Chapter 24 #2
"My lady." He got it out on the second try. "She has the fever and she will not wake. I have been saying her name for an hour. I do not know what to do."
Amelia set the box down on the table and put the back of her hand against the woman's forehead, and then against her throat, and then she took her wrist and held it and counted, and while she counted she looked at the closed window and the blankets and the coat and said nothing about any of it yet.
"When did she eat?"
"Yesterday. A little."
"Drink?"
"I do not know." His voice cracked on it. "I was at Russell Hall. I was at the house all day."
"Then that is where you were, and it does no good to us now." She got the lid off the box. "Boil the kettle. Fill anything in this house that will hold water and put it on to boil, and then find me a cup and a spoon."
He went.
She had the meadowsweet and the willow bark out on the table by the time he came back with the kettle, and she made it strong and let it stand until it had gone from scalding to hot, and she got an arm behind the woman's shoulders and lifted her a little and put the spoon to her mouth.
It went in and came straight back out again.
She tried again, slower, with less on the spoon. The woman's lips moved but there was nothing behind it, and the liquid ran along her jaw and into her hair and Amelia caught what she could with the cloth.
The third time was worse than the second.
"She is not swallowing." Jacob had come up beside her. "My lady — she is not swallowing, she cannot, it is going into her—"
"I know it."
"Then it will not work."
"Not like this." Amelia set the cup down.
Her hand was steady and she made herself notice that it was, because it gave her something to do while she thought.
"She is lying flat. Nothing goes down a throat that is lying flat except by accident, and the accident is the part that kills people.
She must be upright and she must be held there. "
She looked at him.
"That is you. I cannot hold her and pour at the same time."
Jacob got up onto the bed behind his mother without a word and got both arms under her and brought her up against his chest, and her head went back against his shoulder and stayed there.
"Higher. Her chin toward her chest, not away from it." Amelia moved his hand for him. "There. Do not let her slide."
She got a spoonful in.
It went down.
She waited, and watched the throat, and got another one in, and then a third, and by the sixth she had stopped counting and started listening to the woman's breathing instead, and it had not changed at all.
She got most of the cup into her over the next quarter hour. It did nothing whatsoever.
"It is not working." Jacob's voice had gone flat and very young. "My lady, it is not — she is the same. She is exactly the same."
"She is."
"Then what—"
"It wants an hour at the least, and it is not enough on its own, and I should have started with the other thing first." Amelia stood up. "That is my fault. I shall correct it now."
She went to the window and put her hands under the sash.
"My lady—" The neighbor woman was on her feet. "You cannot open that."
"I am going to."
"She has a fever. You will kill her." The woman had come round the bed. "You keep a fever warm. Everybody knows it. My own mother had the fever in this parish and they kept her under six blankets a week together and she came out of it—"
"Did she?"
The woman stopped.
"I am sorry." Amelia said it plainly and did not take her hands off the sash.
"I have no wish to be unkind to you and you have sat with her the whole of today when nobody else would.
But that woman is burning, and everything in this room is holding the heat against her, and if we leave her in it she will not last the night.
" She pushed the window up. "Jacob. The blankets. "
Jacob looked at the neighbor woman. He looked at Amelia.
He took the blankets off.
"The coat as well. And the second sheet." Amelia was already rolling her sleeves. "Cold water, as cold as that well will give you, and every cloth in this house, and a second basin if there is one."
"There is not."
"Then find one."
What followed was not medicine of the kind anybody writes about.
It was cloths. Cold cloths at the throat and the wrists and the insides of the elbows and behind the knees, changed the moment they went warm, and they went warm faster than she could believe.
It was Jacob at the well and back and at the well again, thirty times, forty, until his shoulders had stopped working properly and he went on doing it anyway.
It was Amelia on her knees at the side of a bed with her sleeves soaked to the elbow, wringing out a rag in water that had come out of the ground cold and did not stay cold for a minute, over and over, while the candle burned down and was replaced and burned down again.
Twice she stopped and made more of the infusion and got what she could into the woman, with Jacob holding her up.
Once, somewhere past midnight, the breathing changed and she thought it was ending and put her fingers to the throat and found it was not.
The neighbor woman fell asleep upright in the chair at about two and Amelia let her.
By three Jacob was not speaking at all, only carrying, and Amelia had stopped telling him what to do because he had learned it.
She did not leave. That was the whole of it, afterward, when people told it in the village — that she came at four in the afternoon and did not leave.
Nobody who told it that way could have said what she actually did, and Amelia never explained it to anybody, because the truth of it was cold water and a rag and refusing to stop.
The fever broke a little before dawn.
She felt it go out of the woman's skin under her own hand and she did not trust it, and she sat back on her heels and waited a full ten minutes before she let herself believe it, counting the breaths, and they were slower and they were deeper and they went on being both.
Then the woman's eyes opened.
They did not find anything. They went over the ceiling and the window and Amelia's face without stopping on any of it, and her mouth moved and produced nothing, and after a moment they closed again.
Jacob made a sound.
"No — that is well." Amelia caught his wrist before he could speak. "Listen to me. That is not her going under again. That is sleep. She has been out of her senses since yesterday morning and she is now asleep, and they are not the same thing at all, and the difference between them is everything."
"She is—" He could not finish it.
"She is asleep."
Jacob sat down on the floor where he had been standing, all at once, as though something had been taken out from under him.
Amelia went on wringing the cloth.
◆◆◆
They came a little after seven.
Mrs. Miller was first through the door — she had walked from Russell Hall the evening before and gone only as far as the crossroads before Thomas made her wait for the cart, and she had been sitting up in the neighbor's kitchen since eleven because Amelia had told her there was nothing to do and she had not believed it.
Thomas came behind her. Oliver behind him, and two of the crew, and half the lane besides, because word had gone round in the way it does.
And behind all of them, her father.
Amelia did not notice him at first. She was where she had been for fifteen hours, on the floor beside the bed with a basin at her knee and her sleeves pushed past her elbows and her hair down, and she had a rag in one hand and the woman's wrist in the other and she was still counting.
The room went quiet in a way she registered only after it had happened.
She looked up.
Her father was standing in the doorway of a laborer's cottage in his riding coat, and he was looking at his daughter on the floor, and he did not say anything for a long moment.
Then he came in.
He crossed the room and bent down and kissed the top of her head, once, the way he had not done since she was a child.
"I am proud of you, my dear."
Amelia found she could not answer that at all.
He straightened. Then he turned to the bed, and looked down at the woman lying in it, and after a moment he sat on the edge of the chair the neighbor had left and took her hand in both of his own, carefully, the way a man handles a thing that is not his.
"Now then." His voice had gone gentle and entirely matter-of-fact. "You have given this village a considerable fright. We shall have you well again, and there will be no argument about it, and the cost of it is not a thing you are to trouble yourself with for one moment."
Behind him, in the doorway, Mrs. Miller was looking at Amelia and had not looked away since she came in.
Amelia met her eyes.
Neither of them said anything.