She sat down at the table and tossed her thick, painstakingly brushed sheets of smooth brown hair behind her—Abigail Pent would present smartly in earthquake, fire, or flood—and Harrowhark said, “I assume you mean the organs.”

“Yes. Those aren’t great,” said Pent.

The snow had settled; the ice, in pinkish, crackling drifts, had formed miniature fernlike cherry-shaded patterns on all the ancient glass. In their wake, great slithering, pulsing tubes had worked themselves up through the cracks in the floorboards, or wound down among the frozen weeds. The tubes were a fresh, clear pink, with redder veins beneath the translucent topmost layer. At intervals, black clusters swam within, this way and that, like frightened fish. When one cut them, they bled a gush of filthy water, then the wound closed up as one watched. The cold had deepened to the point where a few hours would freeze this substance solid, a sort of brownish cloud with a misty, gelid surface.

The tubes were not homogenous: every so often they would pouch out, or fall in dramatic drapes along the wall or from the ceiling, with whitish, pearl-bubbled globules secreted away within their flesh. The surviving inhabitants of Canaan House were united—even Harrow—in agreement with Dulcie Septimus’s pronouncement that it was “absolutely ghastly, bordering on shitty.”

Abigail considered Harrow gravely, with her hands tucked into a pair of her husband’s outsized woolly gloves, and she said: “Reverend Daughter, we look to you.”

Harrowhark had been looked to before, though rarely by anyone under seventy years old. She kept her gloved fingers within the folds of her robe, flexing them occasionally, and waited. The Fifth historian continued: “My necromantic scholarship is specific, my general practice—scattershot. I never did hold ambitions in that quarter. I can command a skeleton, but I can’t create one. I can work tendon or a muscle, or settle skin into a gash, but if that can be weaponized, I’d love to know how. And as for the Duchess Septimus…”

All things considered, Dulcinea Septimus was a medical miracle. By her own account, her lungs were blown-out sacs of inflammation from the last round of pneumonia she had fought before her voyage to the House of the First; the cold ought to have already buried her beneath those deep, cerise snows outside. But there was seemingly very little wrong with her, apart from the occasional cough. Harrowhark had been ready to denounce her as a lifelong hypochondriac, except that Septimus herself was the first to insist as much: “I have always said that thinking one is sick is probably what makes you sickest,” she once said hopefully, while avoiding attempts on her cavalier’s part to feed her evil-smelling linctus from a spoon.