Page 14 of This Vicious Hunger
I put on a spare pair of the doctor’s gloves and take the length of vine from her. It’s a lot longer than I thought, growing from a pot below her desk where the sun filters through the window. It’s swelteringly warm in here again, but the vine is cool to the touch—and farther down its length there are curious clusters ofsickly yellow flowers, several of them wilting although the soil at their base is perfectly moist.
The vine wriggles again, and this time I’m sure it’s not a trick of the light, or false movement, or some phantom breeze. I feel the pressure of the green matter against my covered skin and fight not to recoil as it trembles slightly, shifting to sit across my knuckles as I hold it awkwardly.
Up close I realise that what I’d thought were pustules, oozing wounds, are in fact scaly buds covered in a layer of sticky, protective gum; the buds themselves are not unusual, many plants have them, but the colour… The colour isn’t right, dark reddish pink in places and pus yellow in others.
“How are you finding your studies?” Petaccia asks, either oblivious to my discomfort or content to ignore it. “Are you settling in?”
“I’m enjoying them.” I don’t really know what to say, what answer she is expecting of me here. The reality is I’ve hardly had time to think, even though I spend every day thinking so hard my brain feels like ooze. “I would prefer more time dedicated to the science, although—”
“Yes, I know. It’s regrettable that you’re having to split your focus, but there’s much you need to know, and I need as well rounded a partner as I can get. My father always said that life breathes science, and the older I get, the more I’m inclined to agree with him.”
Petaccia scribbles something with a flourish—all I can make out isP. studies incomplete… movement gaining traction though not without… pause, which means nothing to me—and then looks up at me expectantly.
“Oh, of course,” I stammer. “Whatever I can do to help. Ididn’t mean to criticise. I’m finding the other lectures very valuable. I suppose I always knew there was a lot to learn, I just didn’t realise that the arts and the sciences were so… interconnected? I think that’s the right word. Your father sounds very wise… Was he a botanist too?”
“Yes. And my mother, though her focus was more taxonomy than anything else.” Petaccia scratches the tip of her nose, leaving an inky smudge that looks a little like dirt. “She was the author of a wonderfully detailed botanical dictionary, though not many people have heard of her. My father was renowned.”
“Did they raise you to be interested in science, then?” I ask. Not for the first time since I found out about the scholarship I’m struck by an unfamiliar bitterness towards my own father. I thought I’d made my peace with the parts of me he nurtured and the parts he bade me keep hidden, but how much of what I thought I knew was a lie? I could have been like her, like this doctor with a career behind her as well as ahead, if he hadn’t been such a coward.
“Yes, my sister and I were both educated from a young age. A little like yourself, no?”
“Oh, uh—”
“I knew your father when he was a student here. That was before the chapel laws and the bruising fever, I think.”
My father did mention this in his tales of the institution, usually as almost a footnote. In his last year of study at the mortuary school, there was an outbreak of a fever that mottled its victims in bruises the size of apples. There were so many deaths they had to open a new chapel and sepulchre in the village, which soon became the primary site for all rites. The campus was quarantined until an antidote was discovered, and the schools remained separated afterwards.
“I remember my father telling me about the antidote,” I say.“How it was like a kind of miracle, coming right at the point everybody thought the university would have to close. That’s probably the first time I thought about the science oflifeinstead of just—well, death. I… I read a lot of my father’s notes growing up, his books too. I always wondered who thought to try something as simple as purple saltflower…”
Petaccia inclines her head, watching as the vine coils in my hands again. Her expression gives me pause, half amusement and half more like…pride?
“It was you?” I mouth, jaw agape. My father always said that the bruising-fever cure changed the place of herbal medicine in the sciences, pulling doctors back to its research for decades despite advancements elsewhere—the same shift Almerto is fighting for again now. “But you must have been so young?”
“My father and I worked together on the tonic.” Petaccia shrugs. “Plants like saltflower have been used topically to reduce immune response for hundreds of years, but the antidote was a little more complicated.”
“Did you get the credit?” I blurt. “Or did he?”
I realise the moment the words are out of my mouth that this is a huge mistake. I was thinking not of my own father but of Aurelio, knowing he would not allow me to claim such a prize for myself even if I was responsible. Speaking freely with Leonardo might be acceptable because he, too, is a kind of outsider. But Petaccia? She is a university fellow, and she holds my future in her palms. I slap my free hand over my mouth stupidly.
Petaccia’s eyes are cold, but they glitter with a surprising amount of humour.
“We shared the credit,” she says. “I was young. At the time I thought that was fair.”
“I’m sorry—”
“You needn’t worry so much about upsetting me, Thora. We have a lot of work to do and I don’t have time to mollycoddle. If you’ve got questions to ask, speak up. If you think we should do something differently, tell me that too. I didn’t get here by pandering to the whims of others but, well”—she pauses and smiles and there’s something unsettling about it; I think it’s the largeness, and the dark colour, of her teeth—“perhaps it’s time to try another tactic.”
Petaccia pushes away the papers, sweeping them into her top drawer, and gently takes the vine from my hands. I peel the gloves off and wipe my palms on my skirts immediately, hoping she doesn’t notice.
“Forgive me,” I say then, “but you still haven’t really told me exactly what it is we’re trying to do. They say you never take mentees or apprentices and yet you’ve made an exception for me—and I’m doing my best but a handful of classes won’t make me well rounded overnight. So why me? Why now? My father always lamented the fact I would never attend the university and yet here I am.”
Petaccia lets the vine down onto the desk gently—I get the distinct impression neither of them is happy about this development—and gestures for me to follow her to one of the windows on the far wall.
The heat here is something fierce. Sweat beads on my forehead and I feel it gathering across my collarbones and at the base of my spine. Once again I regret my outfit choice, envious of Petaccia’s short sleeves and unhindered legs. The air is wet and green and cloying, like soup in my lungs. I wonder why she never opens the sash—just a little breeze would make this room so much morebearable—but there must be a reason for it. Still, perhaps the reason is that the doctor doesn’t feel the heat, since her skin looks entirely dry to the touch.
“You’re like me,” Petaccia says. “I think.”
I wait as she studies me, her gaze trailing with scientific precision from my cropped hair right down to my barely used shoes—another of Aurelio’s marriage gifts.
