Rachael Chadwick

In sixteenth-century England, Ophelia Harrow has no use for God.

She’s Beswick’s apothecary, and she’s buried too many good people to believe there’s anything waiting beyond the grave. To Ophelia, death is no divine judgement. It is sickness and suffering, flesh failing as flesh always does. But when the village physician dies, leaving her the only one to tend the sick, Ophelia must go beyond the parish to seek a replacement.

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She finds Doctor Iscairn standing among the mass graves of a neighbouring village.

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Masked and unnerving, he refuses food, scarcely sleeps, and will not cross the threshold of her brother’s church. None of it should inspire much confidence, yet he understands sickness the way the pious understand sin. At first, that's enough for Ophelia to overlook the strangeness surrounding him. But the longer they work side by side, the harder it becomes to dismiss what she sees—and the more the earthly world she has always trusted begins to fracture.

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Because Iscairn is no ordinary man.

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For centuries, he’s walked through England, harvesting from the dying what disease cannot destroy. He does not interfere with death, and he has never allowed himself to truly care for the living.

Until Ophelia.

 

As fear and religious fervour tighten their grip on Beswick, so too does her attachment to the impossible creature at her side. And when the plague finally comes for her, Iscairn must confront something three hundred years of death have never prepared him for: the possibility of losing the woman he loves, and the terrible uncertainty of whether even he can save her.