Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve

for to me and my children the loss would be one hundred percent.”
    He studies her for a moment. “I think you quite beyond your years in understanding,” he says. She flushes with pleasure, though later she will wonder if the remark did not contain more hope than accuracy.
    “What of the others?” she asks quickly.
    “We have several with broken bones, one with a serious injury to the neck that may leave the man paralyzed. Philbrick is even now trying to arrange to have the injured and sick transferred to the hospital at Rye, but Mason has declared the house quarantined and has said that no one may leave.”
    Haskell refers to the health inspector from Ely Falls, who arrived in the early hours. He comes to the tub and lifts the Norwegian girl from the water, the suds falling on his shirt. Olympia hands him a flannel, and he swaddles the girl in the cloth. He lays her on the kitchen table and examines her in a way Olympia finds thoughtful and gentle, despite the demands on his time and the sense of urgency all around them. She stands to one side, not certain whether to stay or to go, and in the end, indecision keeps her still.
    She watches as Haskell retrieves a dry cloth from a basket Josiah has brought. He wraps the child again. He holds the girl in the crook of his arm — such a tiny thing in his confident grasp — and speaks to her constantly of this small thing and that, his words incomprehensible to her but their soothing quality apparent in the drowsy look in her eyes.
    “Did Mr. Mason say how long he expects the quarantine to last?” Olympia asks, thinking of the mild unpleasantness of being unable to leave the house.
    “No, he is like all petty officials in the arbitrary wielding of very little power. No, he will not say, and this is of some annoyance to me, as Catherine and the children are to leave for York later today.”
    Olympia busies herself with the wet cloths on the floor of the kitchen.
    “Where will Mrs. Haskell and your children stay in York?” she asks.
    “Catherine’s mother has a cottage. My wife will return here on weekends, of course, and then will come to stay for good in August if the new cottage is finished, which I hope it shall be.”
    Olympia drops the cloths into another basket in the corner of the room and walks toward John Haskell.
    “Let me,” she says, lifting the girl out of his arms.
    And it seems a most elemental gesture — to take a child from a man.

O N THE THIRD DAY after the wreck of the
Mary Dexter,
the visitors to the house are released from quarantine. Olympia wonders what will happen to the refugees. Since they now have no assets with which to negotiate their way in America, many of them are incorporated into the mills at Ely Falls, and what happens to the very young children, such as Anna, she never learns.
    Catherine and the children travel on to York. Haskell again takes up residence at the Highland Hotel. For some time, Olympia does not see him, since he works at the clinic in Ely Falls most of the hours of the day, and there is no natural opportunity for them to meet.
    Outwardly, Olympia passes her time in the usual manner. She reads books from a list her father has made up for her. Later she will remember
The Valley of Decision
,
A Tale of Two Cities,
and
The Scarlet Letter
in particular, since they are all works written in one century about another, the purpose of which is an issue her father and she debate at some length (her father taking the position that the social mores of a previous era might better highlight certain moral dilemmas of one’s own time, and Olympia holding to the notion that Edith Wharton or Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne might simply have been drawn to the baroque language and richer color of an earlier era). As Olympia’s drawing skills have been seen to be inferior, she is given instruction by the French painter Claude Legny, who is residing at the Isles of Shoals for the season and who consents to ferry over to the