Vesna McMaster – Cold Coffee

I have a cold, and I’m coughing. The apothecary’s daughter suggested her father’s syrup, but I’ve had too close a view of his workshop to take that up. Meanwhile the weeks go past and Mary complains she can’t sleep for the noise I make.

Harry from the blacksmith’s, little Harry with the smutty nose, says his uncle in the country swears by a pickled pigeon’s egg, mashed with honey and ash. Where does one find a pigeon egg in November, let alone a pickled one? And why am I paying heed to little Harry with the smutty nose? If you saw Mary’s face of a morning after a night broken by coughing, you’d pay heed to just about anything.

I take myself and my troubled lungs to the Lady’s chapel on the hill. Reckon, it can’t hurt. Except it does, because the hill’s so steep my chest is on fire before I get there. Our Lady has her work cut out for her on this one. My hacks echo round the chapel and I almost blow out the candle before it catches. A flurry of black wings bursts out of the rafters and swirls around my head.

‘Aye me!’ comes a thin cry – so hollow and strained a voice that the fire in my chest is shot through with ice. I had not seen the crouched figure in the back. ‘The bats – the bats say the time is up!’

‘What time?’

‘Your time.’