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For that kid in my college writing class who told me he loved my writing, even if he didn’t always understand it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Jessica Faust, and my editor, Hannah Braaten, for everything. You are simply the best.
Thanks to everyone at Minotaur who works so hard to make these pages into real books. A special shout-out on this one to Alan Bradshaw, Amelie Littell, and Tom Cherwin. Your ways with words, grammar, and research are much appreciated.
My guys, Charlie and Tyler, are the best. I’m crazy lucky to have them both. As always, thanks for your support, fellas.
At around the sixth century BC in Scotland, numerous wells with miraculous powers of healing were associated with the names of various saints. Of these, one of the most famous was the Well of St. Triduana, at Restalrig, near Edinburgh. St. Triduana was a recluse of the primitive church, whose tomb after her death became a shrine for pilgrims afflicted with eye diseases. In early life, her beauty had attracted a Pictish chief from whom she fled, and, being pursued by his emissaries, she plucked out her eyes and sent them to him impaled upon a thorn, as they had been the cause of his unwelcome attentions. For many centuries, the Well at Restalrig, afterwards called St. Margaret’s Well, was the resort of those [who came to drink the water with the hopes they could mend their eyes].
—From History of Scottish Medicine to 1860 by JOHN D. COMRIE
And that was only the beginning.
ONE
The cold liquid splashed the back of my neck before it rolled down and underneath my shirt. I gasped and reflexively turned to see who had sloshed their drink in my direction.
“Delaney! I’m so sorry. Oh dear. Here let’s go tae the toilet. I’ll get you cleaned up and you can have my shirt,” Sophie said loudly with a drunken slur as she grabbed my arm and started to pull me through the crowd.
“But then what will you wear?” I asked, trying to raise my voice.
She didn’t hear me above the crowd and band noise. I barely heard myself.
Though loud, the performers weren’t, in fact, a band; they were a duo. Mad Ferret was made up of one Irish and one Scottish gentleman. Together they performed upbeat folk songs that brought out the jig in pretty much everybody.
I’d first seen them with Tom, my boyfriend, after the two Mad Ferret members had stopped by his pub one evening and invited him to a show. Tom had taken me to see them in a very dark pub that hadn’t seemed quite big enough for the jubilant crowd inside. The setting was much the same tonight, though Tom wasn’t with me and my new friends, Sophie and Rena, and my newest friend Mallory, whom I’d just met this evening. All the women were medical students at the University of Edinburgh.
A few crowd dodges later, Sophie and I made our way toward the small back ladies’ room, a place where everyone wrote their name on the walls and the liquid soap smelled like the lavender hips scent my mom used in her kitchen back home in Kansas.
The three green-doored stalls inside were empty and the music fell into a muffled tinny bass beat when the bathroom door closed behind us.
“Your shirt is soaked through. I’m so, so sorry. I was careless. I’ll have it cleaned,” Sophie said as she turned me around so she could inspect my back. Then she turned me again to face her. “Here, take mine.”
I stopped her just as she made it to the second button of her blouse.
“It’s not a problem. I’ve been spilled on before,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
She blinked her heavily mascaraed brown eyes my direction. Until tonight I’d only seen her and her roommate Rena with light to no makeup and hastily brushed or pulled back hair. They were usually dressed in scrubs or jeans. Their skirts and makeup as well as their post-test Friday desire to blow off some steam had surprised me tonight, though I remembered that feeling from when I was back at the University of Kansas.
I’d lost track of how many gin and tonics they’d downed, though it seemed that Sophie was moving double-time compared with the rest of us. Now, some of her latest drink was beginning to make my back sticky. I was going to smell like a pine tree, but I didn’t really mind.
Reluctantly she said, “All right. At least let me buy you a drink tae make up for it.”
I laughed. “I’m good, but I’m glad you’re having fun.”
“I’m going to have a wicked hangover tomorrow, but it’s worth it. It’s good tae let loose a little.”
I smiled and redid the one button on her shirt. She didn’t seem to notice as she leaned against the sink.
“It’s a lucky twist of fate that we met you,” she said.
“I feel the same about you guys. Come on, let’s head back out and listen to some more music,” I said, sensing an alcohol-induced love fest coming on if I didn’t distract her.
A couple of months earlier, Sophie and Rena had come into The Cracked Spine, the rare book and manuscript shop that I’d traveled halfway around the world to work at. They’d brought in some old medical books that had been in Rena’s family for decades. Rena’s father had given her the books
