the path, and you had this look on your face like you’d suddenly found a kind of heaven. I could tell, everything was a wonder to you. You took none of it for granted, even the flowers that had wilted and aged.”
Frankie sank back into her memories, trying to remember him, but she could recall nothing.
“I drew you,” Charles said simply. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper folded several times over. With careful movements, he began to unfold it. “I couldn’t bear to show it to my tutor. It felt too personal.”
He handed the page to Frankie, and she swallowed twice before taking it. She noticed how her hand trembled as she shifted for better light. Sketched in pencil across the page was her, hands on her knees as she bent so close to a daffodil bud that the fringy edges of it caused her nose to crinkle.
This moment she remembered. The brightness of the yellow, the crispness of the scent. She’d even picked that flower, and the sap from the stem had pulled into long saliva-like strands that draped over her fingers.
Charles kept talking. “I’d never thought to find something so simple as a flower quite as mesmerizing as you seemed to. You took delight in things I’d always dismissed.”
Her cheeks were hot under his scrutiny, and she remembered again about the thinness of the sheet draped across her body and how she wore nothing underneath.
“I never knew who you were,” he continued. “I waited in the garden for you to come back so I could talk to you. I thought you had to be a daughter of one of my mother’s friends, but I never saw you again. I was so young, but I think . . .” He hesitated. “I think I fancied myself in love with you.”
Frankie’s heart soared until Charles let out a kind of laugh as if the very notion of him caring for her was ridiculous. The blood that only a heartbeat before had sung through her veins froze, and she struggled to keep her shoulders from sagging.
She pushed the sketch back toward him. The creases crossing it were frayed, the pencil faded along the well-worn lines. “I’m sorry.” Frankie had no idea why she said those words. She’d done nothing wrong, and yet still she felt somehow inadequate.
She despised being embarrassed about where she lived and the life she’d been born into—one she had no control over. She wanted to shout at him that she was a hard worker and a smart girl and none of her surroundings were her fault. She was trying—damn it—as hard as she could to hold her life together, and she didn’t need his scorn.
“You know who I am now.” She kept her voice stiff. “Not the wealthy heiress to some fortune with a house on the hill and a cottage out along a stretch of sand somewhere down the coast.” She hated how her lip trembled. “I’m a servant in your mother’s house, as my mother was before me and her mother before her. And the only garden I own can be contained in two broken teacups.”
Charles said nothing. A cannon roared in the distance as she stared at him and let him stare back. The scent of incense had grown stronger. Soon doctors would knock on her door, and she only had two days’ wages to offer them to pass without stepping inside.
She waited for Charles to say something, to tell her it didn’t matter where she came from, but those were words reserved for dreams, not reality. She could see the beaked doctors down the street, and she was sure, now, that they never traversed the neighborhoods on the hill but rather spent their time in the communities along the swamp.
First in the procession came a thin boy shuffling slowly with a silver censer that he waved back and forth in intricate patterns, filling the air around them with smoky blue incense to ward off the miasma.
Behind him came the doctors in their sweeping black cloaks, their long white masks piercing the night in front of them. Their goggles made them appear as though they had no eyes and therefore no souls. In their gloved hands they wound leather leashes that barely restrained plague eaters scrabbling toward the hovels they passed.
The creatures were hideous, a perversion of nature, with their long mangy bodies and their forked tongues licking the air, tasting for fever. They grunted as they walked, the talons of their many toes digging into the cracked dirt of the road.
Frankie needed to be inside preparing Cathy. By this time the water in the tub would be cold, and Frankie had to dump rose powder over her head and dunk her under to mask the scent of illness.
This was her life, here with the swamp and the bad air and the sickness. Charles belonged on the hill with its freshly scented breezes. She was stupid to have ever dreamed about them. She’d given him enough time to respond to what she’d said to him—to deny the truth of it—and still he was silent, and it hurt because she hated to lose the idea of him to reality.
He was just a boy in a big house with a lovely winding garden. Nothing more.
“Go.” The word she spoke was simple and effective. He paused, only a moment, and then nodded before striding off. She was surprised, at first, to see him heading toward the procession of beaked doctors, but then she remembered that he had nothing to fear from them.
Frankie turned back to the door and took a deep breath before plastering a smile on her face for her sister. She would not fail her family again.
Once Cathy had been dunked under several times and coated liberally with sweet-smelling powder, the two sisters sat and waited for the doctors to knock on the door as Cathy’s bathwater grew cold. Frankie perched on a stool by the tub, holding her sister’s damp hand in her own. Neither of them spoke as they heard and smelled the procession grow closer.
But the knock didn’t come that night, and Frankie let out a long breath of relief. Tomorrow when they came, she’d have three days’ worth of wages for them. She hoped it would be enough.
The next day Frankie paid more attention to the goings-on around her as she performed her duties at the Oglethorpe house. Now that Charles had told her of the family’s plan to escape Portlay, she could sense the nervous thread of energy vibrating through the rooms, the harshness of the Mistress’ voice as she made demands for certain linens to be folded more carefully or her favorite dresses to be pressed.
There was a quietness to the servants as well; the maids moved about with tense lines of worry around their mouths, and Frankie couldn’t determine whether they were caused by fear of the fever or fear of when they would all be forced to find employment elsewhere.
And that’s when Frankie realized the enormity of the situation. If the Oglethorpes left, there would be no need for her, and she’d be fired without any kind of notice. She’d been walking through the garden when the understanding overwhelmed her, and her feet fell still as she struggled to breathe.
For the first time she ignored the beauty surrounding her and the crisp sweetness of the air because all she could think of was Cathy. A sense of panic began to claw its way through Frankie, and her mind scrambled for a solution. She could sneak in after the family left and dig up the roses and plant them in the dirt of her home. That would keep the illness from advancing through her sister, but it wouldn’t keep the beaked doctors from knocking on the door and demanding their bribe.
Frankie’s legs felt weak, and she allowed herself to sit on a nearby bench. On any other day such action would lead to a severe reprimand, but what did that matter if Charles was telling the truth? And he had been—she could see it in the small details of the house, the tiny preparations for the family to flee.
A flicker of movement caught her eye, and Frankie raised her face, scanning the rows of blank windows surrounding the courtyard garden. Most days the curtains were drawn to keep the sun from heating the rooms during the long summer mornings, but today one was open along a third-story corridor.
Charles stood, watching her, his hand cupped around the sill. Frankie thought she saw one of his fingers twitch, and she couldn’t tell if it was a greeting or merely a muscle spasm. It didn’t matter. She was sitting when she should be working, raising her chin toward family when she should be bowing.
She stumbled to her feet quickly, the stack of linens she’d set in her lap fluttering to the ground. Instantly she dropped to her knees, pulling the fabric into a pile and gathering it in her arms before scurrying toward the kitchen. She was happy to have an excuse to hide her face from him.
That night when the knock on the door came, Frankie felt confident that Cathy was scrubbed bright and clean and that the three days’ worth of wages she’d scrounged would be enough to keep the beaked doctors at bay.
Her heart still pounded as she cracked open the door, but the flood of terror that accompanied this ritual most evenings was set to simmer rather than boil. Still, the sight of the doctor looming outside, the long, slender
