Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

has gripped her, but there is little he can do and he knows she has sensed as much. He orders the family to keep the fire banked, and to give her what water she wants together with a little wine to fortify her. More importantly, she is to be attended only by those servants and family who have themselves already suffered the smallpox. No children are to visit her. Any mirrors should be removed from her room. Yes, he has seen worse cases come through. There can be no excuse for losing hope.

That evening the pustules form; by midnight she is delirious, and to the petrified relief of those who watch over her, the girl dies two days later, an hour before sunrise.

Viney is not there when she dies. He already has five new cases, three of them children. They are the kindling; he can only guess how the fire will rage, how it will spread. He rides from one stricken home to another, eating his meals on horseback or standing in the kitchen while some sobbing woman cuts a slice from the spit. Were he a heartless man it might have amused him, how his powerlessness spurs them on to greater faith in him, as though his very shape atop the grey mare were enough to ward off disaster. He is loneHer than he has ever been in his life.

The first death. The news is everywhere within hours. Elizabeth hears it from Dan Miller's wife, Ruth, who has heard it from Biddy Bidewell who has heard it from another. The Dyer children are sat about the table in the kitchen, all but James, still laid up in the little parlour. She does not say anything to them but her face betrays her. Liza gives her a worried, questioning look. Who was that at the door, Mother?'

'Just Ruth Miller with a pot o' gossip.' She knows they will find out soon enough. Of the family, only Joshua and the Widow have been with the smallpox.

Elizabeth takes a basket into the dairy, fills it with cheese and butter and cream to go over to the Ketch family the next morning, then goes upstairs to her room. When Joshua comes, the two of them sit on the edge of the old casement bed, hand in hand, wordless and pale, hardly a sound in the world beyond the rise and fall of their own breath.

Hearing of Amelda's death, Sarah and Liza cry for an hour; then there are chores in the dairy, the hens to feed, a shirt to be darned. They do not feel especially threatened; they are fuU of strength and youth, and though they have seen the marks of smallpox on the faces of their elders, they have never seen the sickness at work. Life goes on. A half-dozen cases are reported in Coverton. One of Lady Denbeigh's kitchen servants is said to be in the balance. Elizabeth holds to what comfort she can and tells herself that the disease is not spreading as fast as they had feared, that there has not been much dying. Perhaps the disease is of a mild type and it was Amelda's constitution more than the sickness which carried her off. Then too, no near neighbours have been affected. The worst of it seems to be Kenn way and towards the sea. For a day, two days, she relaxes her vigilance. Then, as if the sickness had been waiting for a moment's inattention, it comes.

Sarah complains of a persistent headache. Her limbs ache. She feels feverish. When the marks come Elizabeth resigns herself to saving what she can. Sarah is followed by Liza. Then Charles. She nurses them without tears or sighs. She sets her face against the power of the disease, attempts to resist the onslaught through the unremitting exercise of her love. James remains free from infection. She keeps him away both from herself and from the other children. The house divides into camps. Elizabeth, Sarah,

Liza and Charles, Joshua, the Widow and James. From one camp come strange, pathetic cries, the air of fever. From the other, a tense and impotent silence.

Elizabeth carries her bedding into the children's room and lives there with them, spooning honey-water, changing sweat-soaked clothes, mumbling prayers as she goes from one to the other. She feels oddly calm, as she did that night on the frozen river, but now the ice is thin and cracking and the voices of her children, seeping through the swollen membranes of their mouths, are the sound of the dark, cold-flowing river beneath.

Joshua, on the understanding that he will not afterwards go to James, visits the sick-room, hanging above his children like an ineffectual planet, touching them with a despairing tenderness. Sarah, whose beauty has given him such great and quiet pride, affects him the most cruelly. The disease has turned her face into a mask of livid blisters, so that when she dies he is almost glad, though in the hour of her death he feels himself wrapped in a cloak of madness. Viney comes and helps lay the girl out and wrap her in her shroud. He sees in Elizabeth her will, hard and tempered. He knows that she will last at least as long as the storm. Joshua he persuades to keep to his work, tells him of other families, also grieving. Joshua hardly hears him.

On his way out, Viney speaks to his old assistant through the door of the parlour. 'Your sister Sarah is with God, Jem, but your mother is a fine nurse. I have great hope of the others being well again.'

The boy's voice comes muffled through the wood: 'Shall I die too?' The question is cool, undistressed.

'We must all die one day, Jem.'

'But shall I die now? Like Sarah?'

'I think not, child.'

'Nor I,' says the voice.

A tumbril, the wheels muffled with sacking, comes next morning. Joshua goes with them to see his daughter into the ground. Elizabeth remains with Liza and Charlie. Delirious, their voices