iv. In which Charlotte faces wood sickness
The Throckmorton-Prentices hadn’t made it past the churchyard when a well-dressed old woman with milky skin and impeccable
posture stopped them. She took one of Charlotte’s hands in both of her own, warm and welcoming as she’d been for as long as
Charlotte could remember.
“My dear Charlotte. I hoped I might speak to you.”
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Livingston?” Charlotte asked.
The old woman nearly snorted, but she was too well-bred. “‘Mrs. Livingston.’ Please, Charlotte, I pray you will call me Agnes.
How long have we known each other, yet you insist on such formalities?”
Charlotte’s lips twitched. “It seems one of us ought to.”
“Silly girl,” Agnes said fondly.
Charlotte may have been thirty-six, but she’d been a favorite of Agnes’s since childhood. After their father’s disappearance,
their mother, drowning in grief, had taken to her bed, neglecting her work, her home, and her children. The villagers had
offered her no help or sympathy. Twelve-year-old Arthur had dressed himself and Charlotte in their best clothes, taken his
sister’s hand, and walked up to the Livingstons’ manor door to ask in a trembling voice whether they had any clocks in need
of repair.
Agnes’s husband had wanted to turn them away, but Agnes had hushed him.
Pulling an old mantel clock out of storage, she’d told Arthur she’d pay him to fix it.
She’d played a game with Charlotte while he’d worked, made him stop so they could have supper, and, when he’d managed the repair, paid him far too much and told them to come back the next day.
Agnes was the main reason the two of them hadn’t starved, since Arthur’s only notable skill was clock repair and Charlotte
had been just five years old. Back then, Charlotte had wished the old woman was secretly their grandmother and would adopt
them once the truth came out. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t.
The old woman smiled at Arthur, offering her hand.
“Arthur, dear boy.” He kissed her hand, bowing, and she turned back to Charlotte. “Do you have a moment to come by the house?”
“Is everything all right?”
Charlotte hadn’t visited in some time. As she and Arthur had grown, and Charlotte had become a healer, they hadn’t relied
so heavily on Agnes. Then, too, Charlotte had become more aware of the differences between them; Agnes could sail about doing
whatever she pleased because she had money. Though Arthur cared for her ever-increasing collection of timepieces, she’d never
had need of Charlotte’s services before: She’d long kept a live-in physician who’d tended her husband’s poor health. Agnes
had outlived her physician (and her husband), but surely she’d send to Port Lorne for a doctor if she needed medical attention
now.
“It’s poor Gracie—my cousin, you know. Gracie Buchanan. I don’t think you’ve met her yet, Charlotte. Arthur has, of course,
he comes by so often. I do wish you’d visit more.”
“Gracie Buchanan?” Charlotte prompted.
“Yes, of course.” Agnes’s smile faded. She wrung her hands. “A tad under the weather, I’m afraid. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look . . .”
The area over Charlotte’s left eye throbbed with a threatening migraine, but she was a healer before she was anything else.
“Of course.”
Her brother bit his lip, but she attempted a smile. Her facial muscles felt stiff. She hadn’t smiled much in the last six
months.
“I won’t be long, I’m sure. You go on home with the children.”
“Well,” he said helplessly, but Agnes said, “As it happens, I’d like to talk to your brother, too, on another matter. The
children are welcome. You know how I adore children.”
Charlotte would’ve really smiled at that, if not for that throbbing over her left eye. Agnes had spent hours playing games
with her when she was a child, or lying on the floor of her drawing room, pretending to see shapes in the clouds painted on
the ceiling. Arthur said she still asked after Charlotte whenever he visited.
Agnes hurried toward the Livingstons’ manor. Charlotte lagged, fatigued from her muzzy-headedness during Mass and the headache
now.
“Are you all right?” Arthur asked.
She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Of course.”
Luckily, the manor wasn’t far. At the sight of its magnificent wooden door, carved with the family coat of arms, Charlotte
froze. It made her feel five years old, walking up to that door hand in hand with her frightened but determined older brother.
The door had seemed magical then, a harbor in the sudden storm their lives had become.
Arthur had spun such stories about the wondrous things they’d find inside.
Reality had fallen short, as it often did; the manor was, even then, staid and prissy.
Agnes’s husband hadn’t wanted them to touch anything, though Arthur had washed their faces and clumsily darned their clothes before they’d come.
“Come in, come in,” Agnes said, with uncharacteristic impatience.
Charlotte tore her eyes from the door. The old woman’s brow was furrowed.
“Mrs. Livingston,” Charlotte said, “what’s going on?”
Agnes’s mouth twisted. “It’s the sickness.”
Charlotte’s heart sank. If it was wood sickness, she could do nothing. She didn’t know why Gracie Buchanan should even have
it. In recent years, an increasing number of villagers had entered Shiftleaf, despite their suspicion of it, for firewood
or meat. But Agnes had more than enough money to buy such things, or to send someone else for them. A wealthy woman had no
need to risk the forest’s dangers.
Agnes pushed the door open. Inside, the manor was shabbier than Charlotte’s childhood memories of it, and less lived in. Sheets
covered half the furniture. An entire wing was unlit and closed off.
“The housemaid left us some time ago,” Agnes said.
She offered no explanation as to where any of her other servants might have gone. Charlotte suspected they had fled the sickness.
She’d never seen it spread from person to person, but that didn’t stop the villagers from staying far from any house with
a black rag on the door.
Automatically, Charlotte turned toward the spare bedchamber in which Agnes had sometimes laid out old clothes, tutting over
how out of fashion they were but promising to have them resized for Charlotte or Arthur. Charlotte had barely opened the door,
however, and glimpsed a bedchamber long out of use, when Agnes said, “This way. She’s in my room.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled.
“Well, gosh,” Arthur said. “That’s awfully kind of her, letting her cousin stay in her own room when she’s ill.”
Charlotte flushed, grateful for her own sake that Arthur didn’t have the suspicions she suddenly did about the nature of the
women’s relationship. If he didn’t suspect anything amiss about them, likely he didn’t suspect anything about his sister’s
proclivities, either.
At the door to Agnes’s bedchamber, Charlotte fumbled in her pocket for the masks she always carried in case of unexpected
house calls like this. While the sickness didn’t seem to spread between people, she still knew so little about it that she
preferred not to take the risk. She put a mask over her nose and mouth and offered one to Arthur, but he said, “I’ll take
the children and wait in the drawing room, shall I?”
“Can I come with you, Mama?” Jonas asked.
“Of course, dearest.” Charlotte turned to her brother. “You’ll be all right with Sasha?”
Arthur smiled, grasping his niece’s hand. “Of course. We have great fun together, don’t we, duck?”
“Can we play pirate?” Sasha asked.
“Not in Mrs. Livingston’s drawing room.”
“When we get home, then.”
“If we get our chores done.”
“Okay. But only if you let me use my sword. Jonas never lets me use my sword.”
The sword in question was a stick bigger than Sasha, with which she was excellent at whacking people very hard. Before Charlotte
could suggest, however, that it might be best if she did not whack her uncle as hard as she could with said stick once they got home, they disappeared around a corner. Sighing, she handed
masks to Jonas and Agnes.
Agnes knocked on the chamber door but entered without awaiting response. She hurried to the luxurious four-poster bed, where a lump was piled with blankets.
“Gracie, dearest?” Agnes leaned close to the lump, lowering her voice. “The healer’s come, love.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled again at the endearment not meant for her ears, the tenderness in the old woman’s voice. The throbbing
in her head worsened.
Gracie Buchanan turned over in bed, revealing a tanned, withered face threaded with black.
Jonas stepped back with a soft gasp. Charlotte drifted forward instinctively, her uncomfortable thoughts forgotten in light
of a patient who needed her care.
She peeled the blankets back. “It’s all right.”
The black veins extended down the sick woman’s throat to her chest. Her neck was bandaged, but the veins concerned Charlotte
far more. Even the whites of the woman’s eyes were threaded with black.
Charlotte’s skin crawled. Blood, pus, the throes of a difficult childbirth, a limb mangled during a shift in the cannery—none
of them affected her, beyond the thought of how best to take care of them. The black veins characteristic of wood sickness,
however, made her shudder. This was her eighth case this year, but she’d never get used it.
At least with those other things, Charlotte knew she could do something.
She felt Gracie’s forehead. No fever; there never was. But the woman’s breath rattled like a pot boiling over on a stove.
“How long has she been like this?”
Agnes wrung her hands again, her dark eyes fixed on Gracie’s face. “Since last night. She returned from a hunt two days ago—she
loves hunting, you know, and she was itching for fresh venison—I told her we could send a boy, but she would go—”
“Last night,” Charlotte prompted.
Agnes swallowed. “Yes, my dear, forgive me for prattling so, I can’t help myself—she returned two days ago with the most horrid
claw marks on her neck. I was all a dither about it, but Gracie laughed and said it was fine, she’d had worse. But the next