The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “I’m all right, thank you,” Caroline said, and stood, and kept her feet.

  Jeffers stood too, his hands still outstretched toward her. “I saw you fall. I was at my desk and I saw you through the window.”

  Mr. Perkins watched from the steps of the post office. Mrs. Thomas from the front porch of her house.

  “The heat, that’s all.” Caroline smiled: On hot days we all of us faint.

  “Heat?” Jeffers’s forehead creased.

  She remembered the snow. “I meant I overbundled myself.”

  His eyes on her naked throat.

  “Well, I ought to get back,” she said.

  “You’re red as a new baby. Come in and sit down a minute.”

  Caroline had to move—the skin might find her again. “Really, I’m all right now.”

  “Your father would never forgive me if I let you leave like this. I’d feel much better if you’d just come back and rest, and later I can drive you. Why rush off? What disaster, if you wait a moment?”

  Caroline had visions of Eliza setting bedclothes on fire, Livia poisoning the well, Rebecca turning the horses loose, a great tidal wave of the earth of their hills gathering itself to bury them all. A laugh escaped her. She could tell from Jeffers’s face that the laugh hadn’t helped her cause. “Thank you, but I’m quite well,” she said again. Before he could catch her wrist and make her stay, she turned and began walking. Her legs felt less responsive to her than usual, as if they were weighing their considerations.

  “Miss Hood.”

  If she turned again to answer him she might fall. She kept walking. Jeffers did not pursue.

  There was still no one else on the road. She forded iced-over puddles. She wished she knew what her feet, legs, arms, hands had been doing while her mind was dark, but if there had been flailing, Jeffers would have said, or she would have known it from his face.

  Time, though, to tell.

  The thought came simply and brought a simple relief. She could do it, tell. Not her father—that she could not imagine; she couldn’t stand to imagine his face, hearing this from her. She suspected her mother had only barely told her father—Another one today, but not so bad, don’t worry—reports short enough to be delivered quickly while he was working, with a dry brushing kiss to the forehead. There was some fragility to Samuel that demanded protection, at least if one loved him. If her mother had turned to Miles Pearson, the need to really say it might have been part of what prompted the turning: Find me next time. Next time I don’t want to be alone. The idea of being alone when you weren’t even there yourself was terrible.

  But David, maybe. Caroline might be able to make herself less alone by telling David. His face she would be interested to see.

  She walked faster, closing the distance. And suddenly there David was, walking away from Trilling Heart as she was walking toward it; her mind might have made him for her. Her heart beat hard, thickly. She thought she might faint again right in his path and take away the need for telling at all.

  A strange thing just happened, she would say.

  From his face she would see what it meant to him, her falling like that, into a place none of them could see.

  David called to her before she reached him. “Have you seen Meg?”

  She saw that he wasn’t strolling but hurrying, almost running.

  “No, why?”

  “She went somewhere, we don’t know where, while Livia was asleep.” He stopped in front of her, but his need to keep moving was visible in the way he stood.

  Somewhere, ominous word. “Eliza—”

  “Knows nothing, or claims to know nothing. Your father is talking to her right now.”

  “And I’m sure she’ll just tell him every last thing she knows.” Caroline wheeled in the road, dizzy, disregarding the dizziness, scanning the gray-green frozen hills. “Meg can’t have gone far. She won’t have made much of a plan.”

  Though this only used to be true of Meg—before the illness and the new boldness it seemed to have given her and all of them. She could have gone far enough now.

  David’s hands raked his hair.

  Caroline stepped off the road into the snow. “Shout if you find her,” she said. She’d try the main hill first—it had worked before, given her the view of Eliza limp and tossed down that had made her begin to see what was coming.

  The land as she crossed it had never looked emptier. The hills might have opened up and closed over Meg again; she might lie beneath them now, a plain, drowned maiden faceup under the surface of an opaque sea. Above her the red bobbing undersides of birds.

  Caroline hadn’t even begun to climb the main hill when she heard David shouting. And now here he was, coming back, running. “Caroline, we’ve found her!”

  And Hawkins. Hawkins, not hurrying, walking with his arm around Meg’s shoulders.

  “I found this one,” he called, “going down the road with a basket, as if she were on a summer’s picnic.”

  Meg sniffled. Had she been crying already when Hawkins found her?

  “I had a dream some of us were picking berries,” she said. “In the dream they tasted wonderful. I wanted them, when I woke up, so I came out to see.”

  “But Miss Sawyer, it’s winter,” Caroline said.

  “Berries?” said Hawkins. “Even if you could find them—and Miss Hood is right, of course, none to be had in winter—berries will often kill you, miss. I’m surprised at you, a big girl like you, not knowing that.”

  He smiled, baring his teeth.

  13.

  DR. HAWKINS

  Over his mind, her illness hung like a black curtain.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 310)

  Hawkins wanted an assembly for his introduction. “It will be better if they meet me all at once,” he told the teachers, in Samuel’s study. Caroline thought of the bridegroom in a fairy tale, his many choices for a bride arrayed before him.

  “You don’t want to examine them individually?” Samuel asked.

  “Oh, I will. But this should come first,” Hawkins explained. He seemed to be enjoying explaining things to Samuel. “For me to creep amongst them like a rumor—that’s the wrong approach. I suspect their secret connections to one another may be part of what’s fueling this. We have to avoid giving those connections more to do and thickening them up.”

  Hawkins’s voice vibrated in the fleshy parts of Caroline’s arms, her legs, her belly. Connections. She pictured the girls in a circle, their wrists ensnared by interwoven bracelets of hair.

  “You know, that’s along the lines of what we were thinking too. That their minds—something about the content of their minds…” Samuel was relieved to have Hawkins here—he sagged with this relief—but still, he was unused to being taught.

  Hawkins said, “In these cases one is really treating the group as well as the individual.”

  “What cases?” Caroline asked, from her chair in the corner.

  “Well, I won’t know for certain until I’ve done the examinations—so far I only have conjectures, though I must say I’m fairly confident in them, from what Sam’s told me. And if it does turn out I’m correct, it will be important to address the sum along with the parts.”

  He seemed more robust and even redder than usual, holding forth, and this made Caroline angry. She knew she should want him to be right about all this—for it to be fixable, for him to fix it. Yet what she wanted just now was to send him upstairs into the mouths of all their slight lions, so that he could come back down pale from a fine bloodletting.

  Sophia said, “What does that mean—parts, sums?” She leaned forward, attentive as a hostess, but her face was uncertain.

  “Oh, Mrs. Moore,” Hawkins said, with another smile, “spoken just like a part.” He clapped. “Let’s round them up, shall we, Sam? Where are they
? What have you done with them? I’ve never in my life seen a school so quiet.”

  Mrs. Sanders was sent up to ready them, and the teachers went to the barn for Hawkins’s unveiling. But the barn did not smell like a place where anything new could happen. Days had passed since anyone had been in here, and the air had a stale earthiness even with the fire going, a scent that suggested animals had died in here and only lately been removed. Perhaps the lingering scent of the ceiling collapse and what the birds had heaped above. Or maybe the barn itself had a memory and was recalling previous disasters; during that last terrible winter at Birch Hill, Caroline remembered the bodies of three dead calves, bony and distended with bloat, piled against one outer corner of the building because the ground was frozen too hard to bury them. They were the first substantial dead things she’d ever seen. Their locked-stiff legs had seemed to her about to pop the bubbles of one another’s stomachs.

  She must not faint during this meeting. She couldn’t bear the idea of anyone having to carry her out.

  Her father and Sophia and David all sat against the back wall too. Hawkins stood before the teacher’s desk, as if he were only another teacher and this were only a new kind of lesson. The girls eyed him as they appeared, unsteadily, and took their seats. Still in that circle, that one body the teachers had been so proud of—forgetting to consider all the things that bodies could do. They rubbed their hands together to warm them.

  “Young ladies, hello,” Hawkins said.

  Now, when they should have been going still and silent, the girls revealed themselves. Most of each girl, each body, settled down, but a part of each was otherwise occupied. “Hmm-hmm,” Abigail said. Livia jerked her head slightly, as if an insect nibbled her earlobe. Meg rubbed at the skin of her arms—perhaps they did itch her now. Tabitha’s legs bounced beneath her desk. And Eliza teetered in her seat, leaned to one side a little before catching herself, then leaned again, though her gaze stayed fixed on Hawkins.

  Would all this happen to Caroline next? Her secret would tell itself to everyone.

  Hawkins planted his feet a little apart. The bridegroom displayed. “I’m Dr. Hawkins, and I will be overseeing your medical treatment.”

  The girls glanced at one another. “What treatment, sir?” Eliza asked.

  “Well, Miss—?”

  “Bell.”

  “Ah, Miss Bell. I knew your father, of course. Very nice to meet you.”

  Eliza inclined her head. Her whole torso slipped forward after it, then straightened.

  “Whoops, there,” Hawkins said.

  Eliza’s expression admitted nothing.

  “What I began to say, Miss Bell, was that I of course can’t tell you precisely what the treatment will be before I have examined you.”

  “What’s the purpose of this meeting then, sir?” Eliza said. “Pardon the question. It’s just that none of us is feeling well, and it’s taxing to gather like this.”

  The rest of them nodded. It was taxing; what a relief to have Eliza to say so.

  “I’m sure,” Hawkins said. “And I do appreciate the effort you’ve all made. It just seemed that an effective way for us to get started would be for me to meet all of you at the same time.” His eyes skipped around the circle. “May I have the rest of your names, please, girls?”

  Softly, they spoke them. Abigail’s hmm interrupted between her first and last.

  “And you, sir?” Eliza said, when they’d finished.

  “I’ve told you my name.”

  “Yes, so we know that, and we know you’re a physician. Why did he send for you, though?” She nodded to Samuel, along the back wall. “Dr. Burgess has been attending us.”

  “You, anyway,” Livia said to Eliza.

  “And have you found yourself much improved, Miss Bell, since Dr. Burgess began his course of treatment?” said Hawkins.

  “He hasn’t really done anything. Just checked on her,” said Felicity.

  Hawkins widened his eyes and nodded.

  “Do you have some additional qualification that better suits you for our care?” Eliza asked.

  Samuel said, “Miss Bell.”

  “No, it’s all right, Sam. Well, I’ve been a practicing physician for just about three times the length of your lives, girls. Not longer, probably, than Richard Burgess—but the bulk of my work has been in Boston, and I think it’s safe to say my experience will have been a bit wider, a bit deeper than his. I’ve seen almost everything there is to see. Mr. Hood called me for that reason.”

  “You think you’ve seen this, what’s happening to us, before?”

  “Do you know how to stop it?” said Meg, with hope in her voice. She looked at Eliza, read that she’d judged wrong, and drew back in her chair.

  “Really, ladies, you mustn’t worry,” Hawkins said.

  But Samuel had taught them to know an answer that wasn’t really an answer. They sat without speaking, to let Hawkins see this.

  He said, “Of course much more information will have to wait until after I’ve had a chance to make my examination. But if my suspicions are correct, yes, I’ve treated many young ladies in your situation before, with a great deal of success. I must have treated four in the past month.”

  “What situation?” Abigail said.

  “What is it? What’s wrong with us?” said Julia.

  “The place to begin is often to ask if you yourselves have any theories. It can be quite useful, quite enlightening, to hear them in cases such as these. What do you suspect is making you ill, girls?”

  “Are we expected to know?” Eliza said.

  In spite of herself a tremendous pride in Eliza was rising in Caroline.

  “Well, we might start with your reading habits, Miss Bell. I hear that your father’s book has taken on a particular fascination for the whole group.”

  The girls looked at Samuel, surreptitious reporter.

  “I gave Dr. Hawkins some background, in case it should prove relevant,” Samuel said.

  “It’s certainly a very exciting book,” Hawkins went on. “Full of all sorts of alarming occurrences, and of course a physical languishing too. In combination with the return of the birds and with your own presence here now, I could see how such a book might seem…suggestive to all of you. I wondered if perhaps you might have had any ideas about the story seeping over into life. You know, ghosts, visitations, things of that nature, perhaps being part of your affliction.”

  “Ghosts?” said Eliza bitingly.

  Hawkins bristled. “As it happens, your father didn’t find the idea so ridiculous. He loved the whole notion, in the book of course but in his real life too. ‘Celestial guests,’ he called them. He was always wandering around searching for likely sites of hauntings, saying he’d felt spirits in the forest, spirits in the house.” Hawkins fluttered his fingers.

  Caroline watched Eliza swallow questions: What did he say? What were the words, the actual words, every last one?

  “It was never exactly clear whether he thought they were the spirits of the dead, or some sort of spirits of the earth, or what, precisely. You might have noticed that vagueness in the novel too. Logical consistency was never Miles’s strong suit, if you’ll excuse my saying so, Miss Bell.”

  “Dr. Hawkins, perhaps we might continue,” said Caroline. She didn’t want to watch Hawkins dance Eliza along this edge.

  “Certainly, Miss Hood—I only thought Miss Bell might be interested in hearing. Then if you aren’t similarly mystical, girls, what are your theories? It’s hard for me to believe you have none. Especially given where you sit, what you’ve been doing here all these months. You must have theories about everything now.”

  Tabitha’s jouncing knee knocked into her desk. Hawkins winced theatrically. “Careful.”

  “I can’t stop it,” Tabitha said.

  “Of course. But to continue, I
think you must see that this is not some run-of-the-mill fever or cough that’s passed from one to the other of you through ordinary contagion.”

  “Ordinary? No,” said Eliza.

  “Ah, good,” Hawkins said, taking a step forward. “Now perhaps we’re beginning to get at something. Tell me, Miss Bell, do you and your friends feel yourselves to be…special in some way?”

  Here in this room, on their first day at Trilling Heart, Samuel had told them that they all were. Caroline glanced at him, beside her on the bench. His eyes were full of tears.

  Eliza pulled in a breath. “I think we’d best let you decide, sir.”

  Caroline feared Eliza, resented her, wanted her cured, bested, gone from their lives, but just then—the little smile on Eliza’s tilting face—she would have given anything to see Eliza win at whatever this was. No matter the cost to any of them.

  * * *

  *

  “Unstable,” said Hawkins, back in Samuel’s study. “Visibly, markedly. Small wonder, given what she comes from. Sam, she thinks she’s inside that book, and you’re summoning spirits to torment her, I’d wager on it.”

  “Perhaps we might table the question of wagers for now,” Caroline said. “I think you’ll find that whatever else she is, Eliza isn’t silly. And she isn’t the only one who’s ill.” She kept her hands behind her. She worried Hawkins would somehow see the tingling on her skin. It hadn’t been so bad earlier, faint and distant, but it was present now, so present she felt she was actually listening to it speak.

  “You think the rest of them would be sick if she weren’t?” Hawkins said.

  No, Caroline didn’t, of course.

  “To be clear—you’re saying the others are only imitating her?” David asked.

  “Oh, not intentionally. But in a manner of speaking, yes, without their even realizing. In cases such as this there’s often an identifiable ringleader.”

  Ringleaders, rings of girls in the woods, rings of girls in the snow, a ring of hair around a finger.