“On the contrary, it’s the very thing for a boy,” Vienne said, glancing to the Four Winds Tavern as they passed it, as grateful for her job there as she was for this afternoon off. She had not seen Armand since the day she had stitched him up, nor had she missed him. Neither had she seen Liam since the morning he sampled her baking, though the memory of his kindness on Independence Day stayed with her. If Vienne had been young and naïve, she might have been taken in by it. She might have found pleasure in his attentions, their conversation, or even in the endearing relationship he had with his sister. But she was no trusting maiden. Armand and Félix had taught her how faithless men were, and Tante Rose had taught her how satisfied a woman could be without relying on one.
“My legs ache,” Henri puffed as they neared the covered stalls on Market Street. “How long will this take?”
“Just a few things, Henri, and then we’ll go look at the ships.” Vienne closed her parasol and looped its cord over her wrist.
“Promise?” His eyes widened, too large for his thin face.
“As long as your legs don’t pain you overmuch.” Martine pinched a mosquito off his neck and flicked it away. “And as long as we’re not eaten alive by then.”
Vienne felt Martine and Henri trailing her as she moved from stall to stall. The press of perspiring shoppers added a muskiness to air already thick with odors of raw fish, beef, and the smells of warming produce. Chickens clucked and scratched inside a pen littered with feathers and corn.
After paying a dairy farmer from Jersey for a wheel of cheese, Vivienne added a pint of cherries to her basket. As she dropped some of the ripe fruit into Henri’s waiting palm, a conversation behind her veered into news of France’s Reign of Terror.
“More than ten thousand people have been executed by now,” one said.
“No, more than fifteen thousand, I read,” countered the other.
“Ah yes, it was ten thousand assumed to have died in prison, without trial.”
Her gut twisting, Vienne remembered with a jolt the horrors that had been so easy to forget during the past month of her employment.
“But Louis-Charles is still alive,” one woman offered. “Louis the XVII.”
And the other: “If it’s actually him at all. They say the real Louis-Charles is hidden away until it is safe for him to be crowned king. The poor boy in prison is a decoy. His physique is different, as is his mental capacity.”
“Then where is the young king?”
“Who can say? Austria? Belgium? If I was charged with his well-being, I’d send him as far away from that turmoil as possible. An ocean away, in fact.”
Vienne looked at Martine, whose expressionless face assured her she’d not understood, or perhaps even heard, the English words. Henri pulled a cherry pit from his lips, and red juice dribbled from the corner of his mouth down his chin.
Pulse racing against reason, Vienne led Martine and Henri out of the shadows of the covered market and into the blinding sun, where she opened her parasol once more. Carriages clattered past coachmakers, goldsmiths, and ironmongers. Quakers sweltered in black suits, children skipped rope beside their mothers, and birds sang from poplar trees. This was America, she told herself yet again. Here in Philadelphia, she was safe. She could stay beaten down beyond all logic, or she could rise above her fears.
She chose the latter and offered a smile to Henri. “Are you ready to see the ships?”
He grinned and, with the back of his hand, smeared the cherry juice on his chin.
They walked down the slope from Front Street and turned south. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth, its wet fur reeking. Henri’s steps were quicker now, if not entirely strong, as they came to a familiar wharf studded with packs of planks and shingles ready to be shipped.
At the end of the dock, the little boy sat on an overturned crate beside Abel, a fisherman they’d met before. Wrinkles carved his leathered face. Just as he had on their previous visit, he cracked open oysters and loosened the meat from the shell, allowing Henri to slide it into his mouth. The two exchanged few words, neither speaking the other’s language, and contented themselves with oysters. The sight of them together—Henri in his green silk breeches and gleaming white stockings, and Abel in his fisherman’s slops—lifted the corners of Vivienne’s lips. The smile Abel offered in return was more subdued than last time, but who could blame him in this heat?
The river doubled the sun’s intensity. Grateful for her parasol’s shade, Vivienne set her basket at her feet and watched the activity around the piers. Stevedores clambered over the wharves, some shouldering slabs of salt fish, others carting barrels of molasses from the West Indies, which would no doubt be made into rum in the nearby taverns.
Abel scooped another oyster from his bucket. He moved stiffly, slowly, as if it taxed him. “See here, son, and maybe next time you can do this yourself—” He winced. Leaning forward, he dropped the oyster with a clatter back into the pail. A guttural groan escaped his gritted teeth.
“Abel!” Vienne placed her hand on his back. “What ails you?”
“The oysters,” Martine gasped, and knocked Henri’s from his hand.
“Something you ate?” Vienne asked.
“I don’t know,” Abel moaned. “But there’s a tempest in my belly sure enough!” He dumped the remaining oysters onto the dock. They skittered across the wood planks while he vomited into the bucket.
Martine grasped Henri and the basket of food, pulling both away.
Vivienne stayed and offered the fisherman her handkerchief. “Keep it,” she said. “I have more.”
Abel kept his head bowed as he accepted. “Thank you kindly. ’Tweren’t fittin’ for you to see that.” He wiped his mouth. Before he could fold it and tuck it away, Vienne saw that the stains on it were black. “I was feelin’ poorly for a while there but thought I’d licked it.”
“Let me help you to a doctor.”
Abel spewed a stream of curses. “I ain’t goin’ to any doctor so’s he can bleed me to death. Get away from here, miss, and don’t come back to the docks until after the first frost. It’s unhealthful by the water.”
Vienne’s mind spun.
“And don’t you dare tell anyone you saw this, or there’ll be a panic, and you Frenchies will be blamed for every death. Now git!” He ended his speech with a growl and a stomp of his boot.
Barely daring to breathe, Vivienne pivoted and hurried to join Martine and Henri, who waited for her at the end of the wharf.
“What is it? What is it?” Panic raised Martine’s pitch.
It is nothing, Vivienne longed to say. You are too fearful, as ever. All is well. But all was not well. Neither did she want to admit it. “Come.” She steadied her voice. “Madame will be waiting for her cheese.”
Martine skewered her with a narrowed gaze, but Vienne glanced at Henri with hiked eyebrows, willing her friend to understand they should not speak of it before the boy.
“Fine,” breathed Martine. Her face blanched as white as her hair.
“Can we come back tomorrow?” Henri asked. “If Abel is sick, can’t we bring him some broth? Oysters are no good for the gripe, you know. Too squishy.”
“If Abel is sick, he’ll stay abed and would not want you around to catch it.” Vivienne placed her hand on Henri’s shoulder, firmly turning him toward the pension.
Mosquitoes hummed in her ears as they passed taverns along Front Street. A door slammed open and closed again as a sailor stumbled out of a grog shop a few yards in front of Vienne. Clutching his middle, he struggled to the alley and retched into the dirt.
Martine grabbed Vienne’s arm. “What is wrong? What’s happening?”
“He’s drunk,” Vienne tried. But the vomit, she’d seen, was black.
Summer burned away like chaff. By the time news arrived that the radical French revolutionary Robespierre had been guillotined, ending the Reign of Terror, a different terror had taken root in Philadelphia. Yellow fever was upon everyone’s lip
s, if not on each person’s brow. Thousands fled the city before the sickness had a chance to reach epidemic proportions. Among them were Eliza Hamilton and her children, and Father Gilbert and Suzanne Arquette, who went to Asylum, the French settlement up north. At least they were safe, Vivienne told herself.
But Henri was not. Surely it could not have been Abel’s fault, since Henri contracted the fever weeks later. Yet Martine was certain the fisherman was to blame and that Vienne was at fault for taking the boy from the Pension Sainte-Marie in the first place.
“We never should have gone to the docks.” Martine wrung her hands. “He can’t die. Not after everything we’ve survived already.”
Exhausted after her day of baking at the tavern, Vienne knelt by Henri’s bed in the stiflingly hot garret room and felt the scorching temperature of his skin. “Martine,” she murmured, “we can’t keep him here, you know. He needs a doctor’s care.”
Paulette entered the room, her face glistening, and laid a cool damp cloth upon his brow. “She’s right,” the maid said. “This is a pension, not a hospital.”
“If it’s necessa—” Martine wavered and began to crumple. Vivienne caught her before she hit the floor and eased her onto the bed.
Paulette flapped her apron to stir a breeze. “Those ridiculous clothes she insists on wearing, even in this heat. Silk! And all those layers! I do the laundry myself, and I can tell you for sure these gowns are a nightmare to clean beneath the arms. She’d do well to remember she’s no longer at court. Little wonder she fainted.”
Vivienne laid her wrist to Martine’s forehead. “Mon Dieu,” she prayed in a whisper. “Her clothes are not to blame.”
Chapter Twelve
Perhaps it was not her fault that Martine and Henri contracted yellow fever.
Then again, perhaps it was. So when the doctor who came to examine them sent them by wagon to the only hospital that would accept such cases, Vienne went with them and entered a world of new horrors.
“It is the only way, the proven way.” His apron flecked with bile and blood, Dr. Benjamin Rush lanced Martine’s arm as she lay in the bed, and her lifeblood drained into a bowl. Dr. Rush then dosed Martine with calomel.
“Mercury?” Vienne asked. The treatment had been used for Sybille, too, but had only caused extreme salivation and the loss of some of her teeth. “Must you?”
“Young lady.” Dr. Rush peered over his small, iron-rimmed spectacles. “You were not here last summer, so you do not understand how wretched a way to die the yellow fever truly is. Allow me to enlighten you. What appears to be a simple cold or flu is followed by sharp pains throughout the body, which intensify until the patient believes an arm or leg is snapping. The pulse whimpers, soft and irregular as the beating of moth wings. Skin becomes sticky hot, followed by sudden uncontrolled defecation. If the patient does not improve at this point, he will die. But not before his vomit turns black from blood in the stomach, while skin, fingernails, and even eyes turn yellow with jaundice.”
Feigning calm, Vivienne struggled against a rebelling stomach.
“So you see,” the doctor went on, “we must purge the body of the fever through every means we have. Through the blood, through vomiting, and through the bowels. Twice a day, thrice for good measure. It’s a regimen I had my assistant use on myself last summer, and it’s the only reason I’m still standing here.”
Noxious odor stuffed the ward, though the windows remained open to the humid outside air. All around them, patients moaned in fever or while clutching their stomachs before retching into a pan. Henri lay in the bed next to Martine’s, awaiting his treatment.
“I know you are here for your friends,” Dr. Rush continued, “and I’ll allow you to stay and help. After last summer’s raging epidemic, those willing to nurse are few. If you want to help these two, need and common decency demand that you help as many as you can while you’re here.” His bald pate glistened with the sweat of his labors.
“Yes, of course,” Vienne agreed, though she would need to talk to Tara.
“One other observation I’ll share with you, since the patient’s mother is in no state for discussion. Were you aware Henri has rickets?”
She glanced at the young boy, his limbs as thin as rails except for the knobs of his knees barely raising the sheet that protected him from flies. “Rickets,” she repeated. “He’s complained of pain in his legs and back.”
“I shouldn’t doubt it. His bones are weak, and I suspect he’s sedentary due to the pain, but that most likely makes it worse. Movement is good for children of any age.”
“Is there any other treatment?”
The doctor’s reply was clipped. “None we have yet discovered, other than to keep him moving. There is much yet to learn about the condition. Now, if you don’t mind, we both have more pressing matters to attend to.”
When Vivienne explained the situation to Tara, the tavern keeper readily agreed to a leave of absence from baking, adding that her own mother had died of the disease last summer. “Take care of yourself,” Tara whispered and crushed Vivienne in an embrace. “And come back to us.”
So with Tara’s blessing, Vivienne became a nurse, along with several black women volunteers considered immune to the disease. The small compensation she was paid for her labors offset the fees for two patients’ care, but the rest she paid with her own funds, for Martine’s had all but run dry.
Mechanically, Vivienne emptied chamber pots and bedpans and bowls of blood. She kept a handkerchief dampened with peppermint oil pinned to the strap of her apron to help combat her revulsion. Her world shrank to the confines of her ward, and the natural division between day and night ceased to carry meaning, for illness never slept. In the span of one week, which felt like six, Martine and Henri made progress, only to worsen without warning.
Outside the hospital, fires blazed on the street corners to help keep the fever from spreading, the smoke wafting in through the open windows. If anyone dared walk within sight of the hospital, it was on the sidewalk opposite, and with handkerchiefs covering their noses. Some wore bags of camphor around their necks, while others, Dr. Rush told Vienne, chewed garlic or carried dried frogs in their pockets as talismans to guard them from the disease.
Fresh wind blew through the hospital, however, when a new doctor, Edward Stevens, took over. Dr. Rush left for a different hospital, and his radical treatments went with him, to everyone’s relief. Instead of mercury, Dr. Stevens had Vienne administer Peruvian bark and aged Madeira. Following his orders, she gave Martine and Henri cold baths, then glasses of brandy topped with burned cinnamon. Rather than emptying the patients’ bodies, Dr. Stevens’s aim was to build them up. Laudanum was the bedtime drink, and for patients with upset stomachs, it was one of lavender spirits, chamomile flowers, and oil of peppermint.
Still, their patients expired. Exhaustion weighted her as Vienne changed the linens on a bed recently vacated. She had not grown accustomed to this. It was not the stripping of soiled sheets that troubled her, but the quickness with which one patient must be forgotten so the next could take his or her place. There was no time to feel regret or loss for a life snuffed out. Her back aching, she stuffed the linens into a basket to be laundered, then straightened before going to check on her friends.
A smile cracked Henri’s lips when he saw her. “Mademoiselle.” He reached out his hand, and she took it, cringing at the bruising on his arm where Dr. Rush had drawn his blood. But the boy’s skin no longer burned.
Hope flared. She knelt beside him, and he twirled one of her curls around his finger.
“Your hair,” he rasped. “It’s very messy.”
She chuckled. “It is.”
“Where is Maman? Is she well?”
Vienne swallowed. “She is here in the hospital, too. Resting. They moved her to a different area, but she asks after you often.” She did not tell him that Martine’s case was severe, that neither doctor had been able to pull her back to health, or that her fevered mind flipped be
tween present and past.
“Well, you must tell her I’m feeling better. I should like to go home. Is the pension still our home?” The words were in English. Perfect English.
She blinked in surprise. “As soon as you are well enough, yes, indeed. But Henri, I didn’t know you could speak English. When did you learn it?”
“At court, of course. The royal tutors.”
“Then why have I not heard you speak it before?”
He shrugged. “Maman doesn’t like it. She told me to speak only French and not to tell about my tutors. Oh no.” He frowned. “I forgot. You must forgive me, there have been so many things to remember. And so many things to forget.”
The forgetting, she understood very well. But the remembering . . . “What else have you tried to remember?”
He settled back into his pillow and scanned the ceiling for a moment before his eyes drifted closed, his delicate blond lashes sweeping his cheeks. Barely a trace of purple showed under his skin, which meant the hemorrhaging had stopped.
“I’m sorry, Henri. I’ve tired you. I’ll go tell your maman you’re feeling better. For now, you rest.” She pressed a kiss to his forehead, rejoicing that his skin was no warmer than hers on this late August afternoon.
Rising, Vienne turned to go and nearly ran into Sebastien Lemoine. With his black hair tied neatly in a queue and his suit immaculate, he was a vision of health and vigor and wholly out of place in the fever ward. She was suddenly keenly aware of her own soiled apron and rumpled cotton dress.
She straightened her white ruffled cap over her hair. “What are you doing here?”
His hands cupped her shoulders. “I was looking for you. Madame Barouche told me I could find you here—indeed, she insisted I fetch you. You must come home and take care of yourself, or you’ll occupy one of these beds soon. Those black circles beneath your eyes prove you’ve been denying yourself the sleep you need. What good can come of this?”
At the mention of sleep, her body betrayed her, swaying ever so slightly.
Sebastien looped an arm about her waist. “I’m taking you home. It isn’t safe for you on the streets alone.”
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