Page 117 of The Summer Country

“I’m not emptying slop buckets in your aunt’s Paris dresses!” Emily called after him, horrified.

Dr. Braithwaite paused on the landing. “Why not?”

“If you don’t know why not . . . Oh, never mind. I’ll find something.” Emily went off to raid the wardrobes of the upper servants, supplying herself with two plain calico dresses and a variety of brightly colored head scarves to tie up her hair.

The housekeeper was stouter than she; the dresses hung loosely, but that was all to the best in the growing heat, which haunted the corners of the house, rising with the day. It was decidedly hotter in town than it had been at Beckles. Emily found herself grateful for the scarves that kept her hair off her face and neck, and began to wonder if she ought to have lodged Adam in a downstairs room as he lay in his shirt on tangled sheets.

Emily scoured the pantry, searching for suitable foods for an invalid. She ruthlessly raided the chicken coop, sacrificing a fowl for the pot, wringing its neck, scalding and plucking it with her own hands while Adam dozed, fitfully. She would have to find some way, later on, to thank Mr. Turner for his unwitting hospitality. In the meantime, the only object could be to get Adam on his feet again.

“You can cook?” Dr. Braithwaite came in as Emily was hovering over the soup, trying to fish out a recalcitrant sprig of greens.

“Not like your aunt’s cook,” said Emily, poking at the chicken with a wooden spoon. “But I can do you a good, strong broth, or a milk pudding.”

“Your talents never cease to amaze me.”

“Don’t say that until you’ve tasted it.” The steam from the pot warmed Emily’s cheeks. She thrust her spoon at Dr. Braithwaite. “Does this need more salt?”

She fed Adam broth, alternately bullying and cajoling him into taking a spoon here and a spoon there, letting him rest against the pillow between sips, mopping his brow with a damp cloth.

Adam moved restlessly against the pillow. “Do you ever think we ought to have married?”

“You’re talking nonsense. Hush.”

“That was what Grandfather wanted, you know.”

“Grandfather wanted what Grandfather wanted.” Emily touched a gentle finger to Adam’s sunken cheek. “You’ll get better and go back to Laura and your baby and be very glad we didn’t marry, I’m sure of it. Now have another spoon of soup.”

Sometimes he thought they were in the nursery again, that Emily’s mother had just died. “Don’t worry, Cousin Em’ly, we’ll have a jolly time, I promise. Nurse is an old fussbudget, but she’s all right if you know how to get around her.”

And Emily would thank him and pretend to be that long-ago girl, until he drifted again into sleep.

There were mumblings about debts and moneylenders, women and French letters, horses that ran too fast and horses that didn’t run fast enough; there were times when he carried on conversations with cronies that weren’t there and others when he argued with imaginary adversaries.

But it was the adversary inside him whom Emily was determined to fight.

When his bowels emptied, soaking him and the sheets in foul-smelling liquid, Emily stripped the bed and sponged Adam clean, clothing him in a shirt and unmentionables filched from Mr. Turner’s own wardrobe, boiling the sheets in a giant kettle in the yard, before hanging them out to dry in the brilliance of the noonday sun. Her arms ached with the effort and her hair was lank with sweat, but she felt a sense of triumph at the achievement, that she had done it herself, the kitchen girl having wisely made herself scarce. Gone to visit an aunt, she told Emily, and never returned, leaving Emily in sole command of the house.

There were more sheets to boil, more noxious liquids; there were days when Adam scarcely moved at all and others when he moved restlessly and convulsively on the sun-scented sheets and Emily had to struggle to dose him with laudanum. The Board of Health offered lime to afflicted households, to scour away the sickness. Emily scrubbed the yard and the house, the astringent smell burning her nostrils, her hands red and chapped, then went back inside to slip chips of ice between Adam’s cracked lips, to bathe his brow with water and oil of lavender, and coax him to swallow a bit of laudanum.

Dr. Braithwaite was right; the laudanum did seem to give him some ease, not only helping him sleep but slowing the pace of the disease.

“Hadn’t you better find me a proper doctor?” rasped Adam, in one of his lucid moments.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Emily sharply, lifting the tray she had brought. “Dr. Braithwaite is a proper doctor. Be polite or I’ll send you back to Dr. MacAndrews.”

By the sixth day, Emily had begun to hope that Adam might make a recovery. His color seemed clearer; he had obediently sucked the ice chips she had given him.

“He’s getting better,” she said to Dr. Braithwaite. “I’m sure he is.”

Dr. Braithwaite took the glass of sherry she handed him. They’d fallen into the habit of having a glass of sherry in the drawing room of an evening, a moment of peace between the difficulties of the day and the looming demands of the night. “It’s a good sign when they’re sick,” he said seriously. “It’s the cases where there’s no, er, effluvia, where there’s the least chance of recovery.”

“He seemed more lucid today. And he took some water. Boiled,” she added. Her companion was adamant that they follow Dr. Snow’s directive that all water be filtered and boiled before use.

Dr. Braithwaite slumped down on the settee. “We’d another forty deaths today. And those are only the ones that were reported.”

“Is it getting worse?”

“Much.” He closed his eyes, resting his glass of sherry on his stomach. “They’re to close St. Leonard’s Church. The smell from the graveyard has become too overwhelming for services to be held. Anyone who lives downwind is seeking accommodation elsewhere. The governor is looking to buy land for a new graveyard. Something that can accommodate death in the thousands.”