Page 128 of The Summer Country

Nathaniel nodded, his mustache failing to mask the grim line of his mouth. “Oh yes. There was nothing to be done for her by the time I got there. I did what I could for Mr. Bannister, but he was in a bad way.” He looked down at his hands, dark against the white of his cuffs. His face was tired and strained in the half-light. “That’s one thing about the plague. People will take whatever physician they can get, regardless of color.”

Emily looked at him sharply, wondering, for a moment, whether he’d heard Adam’s comment about getting him a proper physician.

She bit her lip. “I hadn’t thought,” she said lamely. “I’d forgot.”

And she had, mostly. It wasn’t something she thought about when they were together. It was only now, when he said it, that she remembered Adam, and felt as though she had been somehow complicit. He didn’t mean it, she wanted to say, but it felt odd to defend the dead to the living. And, she suspected, he had meant it.

“I’d have been shown the door a month ago. Now . . .” Nathaniel rubbed his brow with his knuckles. “One woman—an Englishwoman—asked me if I knew any native cures or local magic. She wanted me to find an obeah man for her. She didn’t believe me when I told her I didn’t know any. I told her I had laudanum, and I hoped that was magic enough.”

“I’m not surprised people are looking for magic,” said Emily ruefully. “There are times when it seems surer than medicine.”

“No. Give me good, sound science over hocus-pocus any day. We’ll defeat this yet. Just not,” he admitted wearily, “soon enough.”

Emily shoved his handkerchief up her sleeve and took him firmly by the arm, pointing him in the direction of his room. “Get some rest. We’ll add you to the death toll, if you don’t.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Nathaniel, but he went meekly enough, objecting only to the threat of having Cousin Bella sent in to make sure he stayed there.

Emily went back to the yard and boiled sheets until she felt more like herself. Her own hands, on the wooden wash paddle, looked strangely pale. It was, she realized, because she’d got so used to the fact that everyone around her bore some degree of African blood. Her own hands looked somehow wrong.

Hands were hands, and hers were good enough to soak a sheet. Emily shook her head at herself and went back to her work.

By the first week of August, they were able to fold up the tent in the yard. A week later, the cots were taken up off the veranda. As beds emptied, through either recovery or death, they weren’t filled again. Cautiously, cousins and aunts and grandparents began to appear to claim orphaned children. The dining room emptied, and then the bedrooms. Cousin Bella found her audience shrinking, and began to make noises about returning to Belle View.

“There were only thirty-two deaths today,” said Nathaniel, coming back from his rounds to an almost empty house. He took the glass of sherry Emily handed him and absently drank from it. “Lord, listen to me. Only thirty-two.”

The parlor had been reclaimed for its proper use, the curio cabinets set back in their place. Only the absence of the carpet, on which Adam had been ill, proclaimed the ravages that had taken place.

Nathaniel was standing in the same spot, in the same pose, as the first night she’d met him. It might have been six months ago. But it wasn’t. He was different; they were both different.

“Thirty-two makes an improvement over three hundred,” said Emily matter-of-factly, getting a grip on her thoughts and her sherry.

“It’s getting worse in the countryside,” warned Nathaniel, setting his glass down on the cabinet. “It’s bad in St. Lucy, they say, and beginning to move through St. Andrew. But yes. It seems to be dying down in the town. I was beginning to be afraid it would never stop, that it would rage on and on until there was no one left to claim.”

Emily looked at him in surprise. “You never said.”

“What would have been the good? It’s my job to fight death—even when death seems to be playing with loaded dice.” Taking up his glass again, he added, looking at the sherry instead of her, “I know I ought to have insisted you return to Beckles, but—I don’t know what I would have done without you here.”

“Slept from time to time?” suggested Emily, more touched than she cared to admit. “It can’t have been much help, having your home given over to patients.”

“Can’t it have been? No matter what happened, you were there, with that infernal pot in the yard and your bucket of lime. Any challenge that arose, you met it with a mop and a bowl of broth. You never despaired, and you kept me from despairing. Without you . . .” Nathaniel made a brusque gesture, nearly oversetting his sherry. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, will you just take my thanks and leave it at that?”

He seemed so uncomfortable, so unlike his usual assured self that Emily found herself at a loss for tart comments.

“I’ll accept your thanks if you’ll take mine,” she said, before she could think better of it. “In truth, I think I would have gone mad if I hadn’t had something to do after—well, after.”

“Your cousin?” Nathaniel toyed with his sherry, pushing the delicate cut-crystal glass this way and that on the top of the cabinet. “I’d wondered, a long time ago, if you had feelings for your cousin.”

“Of course I did. He was my cousin. Oh, you mean like that. No.” There had been a time she’d been comforted by the notion that Adam was there to marry if she ever really wanted to marry someone, but that had been the extent of it. For the most part. “He would have complained that I bullied him.”

“You mean the way you bully me?”

“I don’t—” Emily broke off as she realized he was teasing her. “You don’t let me bully you.”

His eyes were a deep, deep brown. She had never noticed that before. She had never noticed the small scar just above his right eye, or the softness of the skin beneath his mustache. But she noticed it all now.

“That’s because I have the good sense to acknowledge when you’re right,” said Nathaniel.

“And when I’m wrong?” Her voice sounded very strange to her ears, as if coming from far away, from someone else’s throat.