Now Face to Face by Karleen Koen Page A

she saw Barbara carrying Hyacinthe, the dogs yelping and leaping up, trying to lick his hands.
    “What has happened? How is he hurt? Did he fall out of the dinghy? I knew he would.”
    “He’s caught the fever. Help me carry him.”
    Hyacinthe moaned as they shifted him between them. It was no help that the dogs wove themselves in and out at every footstep, licking at Hyacinthe’s hands whenever they could and barking too much. In the house, she and Thérèse put him in the bed in the downstairs chamber.
    “The ague,” said Thérèse, her hand against Hyacinthe’s head. “Shoo, dogs, leave him be.” The dogs had jumped up into the bed to be with him, ignoring her. “What of Williamsburg?”
    “I won’t…stay here,” Hyacinthe said.
    “It hurts you to speak.” Barbara took his hand. “Hush.”
    In two days, the three of them were to go to Williamsburg, where the Governor was holding a fête to introduce her to the gentry of the colony. They were coming in from counties close and far, she was told, as if they had been called for an assembly of their governing body, their House of Burgesses. Except that wives and daughters were coming in, too. It’s a rare thing for us to assemble together so, said Colonel Perry. It’s become the talk of the colony. Some of the women are angry because the Governor did not allow time enough for them to order gowns from England.
    “Don’t…leave me, madame—they’ll…eat me. They…groaned, I heard…them…The birds fly too close…they peck my eyes….”
    “He does not know what he’s saying,” said Thérèse. She compressed her lips, and Barbara saw how upset she was. Yes, Hyacinthe was child to them both.
    Barbara ran up the stairs to fetch the Peruvian bark she had been given for her own fever. She, in turn, had dosed Thérèse with it. Holding the bottle, unevenly blown and colored brown, up to afternoon light, she saw there was only a little left. She stared a moment at a pile of gowns. There was no place to put them save folded back into her trunks, and so Thérèse had laid them out like bodies, one atop another, that they might air.
    What fools she and her grandmother had been, to be packing gowns and French chairs, when what was needed here was clothing for the slaves, tools—and remedies, like her grandmother’s aqua mirabilis, a cooling fever water smelling of cloves and nutmeg, balm and red roses, smelling of home.
    Barbara had already decided that she would return to England on the first ship of the spring; there was so much to discuss with Grandmama, far more than any letter could hold. If her grandmother wished to make First Curle all Barbara believed it could be, coins needed to be spent, and Barbara had none. Asking another for money, even a grandmother, was something that needed to be done face to face. Just where are you going to put those coins, her grandmother would say, and how is that to my advantage? Everything she thought and saw here went into the notebook.
    It would be time to return, anyway, and see what was being done about her own estate. This had been in her mind more and more as she studied First Curle: that she, too, had an estate, even if it was only land and debt now. As she thought about tobacco and fields and overseers, about the foodstuffs, the wood that must be put away to see them all through the winter, she thought about Devane Square. Might it rise again under her hand, rather than Roger’s?
    Halfway down the steps, she heard a voice and recognized it at once, that pleasant voice, speaking French.
    “Make a large fire and put more blankets on him. The more he perspires with the fever, the better. I know. One or another of my crew always has it. You’ll have to bathe him often, every hour at least, so that the fever doesn’t go too high.”
    Barbara put her hand to her hair, which still hung about her face, and sat down at once on a step to pin it into some kind of order. The movement of her arms was entirely graceful,