar between houses. I cannot say why vinegar rather than water, except that it stings, and something in me has decided that a remedy which stings must be doing more than a remedy that does not.

29 August

I opened another body tonight, alone, by candlelight, against every ordinance of the church and the guild. I wanted to see the lungs. Doctor Chastel's theory of the air demanded it — if the sickness rides on breath, the lungs should show some mark of its passage, some blackness or corruption visible to the eye. I found only lungs. Grey-pink, unremarkable, the same lungs I have seen in a hundred bodies that died of age or drowning or the flux. Whatever moves through this city, it does not announce itself to the knife.

I sat with the body for an hour after, not from grief — I did not know the man — but because I did not know what else to do with the hour. I had promised myself an answer and been given only meat.

3 September

The council has asked me to compose a report on the causes and progress of the sickness, to be read aloud in the market square so the people might understand what is happening to them and take comfort in the physicians' knowledge. I have spent three days on the draft and burned two of them. I do not have knowledge to offer. I have a beak stuffed with lavender, a lancet, a jar of vinegar, and eleven years of watching people die in patterns I cannot predict and cannot explain.

Tonight I wrote a third draft, and I believe it is the one I will read. It says that the sickness is carried in bad air, that cleanliness of the home protects against it, that isolation of the sick protects the healthy, that God's mercy governs who is taken and who is spared. Every sentence in it is either unproven or a guess dressed as doctrine. I will read it in the square on Sunday, in my mask, in my black robe, and the crowd will nod, because a man who sounds certain is more bearable to a frightened city than a man who tells the truth.

I have decided this is the last kindness left to me to give. Not medicine. Not cure. Only the sound of certainty, offered to people who have nothing else to hold.

7 September

Marcel is coughing. He says it is only the smoke from the burning of the tanner's bedding, which the council has ordered destroyed in the street. I examined his throat by candlelight and found nothing, no swelling under the jaw, no fever on his brow. I told him he was well. I do not know if I believe this. I have decided, for tonight, that I will act as though I do.

I have stuffed his collar with lavender from my own supply. He asked me why, since he has no mask of his own. I told him it could not hurt.

I did not tell him that this is the whole of what I have learned in eleven years: that certainty is a mercy, that guessing dressed carefully enough can pass for a cure, and that when a man you love starts to cough, you reach for lavender because it is the only thing in your hands, and because the alternative is standing there with empty ones.