Thomas Albrecht’s two-storeyed house stood along a busier stretch just beyond the Tanner’s Quarter, on a street crowded with barrel-makers, cloth merchants, and the occasional hawker's cart creaking over the cobbles. The pleasant smell of tanned hides from the nearby workshops still drifted in on warm days, mixing with the sharper odour from the fishmongers' and horse dung. His building, half-timbered with clay panels, was solid but unadorned. It was the kind of house owned by someone respectable, but not exactly rich.

  The ground floor had once been a cobbler’s workshop. The old tenant succumbed to a sudden fever two winters ago. By then, Thomas’ practice had begun expanding rapidly, outgrowing the back room he’d rented near the cathedral square. So he went ahead and purchased the house outright. He furnished the lower rooms with sturdy walnut benches, thick shutters, and iron-barred windows to protect against thieves and night-wanderers.

  The front two rooms served as his consultation space. Just beyond the entrance, he’d created a small waiting room. Initially, this was just one large room. But he had partitioned it for logistical reasons.

  Beyond the waiting room was his chamber or consulting room. A table stood beneath the main window, stained dark by years of tinctures and oils. On it were laid out his tools – a scalpel, a bone saw, pestle and mortar, linen rolls, and glass jars sealed with wax. Bunches of dried angelica, valerian, and mugwort hung from beams overhead, turning slowly in the breeze. A small hearth in the corner kept a copper kettle steaming with water. There was a slender cot on the wall opposite the main window. The scent inside was the kind of mixture you would get only at a 16th century physician’s – bruised herbs, vinegar, parchment, valerian root and the mineral trace of old blood.

  The room behind was his study. This was a quieter, more personal space. The walls here were lined with shelves made from reclaimed boards, bowing slightly under the weight of books and scrolls. He owned a battered Latin edition of Galen, widely copied and still respected. His copies of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine and a German translation of Johannes de Ketham’s “Fasciculus Medicinae” sat beside a few leaf-bound local herbals and loose tracts from the university presses in Mainz and Basel.

  A desk near the back window bore a collection of sand-filled inkwells, sharpened quills, and folded papers stained with drying pigment. Candleholders were affixed to the beams and walls. Most burned cheap tallow – thick, smoky and with a distinctly unpleasant smell. But in the drawer beneath his desk, he kept a small supply of beeswax candles, saved for long reading nights or simply for those rare evenings when he just felt like indulging in a little bit of luxury.

  A steep wooden stairway rose near the hearth to the upper floor, his living area. This floor had three rooms – a bedroom with a straw mattress and a small chest, a combined kitchen and dining space with a narrow table and three chairs, and a washroom with a pitcher and basin. The window overlooked the rooftops of the Tanner’s quarter, where the smoke of cook fires rose lazily in the morning and the big bell tower broke the skyline to the east.

  The house suited him. He felt comfortable here, he felt at home. The bustle outside was enough to bring in patients from the square and beyond, but inside, behind his books and ledgers, Thomas had found a kind of contemplative quiet.

  The housewife who sat across from him now had removed her shoes and was rubbing one ankle with a tight, circular motion. Her hands were cracked from extensive use of coarse soap and water. She wore the expression of someone used to being ignored. But that wasn’t going to be the case today. Today, she needed someone to listen, specifically the doctor.

  “It was my niece, Elisabeth,” she said, voice low. “Poor thing, she’s barely thirteen. She went to the docks to buy some fish. When she came back, she was flushed, laughing like the devil had possessed her. Or maybe she just got too much sun, I don’t know. I asked what happened, and she said she’d been dancing.”

  Thomas dipped his pen in the inkwell, nodding without looking up.

  “Just a bit of fun by any chance?” he offered mildly.

  The woman scoffed. “She said she couldn’t stop, said her legs moved on their own. She danced so hard shoes came off, that’s what she told me. Then she cried, and slept like a corpse till dawn. She’s quiet now, but her left foot keeps twitching every now and then.”

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  Thomas wrote in neat, slanting script, neater than you would expect from your average doctor.

  “Involuntary motion. Intermittent. No fever reported.”

  He asked about appetite, sleep, and perhaps changes in temperament. She answered with the practised precision of someone who had already rehearsed it twice before coming. Nothing about the details particularly struck Thomas as odd or a potential trigger.

  When she rose to leave, he pressed a folded strip of nettle-soaked gauze into her hand. “For your joints,” he said. “Twice daily, not more.”

  The next visitor arrived while she was still pulling her sandals back on. He was younger, still smelling of tanned hide and woodsmoke. He was a printer’s delivery man, although his stained apron suggested he’d spent the morning helping someone haul skins.

  “My master’s boy,” the delivery man began before sitting. “You know the one? Tall, walks like his knees belong to two different people.”

  Thomas raised an eyebrow. But yes, he knew the one.

  “He was bringing some goods in from the cart,” the delivery man continued, “when he started twitching. Not like a chill. Like...” He searched for the right word, then gave up. “Like a fool. Kept shaking his arms and tapping his heel, like he heard something.”

  “Did he speak?”

  “Sort of. Hummed, more like. Like he had a song stuck in his mouth and couldn’t find the words.”

  Thomas folded his notes closed. “Did he stop?”

  “Eventually. We made him lie down. But he cried afterwards. He says he suffered a lot, he says it felt like someone pulled strings inside him.”

  A longer pause followed.

  “Is it the plague?” the man asked, voice tight.

  “No,” Thomas said. “Not if there’s no fever or swellings.” He consciously kept his tone calm and even. “And no pattern yet. Until I examine him myself, I can offer little more than guesses.”

  That seemed to settle the man’s nerves, if only just. He left quickly after that.

  Later on in the day, the stream of patients had gradually subsided. The waiting room was quiet. A boy sat there, swinging his legs slowly above the floorboards.

  “What’s your name?” Thomas asked.

  “Johann.”

  “Waiting for someone?”

  “My sister’s with Frau Liebel just outside. She’s got a boil on her back.”

  Then, almost absently, he began to hum a strange-sounding tune!

  It wasn’t a church tune. It wasn’t from the streets either. Something about it was off-tempo, the beat just behind where it should be, but persistent.

  Thomas frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”

  The boy stopped, surprised. “What?”

  “That song.”

  Johann shrugged. “My sister danced to it last night. She said she heard it in her sleep. Then she made me hum it so she wouldn’t forget.”

  ***

  The day had bled its colour into the Ill. Thomas leaned against the railing of the old footbridge west of the Custom House, his satchel resting against his hip. His mind was full of unanswered questions.

  He saw her before she saw him. Gretchen was approaching from the far end, shawl loose over her shoulders, braid swinging against her back. The hem of her dress was damp. She'd likely cut through the river path to avoid the fishmongers’ carts on Rue des écrivains.

  “You’re late,” he said as she neared, smirking slightly.

  “I stopped to buy cherries,” she replied, holding up a small cloth bundle. “I’d bought more, but then I saw a boy who seemed like he hadn’t eaten in days and gave him half.”

  Thomas smiled. “Does that mean I just get the pits?”

  She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Maybe.”

  They walked a while without speaking, the bridge beneath them creaking with the shifts in their movements.

  “You seem to have something on your mind,” Gretchen observed.

  “I’ve been listening to too many strange stories,” Thomas answered. “Meanwhile, I’m a man with ink-stained fingers and no real answers.”

  He went on to explain the unusual cases he came across earlier in the day.

  They paused near the centre of the bridge. A barge passed by below, its lantern swaying with the current. Gretchen leaned forward and watched it drift under.

  “Do you think it’s just bile? Something you can sweat out?” she asked, her eyes on the water.

  Thomas hesitated. “I don't know what to think. The summer is too hot, the air is too still, the bread is running scarce. In such times, people reach for whatever they can.”

  She turned to face him.

  “Very poetic!” she laughed. She then added more sincerely, “You explain things. I like that about you. You make the world quieter.”

  He touched her wrist gently. “And you make me forget it for a while.”

  That made her smile. Her fingers slipped into his, and for a long moment, they stood without words. She leaned against him, head tucked under his chin, and he felt the press of her ribs rising and falling in time with his own.

  “Tomorrow, I need to accompany my parents to some place around Kehl to see some distant relatives I've never heard of,” she whispered. “I’ll come again on Monday."

  “I’ll be here.”

  They kissed, and just stood there for a while in each other's embrace, letting the world drift by around them. It was peaceful there on the bridge.

  As the first evening bell rang from the direction of the cathedral, they parted. Gretchen crossed the bridge, her braid swinging ever so slightly in the faint breeze. Thomas watched until the crowd swallowed her.

  And then he turned for home, the hum of the river following him into the old Tanner's Quarter.