water, her only clean set of clothes now drenched and unwearable.
Frankie raised her chin—something she’d never be allowed to do anywhere on Oglethorpe property—but this was
Charles’ eyes skimmed around the room again, and he walked toward the bed shoved into the far corner; not even a scrap of cloth hung from the ceiling to afford any privacy. This made Frankie stiffen because it was such an intimate part of her life. This was where she lay down at night, where she dreamed (often of him), and where she was most vulnerable.
For a fleeting moment she remembered him this morning and how he’d come home so late and his mother had asked if he’d washed. She wondered if this was something he did every evening—follow a girl home, stare at her bed, and maybe spend the night with her before returning to his proper life.
Bile churned in her stomach. This wasn’t what she wanted to think of him. He’d been kind to her, once, and maybe even twice if he’d known she was hiding in his mother’s room this morning.
Maybe he thought it was time for her to repay that kindness. Her eyes flicked toward Cathy. She would do anything to keep her sister safe and alive.
Cathy had been sick for two weeks now, almost three. No one had ever survived the plague that long, and this alone gave Frankie hope. If she could keep piling fresh flowers around her and keep the miasma from the swamps from creeping into the house, Cathy stood a chance.
“What do you want?” Frankie asked Charles again, trying to keep her voice icy sharp.
Charles leaned over and rested his hand on the blanket draped across the bed. Frankie swallowed, wondering where she could send Cathy to be safe while whatever Charles wanted to happen here tonight took place.
And then Charles was on one knee reaching toward the floor. When he straightened, he held a wilted rose petal between his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger.
“From the Oglethorpe garden?” he asked.
Frankie’s stomach tensed. She’d been surreptitiously taking more flowers from the property, always making sure she wasn’t seen. She wanted to explain, to say that she had no choice when her sister’s health was at stake, but she bit the insides of her cheeks instead.
He walked around the room toward Frankie, whose skin was pricked with goose bumps as the bathwater dried along her arms. Cathy shifted in her tub, sending little ripples to shush over the rim, but other than that she made no noise. Even though Cathy was her older sister, Frankie had been the one to step into her mother’s shoes after she was carried off. It didn’t take much for Cathy to defer to her.
As Charles drew closer, Frankie saw, now, that he’d collected an entire handful of shriveled flowers from the floor. He didn’t stop at a respectable distance but instead came nearer than necessary before letting the petals drift from his fingers. Several of them clung to the damp patches of Frankie’s sheet, one pressing against the edge of her right breast. She inhaled sharply as her eyes were drawn to the bright splotch of color, and then she spun around abruptly once she realized that Charles’ gaze was focused there as well.
Cathy started to stand from the tub, but Frankie cut her eyes to her, telling her to stay put. The beaked doctors could still come at any minute.
“What do you want?” It was the only thing Frankie could bring herself to say.
But Charles said nothing, and when she glanced over her shoulder, she saw him staring at her sister. Cathy’s eyes grew wide, and Frankie rushed to stand between them.
“She’s sick,” Charles stated.
Frankie made no move to confirm it but she knew she couldn’t deny it. Why else would her sister be sitting fully clothed in the bath? “It’s none of your business,” she ultimately answered.
“My mother would disagree,” he replied.
“I’m not sick, and I’m the one who works there.” Frankie crossed her arms over her chest, trying to hide the rose petal and the thinness of the sheet covering her. “That’s all that matters. The health of my sister is irrelevant.”
He raised an eyebrow, and Frankie chewed harder on the inside of her cheek.
“It’s why you needed the roses.” Charles’ words came out as a statement rather than a question. His eyes flicked past Frankie’s shoulder to where a chipped cup contained a struggling gardenia cutting, and another sprouted one bud from a tea olive. Barely enough to sweeten the air.
“Why are you here?” This time Frankie’s voice finally cracked. All she could see in her future was getting fired from the Oglethorpe house and losing her wages, which meant that when beaked doctors knocked on her door she couldn’t pay them off, and they’d let their plague eaters scurry across the floor with sharp muddy paws that would pierce her sister’s skin as they climbed up her flesh and howled about her sickness.
Charles reached out and took Frankie’s elbow and tugged her toward him. Now all she could picture was what would happen next. How he would use this knowledge about her—this weakness—to have his way with her. She hated that she’d once believed the best of him when he so clearly only deserved the worst.
“Don’t make her watch,” she begged him in a whisper. “Please.” Her voice was desperate.
He hesitated, his eyes searching her. She couldn’t help it when she glanced at the bed and then back at him.
Realization dawned on him, and he dropped her arm as though it were on fire. He took a large step away from her and then another. “What do you think of me?”
Frankie could come up with no answer that wouldn’t offend him and get her fired, so she kept her mouth pressed tightly shut. Charles glanced again at Cathy, whose chin trembled against the surface of the water, sending out patterns of tiny ripples.
He reached for Frankie again and pulled her to the door and out onto the street. Already she could smell the hint of incense that led the procession of the beaked doctors. She heard the howl of a plague eater and then wailing as a family was wrenched apart.
How long until they took Cathy?
“I’ll do anything to keep this job . . . Charles.” She forced herself to say his name, to make this personal, but it felt wrong the way it fell from her mouth. If she were on his property, he would be Master Oglethorpe, but never Charles. Just as his mother was Mistress and never Camellia.
“If she’s sick, they’re going to take her eventually,” he said when the door closed shut behind them.
“I know.” It was all Frankie could muster.
“How you’ve kept her hidden this long I don’t know.”
He already had so many of her secrets to lord over her, another didn’t matter. “Most of them accept bribes. Even small ones.”
His head shook. “They won’t for much longer. Their sweeps are becoming more aggressive, taking more people. Things have gotten worse; even the families from the hills are looking for a way out.”
This revelation shocked Frankie. It had never occurred to her that the wealthy families with their gardens and filtered water and soft breezes would be so worried about the plague that they’d abandon their property. It would take only hours for those left along the edges of the swamp to fight their way in and take the estates over in the families’ absence.
“But I haven’t seen anything . . . packing or preparations,” Frankie said. “There hasn’t even been a rumor.”
“They’re afraid that if the servants know, then their plans will go wrong. If the help sees us leaving, what’s to stop full-bore panic? And if there’s panic, the enforcers will lock down the harbor even tighter than it is now, and then no one will escape. As it is, they think only one more ship will be able to rush the blockade to freedom.”
Frankie leaned her head back against the side of her shack, trying to find the stars through the hazy mist drifting from the swamp. “Why are you here? Why are you telling me this?” she finally asked.
Next door her neighbor set off another round of fireworks, and the air filled with spent gunpowder. How this type of smell didn’t cause sickness while the one from the swamp did, Frankie never understood.
Charles took a long time to answer. “I was there that morning when you came to Oglethorpe with your mom and you sneaked into the garden.”
Frankie twisted her head toward him. She didn’t remember him at all.
“My tutor sent me out to draw something in nature, but I couldn’t find anything interesting. I’d spent hours staring around, looking for something exciting, but nothing caught my attention. And then you came sneaking down
