“I know,” I say softly.
She waits a moment, then she looks at me square. “Could your people help us? Could they stop this?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but finding out would be better than just sitting here, waiting for the worst to happen.”
She looks around to see if we’re being overheard. “Mistress Coyle is brilliant,” she says, “but sometimes she can only hear her own opinion.”
She waits, biting her upper lip.
“Maddy?”
“We’ll watch out,” she says.
“For what?”
“If the right moment arrives, and only if,” she looks around again, “we’ll see what we can do about contacting your ships.”
{VIOLA}
“But slavery is wrong,” I say, rolling up another bandage.
“The healers were always opposed to it.” Mistress Coyle ticks off another box on her inventory. “Even after the Spackle War, we thought it inhuman.”
“Then why didn’t you stop it?”
“If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.”
“War makes monsters of men,” I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead.
“And women,” Mistress Coyle says. She taps her fingers on boxes of syringes to count them.
“But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Thirteen years now.”
“Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong.”
She finally looks at me. “Life is only that simple when you’re young, my girl.”
“But you were in charge,” I say. “You could have done something.”
“And who told you I was in charge?”
“Corinne said–”
“Ah, Corinne,” she says, turning back to her clipboard, “doing her best to love me no matter what the facts.”
I open up another bag of supplies. “But if you were head of this Council thing,” I press on, “surely you could have done something about the Spackle.”
“Sometimes, my girl,” she says, giving me a displeased look, “you can lead people where they don’t want to go, but most of the time you can’t. The Spackle weren’t going to be freed, not after we’d just beaten them in an awful and vicious war, not when we needed so much labour to rebuild. But they could be treated better, couldn’t they? They could be fed properly and set to work humane hours and allowed to live together with their families. All victories I won for them, Viola.”
Her writing on the clipboard is a lot more forceful than it was. I watch her for a second. “Corinne says you were thrown off the Council for saving a life.”
She doesn’t answer me, just sets down her clipboard and looks on one of the higher shelves. She reaches up and takes down an apprentice hat and a folded apprentice cloak. She turns and tosses them to me.
“Who are these for?” I say, catching them.
“You want to find out about being a leader?” she says. “Then let’s put you on the path.”
I look at her face.
I look down at the cloak and the cap.
From then on, I barely have time to eat.
The day after women were allowed to move again, there were eighteen new patients, all female, who’d been suffering all kinds of things– appendicitis, heart problems, lapsed cancer treatments, broken bones– all trapped in houses where they’d been stuck after being separated from husbands and sons. The next day, there were eleven more. Mistress Lawson went back to the children’s house of healing the second she was able, but Mistresses Coyle, Waggoner and Nadari were suddenly rushing from room to room, shouting orders and saving lives. I don’t think anyone’s been to sleep since.
There’s certainly no time for me and Maddy to look for our moment, no time to even notice that the Mayor still hasn’t come to see me. Instead, I run around a lot, getting in the way, helping out where I can, and squeezing apprentice lessons in.
I turn out not to be a natural healer.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get this,” I say, failing yet again to tell the blood pressure of a sweet old patient called Mrs Fox.
“It sure feels that way,” Corinne says, glancing up at the clock.
“Patience, pretty girl,” Mrs Fox says, her face wrinkling up in a smile. “A thing worth learning is worth learning well.”
“You’re right there, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says, looking back at me. “Try it again.”
I pump up the armband to inflate it, listen through the stethoscope for the right kind of whoosh, whoosh in Mrs Fox’s blood and match that up to the little dial. “Sixty over twenty?” I guess weakly.
“Well, let’s find out,” Corinne says. “Have you died this morning, Mrs Fox?”
“Oh, dearie me, no,” Mrs Fox says.
“Probably not sixty over twenty then,” Corinne says.
“I’ve only been doing this for three days,” I say.
“I’ve been doing it for six years,” Corinne says, “since I was way younger than you, my girl. And here you are, can’t even work a blood pressure sleeve, yet suddenly an apprentice just like me. Funny how life works, huh?”
“You’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Mrs Fox says to me.
“No, she isn’t, Mrs Fox,” Corinne says. “I’m sorry to contradict you, but some of us regard healing as a sacred duty.”
“I regard it as a sacred duty,” I say, almost as a reflex.
This is a mistake.
“Healing is more than a job, my girl,” Corinne says, making my girl sound like the worst insult. “There is nothing more important in this life than the preservation of it. We’re God’s hands on this world. We are the opposite of your friend the tyrant.”
“He’s not my–”
“To allow someone, anyone, to suffer is the greatest sin there is.”
“Corinne–”
“You don’t understand anything,” she says, her voice low and fierce. “Quit pretending that you do.”