The vomit spattered her calico skirt. Her face, beautiful and impassive under an elaborately folded tignon, did not change, dark eyes like a serpent's, registering neither disgust nor pity.

"This man doesn't need your silly Thompsonian trash," Soublet said to Barnard, not sparing a glance for the sick man. "Weeds and vinegar and cinchona bark-fie! It's clear that his constitution needs to be lowered. Boy..." The doctor addressed January. "Hold him down."

Barnard backed away, clutching his slice of onion, which in the dim light did indeed resemble the Eucharist. The Italian, too spent to struggle, only wept a little as January gripped his right arm and shoulder, Soublet's servant his left. Soublet opened the patient's vein at the elbow. The blood was inky in the semidark.

"There. He should do now. Bind that up." Soublet turned away. "I'll leave instructions to Ker to take another pint at noon."

The servant gathered up the reeking bowl and moved off in his master's wake.

January muttered, "I saw less blood when Jackson beat the British than I do on any night he's in charge."

The tall woman, turning away, paused, a flick of a smile in the ophidian eyes.

There was no one else to work the ward that night.

January and Barnard moved the dead Russian-or whoever he had been-out onto the gallery and, later, when they had time, down the stairs to the yard. Three women and four men were already there, rough sheets drawn up over them, waiting for the dead-cart man. The night was as hot outdoors as in, the roar of cicadas rising and falling like demon machinery in the dark beyond the wall. Smudges in the yard-and the fact that the municipal contractors in charge of cleaning the gutters of Common Street hadn't done their job in weeks-rendered the air nearly unbreathable. A woman moved about the courtyard, lifting the corners of sheets to see the dead faces underneath.