Marion was shorter than Kay, and wearing a much fancier dress, tobacco-striped taffeta with blue ribbons daubed on it here and there. Her yellow hair shone in separate curling locks, and her pretty boots were blue Spanish leather. As her mother turned back to carry on helping Thea with the accommodation arrangements, Marion obediently led Kay out to walk around the square.
Seeing Aren following along with Pilot, she asked, “Is that your boy?”
Kay nodded, then realized what Marion meant. “He is my—” She had not had to explain him before. Nothing seemed exactly right. “He is Aren. My sister has adopted him. Come on, Aren!” She took his thin hand and drew him close, putting one arm round his shoulders.
Marion laughed. “What an odd thing!”
“It is not odd at all.” Kay was furious now. She did not know what to say without shouting or kicking, she did not know how to protect Aren from what this girl was going to say. “He is my brother.”
Looking at Kay as if she was halfwitted, Marion laughed again. “Well, he’s a darky!”
“He is my brother,” Kay said again, quickly, her words tumbling over Marion’s to mute them, and she turned in a different direction and pulled Aren along with her, walking as fast as she could away from Marion.
Aren followed after, but she could feel him still turning back to look at Marion. “She waits,” he said, pulling her arm. “Slow…do not go…”
“No.”
“She wants us to talk!” He pulled harder, coughing.
“She is a mean creature and we will pay no mind to her,” Kay told him.
But she could not race on when he was coughing so. She found the handkerchief in his pocket and applied it to his mouth, which he could never remember to do, not having grown up with one always being thrust at him.
Marion had followed after them and stood nearby, not coming too close. “Does he have the yellow fever?” she asked. It was the most cowardly thing Kay had ever heard.
“No! He—we have both had a bad cold, we are still getting well, that is why Thea wanted to bring us up here.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Marion said.
“Mean what?”
Marion did not seem to know what to say. “I mean, he is a nice little fellow—does he speak English and everything? I was only surprised, that’s all. That he was your brother.”
They looked at each other, measuring how this would go.
“I speak English,” Aren said. “And a little bit Chinese. Kay speak-es Greek and quite a lot of Latin.”
Kay was not going to laugh. But then Aren did, so she could not help it, and laughing made him cough again. He said, “May I?” and reached for the hanky she had stuffed into the pocket of her serge skirt.
Marion was quicker. She held a big pocket square out to Aren before the next cough took him. She gave him a grin, her podgy face becoming more interesting, and Kay decided to forgive her, for now.
They climbed together to the next landing, where a little window of the monastery sold bread and pastry. Marion bought a paper bag of Benedictus, which she said was gingerbread stuffed with strawberry jam, and gave them each a piece.
Up there above the clouds, the landscape was eerie—like a surrounding Yarmouth fog, but these trailing scraps were sky-cloud, not ground-mist. Marion said they could climb right up to the summit, where there was a lookout, so they went on, a little slowly, because once Aren had started coughing, he could not seem to stop.
At the summit lay a tiled area and a stone railing where they might look down from the height onto the city and the sea surrounding it, like Christ looking down from the mountain where Satan took him to show him what he might have.
It would be hard to refuse this. Far below, the city and the land streamed out from the base of the mountain like arms reaching out to the sea, the pot shape of the hills repeated and repeated, rich in the wet green jungle they had stuttered up through on the cog train. The ocean swept on outward from the end of the land until it melted into grey haze at the blurred edge of the horizon, the almost indiscernible border of water and sky, very far away. Where they themselves had come from, at early light this morning. Kay turned around and around, the world reshaping below her with each revolution, dream islands and a dream sea, and fine strands of mist still caught in air around them.
Cora Hilton had brought her unmarried sister along on the voyage. Edna had been seeing a man of the wrong sort, Cora confided in Thea, and the family decided that the best cure was an extended course of “out of sight, out of mind” and the benefits of sea air.
“I hope very much that she will not take fever,” Cora said, looking over to where her sister sat playing at Chinese checkers with Aren. That little travelling set was serving him well.
Thea had briefly explained Aren’s presence, and Cora made no immediate comment, although Thea sensed a glimmer of “must write to Mama about this!” in her regard.
Aren bent away from the game and reached one hand to Kay, sitting at the next table with Marion. Kay had her hanky ready. He coughed again, and coughed, distressingly, and bunched up the hanky.
Thea saw, though. The bright-red splotch on it.
She was up and moving before she understood what she knew. She took the hanky from Aren very gently, and laid a cool hand on his forehead. And then she went out to the lobby to seek the doctor who had been visiting the monastery earlier.
It was tuberculosis, the doctor was certain of it. A lean, thoughtful Portuguese, a gentleman, with a sombre manner that inspired belief. Not that Thea had any hope of not believing. He listened to the chests and hearts of both Aren and Kay, and pronounced Kay perfectly recovered from a slight cold. Aren’s sputum test would have to be taken to the city, but he had no real doubt, and he saw that Thea had none either.
“You will have to arrange for treatment,” he said. “There is nothing to be done at this hostelry here, but I might find a suitable place in the country, if you would like to leave the boy in my care…?”
He had left the question of their exact relationship delicately unasked.
“No,” Thea said. “We will—” She stopped and flicked a tiny drop from her right eye. Not a tear, precisely, but an irritation. “I have some experience of nursing. Sea air will be the best remedy, until we can get to New York.”
“Of a certainty,” the doctor said. He did not bow, but gave off the sense that he would have, in the last century. “New York, indeed. They are making—strides, as I believe one must phrase it.”
Language was a surmountable barrier, when people were educated—but it was still a barrier. “Can you tell me where I should take him?” she asked bluntly. “Which hospital?”
“My true expertise is confined to yellow fever, at which we have strided far, and cholera and the like, which have also bedevilled our city. But I shall inquire. Let the name of your ship be sent to me and I will cable ahead and discover for you the best facility. In the meanwhile, let him not be confined in any low-lying, dark or humid place, and be certain that he is fed liberally.”
Thea shook her head, unable to face the task of assuring the doctor that Aren was no slave or servant to be bundled into steerage.
Across the room, Kay was watching them, her eyes strained. Thea let the doctor go out without further question and turned to comfort her.
They spent ten days up in Corcovado. After the diagnosis, Thea kept close by Aren and left Kay to go off with Marion on expeditions of their own along the jungle paths. The girls spent long hours perched on the stone wall at the very peak of the mountain, looking down through strands of cloud upon all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, telling stories of high adventure in the South Seas (Kay) or the scandalous and apocryphal history of Aunt Edna (Marion), inventing dresses or (Marion again) imagining future husbands.
Kay expected, without allowing herself to examine the idea closely, that she w
ould not marry now, because her future husband had already died. She had taken it for granted that one day she would marry Arthur Wetmore, not because of any real romantic attachment, but because that was how the world operated: you eventually married a person known to your family. And he was kind. She told Marion about his drowning, and Marion (who had been to school with Arthur) cried all afternoon, which weighed in her favour.
Although they would not have been friends in the ordinary way, it was good to have a companion for the long, cloud-wreathed days. Thea was in such a state that there was no hope of talking to her. She sat with Aren endlessly, not hammering away at his English as before, but reading to him and letting him read with her any book from the pousada’s shelves that caught his fancy. In the afternoons, sometimes she would let Kay sit with him while she drifted away to sleep for an hour. She was becoming pale too.
Kay was happy to sit on the long sun porch outside their room, the curtains beside Aren’s couch billowing in and out on each breath of wind. There was a very old children’s book in the library that Aren took a fancy to—Nursery Lessons, In Words of One Syllable—and asked her to read with him over and over. It had lovely illustrations, especially the one of a two-masted boat (that even Kay could tell was rigged all wrong, like no boat ever seen on this or any other ocean) that he liked to look at even when he was too tired to read. The text below it read,
How hard the wind blows!
and how the little boats rock to and fro!
It must be sad for those poor men
who have to earn their bread on the sea.
I hope they will bring home a good net full of fish
that they may buy food and warm clothes
for their poor wives and little ones.
Sometimes, as they read it, Kay would find herself almost crying with sorrow for those poor men who earned their bread, and their poor wives and little ones. Then she would turn to her own favourite page, which read,
Ann’s papa had a large dog,
of which she was very fond,
and when Ann had a bun or cake,
she would give some to Dash.
One day, Ann fell into a pond,
but the good dog did not let her sink,
but sprang in and drew her safe to land.
“Good old Dash,” Kay said, patting Pilot’s head where it was jammed into the fold of her knee.
One page made both Kay and Aren laugh:
See! Here is a fine nag.
And that is a good boy who rides on it too;
for he reads his book so well, and is so neat and clean,
that his kind aunt gave him this nice horse;
and I am sure James takes good care of her gift.
“See here is a fine nag,” Aren repeated, laughing again, very gentle, suppressed laughter, so as not to provoke a coughing fit.
Kay said, “And you are a good boy who rides on it too, and reads his book so well.”
* * *
—
At Corcovado, Kay grew used to Aren’s illness, and to the telltale white sputum cup always in his hand, which Thea guarded jealously and washed with vigorous care. When they left Rio, the cup came with them, the badge of TB. There were other provisions for the journey: new sheets and a dozen warm red blankets (plenty of those, to accommodate the inevitable night sweats) reserved to Aren’s use for fear of infection; a reclining wooden deck chair in which he would spend the days outdoors; and a metal hospital cot that could be lashed in place each night, for sleeping on deck.
It was all much nicer than the crowded ward where the Blade Lake children had breathed and coughed and sipped at their gruel. Kay sank into almost-panic, remembering that. She wished she could sleep on deck too, and secretly planned to keep Aren company.
Jiacheng went to market to find fifteen chickens instead of the usual dozen; three good eggs per day was the doctor’s prescription for Aren, shaken up with plenty of cream. Luckily, Brazil was a good place for cattle, and by bartering and bargaining, Francis secured a nice-natured little cow, guaranteed to give a sufficiency of milk to sustain the poor child.
Without drawing Thea’s attention to it, Jiacheng also dosed Aren with a concoction of his own, which he had puzzled out in his little book of cures. Kay loved the delicate vertical strands of words in that book, drawn by some meticulous hand. Aren had coaxed Jiacheng to draw out some elementary letterforms for him to copy, but Kay was content to simply look, since she already had the unending task and burden of gaining fluency in Greek.
She gathered that the book held recipes and advice for all things, not unlike Thea’s Fanny Farmer; but it was more mystical than that practical text. Jiacheng said it required interpretation, but would not elaborate further. He made a wormwood tea, as bitter as bile, and had to add Lyle’s Golden Syrup to each cup to convince Aren to take it. The cream-and-eggnog was easier, especially when Kay gave it to Aren saying, like the Words of One Syllable book, “See here is a fine nog” to make him laugh. But even then, the poor boy often gagged at the viscous richness before catching himself into better bravery and swallowing it down. Once he had taken it, Kay would pronounce, “And that is a good boy who drinks it too.”
There was nothing to be done but the things that were being done, Thea told herself. She spent the long weeks of the voyage up to New York in constant half-buried trepidation, not allowing her mind to race ahead to the inevitable, familiar conclusion of tuberculosis. Not dwelling on the many stick-thin bodies whose eyes she had closed, and carried down the long stairs and delivered into the earth.
In the first week back on the ship, she found she had been ashore too long—her stomach betrayed her again and she had some uncomfortable mornings before she grew sea-wise once more. She had no time to suffer nausea, anyway, for Aren needed her. And the weather smiled on them; if only she could have given those poor Indian children this sea air, this fresh wind and beating, hygienic sunlight…But she would put aside regret, and instead set about making one of the three good meals a day that Aren must have, or fetching him the next glass of milk. She became quite fond of the little cow, who did diligently produce milk at a rate that, well beyond Aren’s capacity for drinking, allowed for puddings on the Aft table almost every day, and quite often junket for Below.
* * *
—
The dreams were back again, and no wonder. Thea heard Kay crying in her bunk, and went barefoot down the corridor to catch her before she woke Aren, sleeping inside in this miserable weather. Rain pelted on the little port window when she opened Kay’s door—perhaps it had entered her sleep and provoked the nightmare.
“Hush,” she said, and Kay turned, startled, and sat up.
“I am sorry!” Her eyes a little wild in the dim light. “Did I wake him?”
“No, no, but you must try to be quieter.”
“Yes,” Kay said. She wiped a hand across her eyes.
The lack of argument pierced Thea’s defences. She sat on the bunk and took Kay into her arms. “Dear heart, what were you dreaming?”
Kay did not burst into crying again, but only whispered, “You know.”
“The children dying, I know, this pulls us back there. But listen, Kay, if you think only backwards, if you think so much about them, you cannot help Aren now. I think of them too, but it is too late for us to help them. They are with God now—we have to wipe that slate clean and make a different ending for Aren.”
“But are you sorry?” Kay asked, her eyes boring up to search Thea’s face.
“Oh, how can you ask me! Of course I am sorry, of course I am. But what about forgiveness, Kay? Do you think we can never be forgiven?”
Kay looked and looked at her face, as if she would never stop looking, and Thea had to gather her thoughts and self together to carry on. “I believe God knew our good intention, and how sorry we are that it all came to naught. I would give
anything for it not to have happened, for all those children to be safe and warm and well now. But I must believe God has forgiven us—forgiven me, I mean, and Father. And I believe the way to make it right is to keep Aren safe.”
Kay still stared, her eyes unable to wake completely from the dream. It always took her a little while to come back into herself. Thea pulled the blue blanket over them and rocked her sister gently until she calmed into sleep again.
Although he was so sick, Aren was not downcast. His cheeks burned with red flags and he talked more than before, to Kay, but also to Mr. Wright and Jacky Judge, and particularly to Seaton. He asked that his deck chair be put close to Seaton’s lifeboat, and they kept up a running conversation, more intelligible on Aren’s part than Seaton’s. Kay did her work on deck even when the weather was cool, wrapped up almost as well as Aren was in his chair, and got her only exercise trotting up and down with his empty glasses (and helping him totter to the head as necessary).
Most of the time their talk flowed along under Kay’s consciousness, but some things poked up from the streaming surface. “When I am-was fish in the old place, I would make a net by now,” Aren said, and Seaton growled some answer from above. Kay did not ask, “Do you mean if I was fishing?” but left it alone.
One afternoon he made the sound of his father’s canoe for Seaton, scraping a ruler along the side of the deck chair. “Then we know to come help bring in over the sand,” he was saying when Kay began to pay attention. “It is the inside sound of our own canoe. Almost the sound…” He scraped again, adjusting it, trying to make just the right noise.
Another time he made a different sound, this time with his hands, which had grown so thin! He was not satisfied with the sound he achieved, and was growing angry with himself, when Seaton said, “Ay!” and tossed down two pieces of coconut shell. He must have a little treasure store up there, Kay thought.
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