Richard understood, with the cold clarity of panic, that a wrong answer here could kill him more efficiently than any knife.
Not because of the physician alone.
Because crowds wanted a shape to place around what frightened them.
Once named, a thing became manageable.
Thief.
Madman.
Sorcerer.
Plague-bearer.
Richard forced himself not to reach for the phone.
Not now.
Not in front of them.
He kept his hands visible.
Empty.
Ash-darkened.
He looked once at the patient, then back at the physician.
"Traveller," he said.
The word came out rougher than he intended.
He added, after a fraction too long:
"Knows breathing."
A murmur moved through the circle.
Not acceptance.
But not immediate rejection either.
The physician's mouth tightened.
He repeated the first word with the smallest possible curl of contempt.
"Traveller."
Then a longer sentence followed, too fast for Richard to catch whole. He took fragments only.
No badge.
No guild.
No master.
No right.
That was enough.
The physician turned slightly so the crowd could hear him better.
A practiced movement.
Not theatrical.
Institutional.
He was reclaiming the centre.
Richard watched it happen almost analytically.
A man could lose authority in one instant.
Recovering it required making the crowd ashamed of doubting him.
The physician spoke again, this time with one hand open toward Richard's coat, his boots, his face.
Foreign.
Filthy.
Unknown.
Richard caught each word like stones thrown at him.
Then came another.
Dangerous.
That one landed harder because the crowd already wanted it.
A woman near the bench clutched a rosary or something like it and whispered to herself. One of the boys who had climbed the barrel stepped down now, suddenly less curious and more afraid. A broad-shouldered man with straw in his beard — one of the men who had helped lift the patient — looked uncertain, eyes moving from the physician to the half-upright man on the bench.
The patient dragged another breath into himself.
Ugly.
Wet.
But deeper.
Not enough to settle anything.
Enough to complicate everything.
Richard pointed at him immediately.
"He breathe better."
The physician answered with contempt so controlled it almost sounded patient. Richard did not catch all of it, but enough:
Moment.
Chance.
Interference.
Then the physician stepped toward the patient as if to continue anyway.
Richard moved to block him without touching.
That, more than anything, made the crowd inhale.
The challenge was no longer implied.
It was visible.
The physician stopped.
For a heartbeat the two men stood face to face in torchlight and breath-smoke and plague air, neither touching the other, the whole street balancing on the question of who would yield.
The physician spoke quietly.
Richard caught only the important pieces.
If he dies—
your doing.
It was clever.
If the patient worsened now, blame could be transferred instantly.
Richard knew that too.
He looked at the man on the bench.
Skin slick with sweat.
Shoulders pulling harder than before.
Lips still wrong at the edges.
He needed more air, more support, less effort, less crowd crushing around him like a wall.
Richard pointed sharply at the nearest men.
"Back."
No movement.
Of course not.
He corrected.
"Step back. Give air."
The broad-shouldered man frowned, but he moved half a pace. Another followed because the first had. Then a third.
A narrow corridor of colder night air touched the patient's face.
The man coughed again.
This time the sound ended in a raw spit of red onto the front of his own tunic.
The circle recoiled all at once.
Fear never needed translation.
The physician seized the recoil instantly and spoke louder.
Blood.
Corruption.
Must be drawn.
The old logic was back in the air.
It sounded certain.
It sounded safe because it had structure.
Richard felt the moment slipping.
Then the patient made a small, desperate movement with one hand.
Not toward the physician.
Toward his own chest.
Fingers clawing weakly at the cloth there as if he wanted something removed.
Richard saw it.
So did the broad-shouldered man.
Richard stepped in first and pulled at the neckline of the patient's tunic, loosening the soaked fabric away from his throat and upper chest without stripping it open. More room. Less pressure. Nothing miraculous. Just less obstruction.
The patient dragged in a breath that sounded terrible but larger.
The broad-shouldered man swore softly.
The woman beside the bench — wife, Richard guessed — began crying harder, but now in a different rhythm. Hope was a dangerous sound. It destabilised old obedience.
"He needs up," Richard said, pointing again. "Stay up."
Then, because the sentence felt too thin, he hit the proof instead of the theory.
"Flat, worse."
This time several heads nodded before they realised they were doing it.
The physician saw that too.
His face did not change much.
That made him more dangerous.
A stupid man would have shouted.
This man recalculated.
He turned not to Richard but to the crowd and spoke with controlled gravity, as though correcting frightened children. Richard caught fragments.
Stranger.
No art.
No learning.
A trick of posture, nothing more.
The physician then pointed to the blood on the patient's clothing and delivered the sentence with brutal timing.
Inside.
Still drowning.
That landed.
Because it was also true.
Richard felt the crowd pull back from him emotionally even while keeping their eyes on him physically.
Contested advantage.
Not victory.
Never victory.
The patient's wife suddenly knelt by the bench and grabbed the physician's sleeve, pleading too fast for Richard to follow. But her hands were shaking toward her husband while her eyes flickered once to Richard.
Not trust.
Need.
The physician looked down at her, then slowly freed his sleeve.
He said something to her in a tone that made his status audible even if the words were partly lost to Richard.
Then he pointed, openly now, at Richard.
Richard only caught three words.
No name.
No witness.
No answer.
The crowd shifted again.
That was the opening the physician wanted.
If Richard could not be placed, then Richard could be expelled.
A voice from the back called out another word Richard had learned to hate.
Priest.
Several people repeated it at once, not as a decision but as instinct. When knowledge failed, summon holiness. When categories broke, bring someone licensed to name evil.
Richard felt a pulse of real fear move through his stomach.
Not because a priest would necessarily condemn him.
Because a priest would ask questions he could not safely answer.
And because priests, unlike crowds, could remember systematically.
His phone vibrated again inside the cloth.
He ignored it.
The physician heard the movement anyway.
Not the message.
The faint fabric-sound.
His eyes dropped for the briefest instant to Richard's coat.
Danger.
The physician took one small step sideways, changing angle, trying to see what Richard kept hidden.
Richard shifted with him automatically.
Too quickly.
That was a mistake.
The physician smiled then.
Not pleasantly.
He had seen the protection.
"There," said the woman from the back — this time clear enough that Richard did not need adaptation to understand accusation in it. "In coat."
The two words that followed were less clear, but the crowd supplied them for her.
Light.
Again.
The ring widened by a fraction. Fear made space faster than respect ever could.
The broad-shouldered man who had helped lift the patient now stood exactly between Richard and three others without seeming to choose a side. That, Richard realised, was the current shape of his authority.
Not loyalty.
Delay.
People were not yet ready to seize him.
They were not yet ready to defend him either.
The patient gave a harsh, tearing cough and suddenly slumped sideways.
The wife screamed.
The entire crowd convulsed toward the bench.
The physician moved instantly, which was why Richard understood at once that the man was no fraud. He was skilled. Just wrong about this.
The physician caught the patient's shoulder and shouted for something. Cloth? Water? Hold him? Richard only got pieces.
The patient's breath turned thin.
Too thin.
Head lolling.
Wrong angle again.
Richard was already moving.
He got one hand behind the patient's upper back through the tunic fabric, using cloth between skin and skin without thinking about it consciously now because the contamination logic had already sunk below language.
"Up," he snapped.
The broad-shouldered man obeyed this time without hesitation.
Together they dragged the patient more upright.
The patient's head tipped forward.
A choking gush of dark fluid and mucus spilled from his mouth onto the mud beside the bench.
Not much.
Enough.
Enough to clear.
The next breath came ragged.
Then another.
Still terrible.
Still laboured.
But present.
The wife made a noise Richard would remember for a long time because it had no dignity left in it at all.
The crowd saw the sequence.
Slump.
Lift.
Drain.
Breath.
That was socially fatal to the physician's certainty.
Not because Richard had cured the man.
Because people trusted order until they saw a different order work first.
The physician stood very still.
Then straightened slowly.
His face had not reddened. His voice, when he spoke again, was almost calm.
That frightened Richard more than if he had screamed.
The physician addressed the crowd, not Richard.
Richard caught more now because the man was speaking for public record rather than argument.
The stranger is fortunate.
Fortunate once.
Perhaps twice.
Chance is not knowledge.
Then the physician turned and pointed directly at Richard's coat.
Show.
Silence.
Richard did not move.
The patient wheezed behind him.
Torchlight trembled in several hands.
The wife was praying.
Somebody at the edge of the ring had already started running, perhaps for a priest, perhaps for watch, perhaps just away.
The physician repeated the command.
"Show."
Richard understood the mathematics immediately.
If he refused, concealment became confession.
If he revealed the phone and it lit, the street could turn murderous in seconds.
If he revealed only cloth, suspicion might not end. The physician would simply push harder.
His own pulse sounded too loud.
Then the screen vibrated once more.
A cold rectangle of potential against his ribs.
He made the decision almost before he knew he had made it.
He reached inside the coat slowly.
Half the crowd stepped back.
The physician's eyes locked onto the movement.
Richard pulled out not the phone itself but the outer wrapping cloth alone — a strip of stained fabric he had used to conceal it.
He held it open in one hand.
Empty.
The phone remained pinned inside the coat by pressure of elbow and lining.
The trick was simple.
Barely a trick at all.
But the century did not know his century's pocket logic.
The physician's gaze flicked from the cloth to Richard's face and back again.
For the first time, real uncertainty touched him.
Not about medicine.
About control.
Richard used it immediately.
"Cloth," he said. "For filth. For blood."
Then he pointed at the patient, at the spit-dark mud, at the wife's hands.
"Not holy. Not devil. Cloth."
The broad-shouldered man barked a laugh before he could stop himself.
It was small.
But disastrous for the physician.
Because it made the street imagine, for one instant, that the physician might be reaching too quickly for fear.
The physician turned on the man at once and said something that made the laugh die.
But the damage had happened.
Not large damage.
Hairline damage.
Reputation often broke that way first.
The patient tried to speak.
Everyone turned.
His lips moved uselessly once.
Then again.
The wife bent close enough that her forehead almost touched his.
He forced out a few words in a torn whisper.
Richard caught only one.
Air.
The wife looked up at once, eyes wide, tears cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
She repeated his words to the crowd, louder, broken by sobs.
Not all of them.
Enough.
More air.
The broad-shouldered man crossed himself.
Another woman at the back began weeping outright.
Now the physician had a more serious problem than a stranger.
He had a patient whose suffering had become interpretable in public by the wrong framework.
Richard knew the danger of that too.
Public mercy could elevate a man quickly.
Public superstition could burn him just as fast.
A new sound cut through the street.
Boots.
Not many.
Three. Maybe four men.
Harder tread than the crowd.
And beneath it another sound.
A bell again — smaller, closer.
Authority approaching through plague-dark.
Heads turned toward the lane mouth.
A lantern rose there first.
Then a familiar silhouette beside it.
One of the men from Anna's house.
The cudgel-man.
With him came another figure in darker clothing and a hanging cross at the chest.
Not richly dressed.
But unmistakably clerical.
Priest.
The physician's posture changed by a degree so slight most people would miss it.
Richard did not.
Reinforcement.
The cudgel-man saw Richard immediately and stopped dead enough for the men behind him to nearly collide with him.
Recognition flashed across his face.
Not friendly.
Not surprised either.
Worse.
Confirmed.
The priest looked from the physician to the patient to Richard with the quick, disciplined attention of a man accustomed to entering rooms where fear had already started speaking before he arrived.
Then someone in the crowd said it again.
Louder than before.
"Devil-light."
Too many faces turned to the priest at once.
The word had found office now.
The physician did not waste the chance.
He bowed his head the smallest possible amount toward the priest and spoke with solemn clarity.
Richard caught enough.
Unknown man.
Interfered.
Hidden object.
Dangerous influence.
The priest's eyes settled on Richard's coat.
Then rose to Richard's face.
For one second no one moved.
The patient wheezed.
The wife whispered prayers.
The bell sounded once more in the lane.
And inside Richard's coat, beneath cloth and modern stitching and the gaze of an entire century that had begun, finally, to notice him, the phone lit the fabric with the faintest possible seam of white.
The priest saw it.
So did the cudgel-man.
And Richard knew, before anyone spoke, that whatever he had won tonight, anonymity was over.