wasn’t even a full day’s wages, as earlier they’d been to the market to buy food for the week. The doctor gazed down at her mother’s trembling palm, and Frankie held her breath, waiting.
“It isn’t enough,” the doctor pronounced. “Next time have more.”
Frankie froze. More doctors came in and bound her mother. “Take care of your sister,” she shouted as she was dragged away. Even though Frankie was the younger sister, she knew her mother was speaking to her. Cathy’s brain didn’t always work the way it should for a girl her age, and Frankie had learned early on how to be the older sister in responsibility if not in years.
The next statement came out muffled as one of the doctors shoved a rag into their mother’s mouth. “Remember I love you!”
And then she was gone.
The quarantine was instantaneous. Not that it took much work to shut down the little town. Portlay was squashed between the swamp and the sea—the only way in was either by ship or the rickety bridge leading out past rotting water and wilted trees. What was left of the mainland civilization was miles and miles away.
Most people knew it was suicide to try going through the swamp this time of year anyway—the miasma hung thick as fog, just waiting to lay waste to whatever crossed its path. Of course that didn’t bother the doctors. Their long, thin beaks were stuffed with incense and herbs; their clothing was doused with scented oils to keep the bad air at bay.
Once the doctors made it into town, they didn’t bother with gates or guards to seal off the entrance to Portlay. Instead they sent out the diggers to pull up the foundation for the first section of bridge. The men did as they were told, shirts off in the heat and backs glistening with sweat, as they stacked the old brick on a slice of dry land.
Three days later most of those men were crying red tears and being taken into the bowels of the hospital so that the people of Portlay wouldn’t realize just how many were dying on a daily basis. It was one thing for people to abstractly gauge the scope and breadth of the disease, but another for it to be so blatantly visible in the form of dead bodies piled outside for family members to claim. The numbers would incite a riot, and that would disrupt the order of things. How would the Oglethorpes’ gardens be maintained, and the Tybees’ tea be served, and the Musgroves’ linens be changed if the masses took to the street in protest?
For those who lived behind pruned hedges with properties wrapped in sweet-smelling gardens, the fever was nothing but a nuisance. Their houses stood tall on the tops of hills, well above the weight of miasma, so that the scant wind of summer could stir the air through rooms, dispelling any sour odor that might lead to illness.
Those families had ample stores of sweet-scented oils and incense and candles with smoke that smelled like irises and clouds. Their water ran through layers of filtration before being pumped into basins and sinks.
Frankie knew well the lengths the wealthiest in town went to avoid contact with illness and how vexed they became at any interruption to routine. And so the night after her mother was taken, she bent over the last of their candles fighting with needle and thread as she cut her mother’s Oglethorpe uniform to a size that would fit her own much smaller frame.
On the other side of the bed Cathy whimpered in her sleep, and Frankie noticed the sheen of sweat along the back of her neck and a flush to her face. For a long while she watched her sister sleep through eyes thick with tears.
She should have fought harder for their mother. She should have been better prepared. She’d failed their tiny family—what was left of it—and she refused to let that happen again. From now on there would be a tub of water always standing ready, and at the first hint of a beaked-doctor raid she’d shove her sister into it and coat her with rose powder to fend off the scent of sickness that seemed to be spawning inside her.
Frankie slipped from the bed and prodded at the fire, hoping the smoke could keep the bad air from the swamps at bay, if only for a little while.
Frankie had only been working at the Oglethorpe house for a few days when she sneaked off to the courtyard garden and plucked free a fresh bloom.
“I saw that.” The voice was male and much too close.
Frankie’s back stiffened. She felt the weight of rose petals in her pocket, and her hand itched to clasp tightly around them. But instead she kept still and silent, letting her chin dip forward in deference.
The owner of the voice drew near, polished leather boots crunching along the cracked oystershell path. In the distance a cannon blew, the enforcers of Portlay trying to clear miasma from the air.
Frankie expected the voice to demand an explanation and perhaps dismiss her on the spot, so she was surprised when long fingers wrapped softly around her wrist to draw her hand forward.
Everything inside her wanted to look up, to search out the expression on the man’s face, but she knew that the slightest hint of defiance, even a flash in her eyes, could get her dismissed. She couldn’t afford that.
She clutched the stem of the rose she’d just clipped and felt thorns break into her skin. Frankie refused to wince.
Gently, the man pried her fingers back until he could pluck the flower from her grasp. “My mother would be incensed if she found out,” the voice said.
So now Frankie’s fears were confirmed. He was part of the family, an Oglethorpe. Her lips began to tremble, and she bit at them furiously. She was in even more trouble than she could have thought.
Excuses ran through her mind. Not for the man standing in front of her—trying to beg her way out of this situation would be useless—but for her sister for when Frankie came home early with only final wages in her pocket.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Frankie murmured, trying to keep her voice even and subdued.
A silence stretched between them. The man still held his fingers around her wrist, and she became far too aware of the feel of his touch. His skin was so much softer than she’d ever imagined possible. Not like the thick calluses of her mother and sister or the blisters that peppered Frankie’s own palms.
“Why?”
At his question Frankie lifted her head, remembering too late to keep demure. She’d expected someone much older than the young man standing in front of her. By the ornamentation on his boots and the sharpness of the crease in his pants, Frankie had thought he must be a brother to the Mistress or perhaps a far-flung cousin. But this boy was hardly much older than she was.
His hair was oiled smooth and his skin scrubbed fresh. She could see where sandalwood powder dusted along the edges of his collar, giving him a crisp, heady smell that mingled with the roses surrounding them.
“Are you going to let me go if I answer?” Frankie asked.
He glanced down at where he gripped her, and his hand released her arm immediately, as if he was stunned to still be holding her.
“I meant, are you going to dismiss me?” she clarified, and just in case he misinterpreted that term as well, she added, “Fire me?”
He considered for a moment and then said, “If you lie.”
Already he wore the mantle of the Oglethorpe name easily along his shoulders, and Frankie wondered what it was about growing up in these houses that could make someone so sure of themselves so young. It was the exact opposite of how Frankie felt every moment of every day. She was always questioning, always wondering, as though her life were a hand-me-down pair of shoes that had previously conformed to someone else’s stride and never fit her own.
For a fleeting moment Frankie considered giving him the truth: her sister was ill, and she needed the rose petals to keep the stench of bad air at bay. But she couldn’t tell him that. If he knew where she went home to and where she came from every morning, he would tell his mother, and she’d call out the plague eaters, and before Frankie could make it home her sister would be gone.
And so she told him a part of a truth instead. “My mother was a maid here, and once, when I was little, she brought me to work.” Frankie’s eyes widened in panic as she realized how she’d misspoken, and she rushed to clarify. “I know she wasn’t supposed to, but my father had just . . .” She struggled for the right words.
“It’s okay,” the Oglethorpe boy said.
After a hesitation Frankie heaved a shaking breath and continued. “It was washday and I was supposed to
