The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  But she hadn’t.

  She had failed Adam. She had failed Laura. She had failed everyone.

  A cart rattled past, piled high with empty coffins. That was all. Coffin upon coffin, some cobbled together so carelessly that Emily could see the spaces between the slats, the nails only half-hammered. Her steps slowed as she began to be aware of her surroundings, to realize how eerie was the stillness of the street. There were no vendors, no cries to buy this or that, to patronize this icehouse or that haberdashery. The shops on Swan Street and Roebuck were still and shuttered. The statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square stood sanctuary over a desolate and abandoned landscape.

  A dog prowled past, dragging something in his mouth. Emily jumped back, almost tripping over the hem of Mrs. Turner’s dress as she saw fingers trailing behind. It was an arm, a human arm.

  A woman passed her, moving rapidly, head down, a basket on her arm.

  “Where are you going?” asked Emily.

  “Shops open at half eight,” the woman said shortly. “You’re out of luck if you want brandy or blankets. Can’t get them for love or money.”

  Emily wandered through the empty streets, discovering pockets of civilization. A Wesleyan minister standing on an empty barrel preached to a congregation of several hundred people. “The voice said, Cry! And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass . . .”

  A group of men reeking of rum and cigars reeled past, laughing at the congregants. One of their number fell in the street and lay still, his fellows fleeing.

  Emily ventured closer, but when she saw it was drink, rather than the disease, she left him be to sleep it off.

  A street away, a harried government official was doling out rice, bread, arrowroot, and candles in prearranged parcels.

  “Do you have your certificate?” Emily heard him ask a petitioner. “You’ve got your share already this morning, I remember you.”

  A phaeton, the sort Adam had driven back in Bristol, lurched past, nearly overset by its awkward burden. A coffin protruded from one side, listing farther and farther until it fell, hitting the street with a crash, the corpse rolling free. The horses came to a halt, and the driver dropped down, using his whip to disperse the dogs, who had leaped forward, snarling.

  A girl of not more than six held a toddler balanced on her hip. “Are you all right?” Emily asked. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

  The girl regarded her warily but answered easily enough. “Auntie.”

  “I’ll see you to Auntie,” said Emily, needing to do something, anything.

  From a house, someone shouted to the driver behind them, “Hey! Bring your cart! There’s dead here!”

  But there was an auntie. Emily delivered the two children and admired a baby kicking his fat feet in the yard. “What a handsome boy you have,” she said politely.

  “No, ma’am,” said the auntie. “He’s not mine. I saw this one sitting on the floor in an empty house. With the help of God, I’ll care for it.”

  “God bless you,” said Emily, wishing she had her father there, with his calm certainty of faith. But surely, if God would bless anyone, it would be someone like this?

  She found her way back to the house on Bay Street, past the silent wharves where no sailors plied their trade, the smell of death and the sea in her nostrils.

  “Where have you been?” The door was open before she was half down the walk. “I was ready to start searching the streets!”

  The dimness of the hall after the sunshine made everything seem rather vague. Or perhaps it was the combination of the sights she had seen, the horrors upon horrors that stalked the silent streets.

  “I went for a walk,” said Emily, untying the strings of her borrowed bonnet and setting it carefully down on the hall table.

  “A walk?” Nathaniel made a visible effort to contain himself.

  “Yes, it’s what one does when one doesn’t take a gig.” Emily abandoned the pretense of normalcy. “You didn’t tell me how bad it was.”

  “You had enough to bear.” Adam might have been gone, but his presence was a tangible thing between them. Nathaniel turned away, saying, “Carts and horses are in short supply. I’ve sent to my uncle to see if we can find a way to get you back to Beckles.”

  “No. What I saw today— I met a woman who had children and relations of her own, but had still taken in a child she found alone in an empty house. If she can do that, what excuse have I? I’ll hand out parcels of food or boil water or wash floors. But I have to do something.” The memory of the empty bed upstairs haunted her. She looked up at Nathaniel, feeling raw and bare. “Unless you think I’d be more harm to the patients than good.”

  “You did everything you could for your cousin. Do you understand me? There wasn’t a doctor from here to London who could have done more.” The hallway echoed with the force of his words.

  Emily blinked at his vehemence. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” said Nathaniel brusquely. “You did what you had to do. It’s done. That woman you saw today, this is her home, these are her people.”

  “But they’re not mine?”

  “No,” he said bluntly. “You can walk away, leave it. This isn’t your fight. You accused me of not telling you how bad it is? It’s bad. It’s worse than you can imagine. I was called out to the Asylum for the Destitute today. Every last inmate is dead. Mrs. Kennedy, the keeper’s wife, died this morning. Her husband died last night. There’s not a criminal left in the gaol. They were assigned grave-digging duty and brought the disease back with them. It took three days, Emily. Three days to kill near eighty men. All gone. Every one. And don’t think you’ll be spared by virtue of your station. They’re dying at Government House. It was His Excellency’s orderly this morning. His sister’s maid died last week. It’s killing the doctors. I attended on Dr. Springer’s wife this morning and found him unconscious beside her corpse. Bascom and Brereton were taken last week. There were three hundred deaths yesterday—and that’s only the deaths that were recorded by the Board of Health. There may well have been more, rotting undiscovered. Do you understand what I’m saying? No one is safe, Emily. No one.”

  “I know that.” Her mother, her resolute, indomitable mother had been taken off by a disease that took some and spared others, with no reason to it. “I know I’m not proof against it, any more than any other man. But if I were to die, what of it? Would it be so very dreadful? I have no husband, no children, no brothers or sisters to mourn me. At least I would know I had done what was needed.”

  “I would mourn you.” The hall felt suddenly very small and very close, the air warm and heavy. Clearing his throat, Nathaniel added, “And I’m sure Mr. Davenant would shed a tear. He might even write you an ode.”

  “Thank you,” said Emily with some asperity. “Do you rate my value so low? I’d hoped for a sonnet sequence at least.”

  Nathaniel didn’t rise to the challenge. “I rate you higher than you think. That’s why I need to make you understand. You don’t know what you’re offering. I know you saw the cholera in Bristol. But the climate—it’s different there. I don’t think you understand the effect the heat has on the spread of the disease. Or if not the spread, at least the smell.”

  “Will you let me be the judge of that? I promise not to swoon on you.”

  “I never expected you would.” Nathaniel seized on another line of attack. “Have you thought that there might be an objection to your staying here alone in my uncle’s house?”

  “But I’m not alone,” said Emily. “You’re here.”

  Nathaniel raised a brow. “My point.”

  Emily grimaced at him. “Do you really care what evil-minded people think? Besides,” she added impatiently, “anyone who has seen the work you do would know you haven’t the energy to go about ravishing people!”

  Nathaniel put his face into his hands and snorted, shoulders shaking with helpless mirth. “I don’t know whether to be comforted or insulted.”

  “Don’t make me dose yo
u with laudanum for your nerves.”

  “My nerves are beyond laudanum.” Lifting his head, Nathaniel blinked away tears of laughter. “My, er, stamina aside, evil-minded people will talk if an unmarried man and woman share a house. Not during the height of the panic, perhaps, but afterward.”

  Emily had to acknowledge the justice of that. “I could go back to Miss Lee’s, I suppose,” she said doubtfully.

  “Good Lord, do you think I want to sign your death warrant? The Lord only knows where she gets her water. I could take lodgings—”

  “There is one obvious solution,” pointed out Emily. “We could bring patients in.”

  “You want me to turn my uncle’s house into a hospital.”

  “If you put it that way—yes.” Seeing that he was wavering, she added reasonably, “We could limit it to women and children if you like. Surely, no one could object to that.”

  “No one, indeed,” murmured Dr. Braithwaite.

  “They’ll be too sick to steal the silver. You’ve said yourself, you’re not allowed to house them in the hospital because of the rules regarding infectious diseases. Besides,” she added, “it’s only fair. I let you use my house as an infirmary.”

  “For broken arms,” said Nathaniel. “Not the bowel death.”

  But he found two nurses from the hospital and installed them in the servants’ quarters and arranged for cots and pallets to be delivered and set up in bedrooms and along the veranda. Word was sent to Belle View. London Turner sent back his approval and an elderly relation to serve as chaperone to Emily. He asked only that they not burn the house down in his absence, and that they save all receipts.

  Cousin Bella wasn’t terribly much use as a practical nurse, but she told wonderful stories, sitting and knitting and talking as Emily plunged yet another load of soiled sheets into the kettle in the yard or splashed lime across the floor.

  “Trust my uncle not to miss a trick,” said Nathaniel darkly, when Cousin Bella arrived, sitting on a cart piled high with blankets and rolled mattresses and even a squawking crate of poultry.

  “I like her,” said Emily firmly, and she found that while Cousin Bella wasn’t much for mopping up sick or changing soiled nappies, she was a wonder with the young children, many of whom had lost their parents and siblings, and found themselves weak and sick in a strange house with echoing high ceilings and stern-looking portraits on the walls. She never wearied of telling endless stories about clever spiders and thwarted witches, each more fantastical than the last, keeping even the sickest children spellbound as Emily bustled about changing sheets and swaddling cloths, feeling brows and emptying bedpans.

  A public fast day was held on June 14, but both Nathaniel and Emily were too busy to attend the service at the cathedral. Nearly three hundred died that day in Bridgetown, and as many again were taken ill. Word had spread that London Turner’s house had turned infirmary, and even Cousin Bella had her hands full, admitting those they could admit, turning away those they couldn’t, helping to set up a tent in the yard to make room for more beds, more babies. Cots marched in lines down the veranda. Mrs. Turner’s prized silver and china were locked away and the great mahogany table turned on its side to make room for more beds in the dining room.

  The days took on their own strange pattern as they battled death. June boiled into July. The house was divided into sections, one for cholera patients, one for children who had lost their families. Nathaniel grumbled that he’d never anticipated running an orphanage, but Emily just thrust freshly boiled coffee at him and told him to drink up and not to think she didn’t know about the sweets in his pockets, and could he please stop inciting riot among her younger patients?

  They took great delight in scoring points off each other, the one bright spot in otherwise grim days, days of relentless heat and hideous smells. There were recoveries, but there were deaths too, and Emily found herself having to spend some time in the airing cupboard to hide her damp eyes from the other nurses.

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of mourning them,” said Nathaniel, who discovered her when he came in for clean sheets.

  “It’s not terribly productive, is it,” retorted Emily, wiping her nose clumsily on the back of her hand. “Do you weep every time you lose a patient? But oh, I had such hopes of her!”

  “Courage.” Nathaniel produced a clean handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket. He paused at the door of the airing cupboard, his face in shadow. “It doesn’t get easier, you know. No matter how many patients one treats. I was called to the Reverend Bannister’s home this morning. His youngest died yesterday. The idiot man not only kissed the baby in his coffin but encouraged the boy’s sister to do the same.”

  “Oh no,” said Emily, the handkerchief crumpled in her hand.

  Nathaniel nodded, his mustache failing to mask the grim line of his mouth. “Oh yes. There was nothing to be done for her by the time I got there. I did what I could for Mr. Bannister, but he was in a bad way.” He looked down at his hands, dark against the white of his cuffs. His face was tired and strained in the half-light. “That’s one thing about the plague. People will take whatever physician they can get, regardless of color.”

  Emily looked at him sharply, wondering, for a moment, whether he’d heard Adam’s comment about getting him a proper physician.

  She bit her lip. “I hadn’t thought,” she said lamely. “I’d forgot.”

  And she had, mostly. It wasn’t something she thought about when they were together. It was only now, when he said it, that she remembered Adam, and felt as though she had been somehow complicit. He didn’t mean it, she wanted to say, but it felt odd to defend the dead to the living. And, she suspected, he had meant it.

  “I’d have been shown the door a month ago. Now . . .” Nathaniel rubbed his brow with his knuckles. “One woman—an Englishwoman—asked me if I knew any native cures or local magic. She wanted me to find an obeah man for her. She didn’t believe me when I told her I didn’t know any. I told her I had laudanum, and I hoped that was magic enough.”

  “I’m not surprised people are looking for magic,” said Emily ruefully. “There are times when it seems surer than medicine.”

  “No. Give me good, sound science over hocus-pocus any day. We’ll defeat this yet. Just not,” he admitted wearily, “soon enough.”

  Emily shoved his handkerchief up her sleeve and took him firmly by the arm, pointing him in the direction of his room. “Get some rest. We’ll add you to the death toll, if you don’t.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Nathaniel, but he went meekly enough, objecting only to the threat of having Cousin Bella sent in to make sure he stayed there.

  Emily went back to the yard and boiled sheets until she felt more like herself. Her own hands, on the wooden wash paddle, looked strangely pale. It was, she realized, because she’d got so used to the fact that everyone around her bore some degree of African blood. Her own hands looked somehow wrong.

  Hands were hands, and hers were good enough to soak a sheet. Emily shook her head at herself and went back to her work.

  By the first week of August, they were able to fold up the tent in the yard. A week later, the cots were taken up off the veranda. As beds emptied, through either recovery or death, they weren’t filled again. Cautiously, cousins and aunts and grandparents began to appear to claim orphaned children. The dining room emptied, and then the bedrooms. Cousin Bella found her audience shrinking, and began to make noises about returning to Belle View.

  “There were only thirty-two deaths today,” said Nathaniel, coming back from his rounds to an almost empty house. He took the glass of sherry Emily handed him and absently drank from it. “Lord, listen to me. Only thirty-two.”

  The parlor had been reclaimed for its proper use, the curio cabinets set back in their place. Only the absence of the carpet, on which Adam had been ill, proclaimed the ravages that had taken place.

  Nathaniel was standing in the same spot, in the same pose, as the first night she’d met him. It might have
been six months ago. But it wasn’t. He was different; they were both different.

  “Thirty-two makes an improvement over three hundred,” said Emily matter-of-factly, getting a grip on her thoughts and her sherry.

  “It’s getting worse in the countryside,” warned Nathaniel, setting his glass down on the cabinet. “It’s bad in St. Lucy, they say, and beginning to move through St. Andrew. But yes. It seems to be dying down in the town. I was beginning to be afraid it would never stop, that it would rage on and on until there was no one left to claim.”

  Emily looked at him in surprise. “You never said.”

  “What would have been the good? It’s my job to fight death—even when death seems to be playing with loaded dice.” Taking up his glass again, he added, looking at the sherry instead of her, “I know I ought to have insisted you return to Beckles, but—I don’t know what I would have done without you here.”

  “Slept from time to time?” suggested Emily, more touched than she cared to admit. “It can’t have been much help, having your home given over to patients.”

  “Can’t it have been? No matter what happened, you were there, with that infernal pot in the yard and your bucket of lime. Any challenge that arose, you met it with a mop and a bowl of broth. You never despaired, and you kept me from despairing. Without you . . .” Nathaniel made a brusque gesture, nearly oversetting his sherry. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, will you just take my thanks and leave it at that?”

  He seemed so uncomfortable, so unlike his usual assured self that Emily found herself at a loss for tart comments.