The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams

Author:Clare Beams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

*

They sent to Ashwell for Dr. Burgess. He came and examined Eliza. “No immediate crisis, anyway,” he told them after, in Samuel’s study. “It seems to have passed. No physical trouble that I can find, other than the rash, which could be anything really.” He was a weak-chinned man who’d spent decades stitching up his patients’ mowing wounds and delivering their babies. Here he was out of his depth.

They put Eliza to bed and stationed Mrs. Sanders to watch while she slept.

When Caroline went to talk to her father that night, he was writing and didn’t hear her enter. She wondered how his own words could transfix him even now. “Papa,” she said sharply.

“One moment.”

She stood there—she actually stood there—and waited. Furious with herself, her own biddability, she ran her eyes over the rows of books, the rich reds and browns and greens of their spines. She looked down at her feet on the Turkey carpet. She remembered when her whole foot had fit inside a single swirl of its pattern, and she would leap around the room from one to the next in a dance she had felt sure the carpet’s weaver had mapped out for her. Her foot was large enough to hide the swirl now.

The Moores had retired for the night. Caroline listened to the quality of the silence above her head. They would be talking about Eliza, surely. What would each be saying?

“All right,” her father said, setting his pen down. “What is it, Caroline?”

“You must know.”

He pushed his fingers back behind his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Such a frightening moment.”

“More than a moment. All the moments. We need to send her home, Papa. I know it’s my fault she’s here, I know it will cause trouble—”

“That isn’t what matters now,” Samuel said. “You’re right, of course.”

She felt such relief at his reasonableness and his forgiveness. Eliza was ill, that was all, and they would send her back to the people whose job it was to take care of her. They would all recover; the school would survive; there was no need for them to take Eliza’s collapse as their own failure.

She sat down opposite her father. “Did Mama have many fits in a row?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she could stand to watch another.

Samuel started. “But Caroline, this isn’t like what happened with your mother.”

“What do you mean? Didn’t she fall down and shudder?”

“Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s not that. Miss Bell never lost consciousness, for one thing. And your mother never had any—any skin ailments.”

So that was what they would be calling those fearsome splotches.

“It was different with Mama? What was it like?” Her father had never agreed before to talk about this.

Samuel sighed. “Often it began with a suspicion. She’d sense one was coming. Though not always.”

Caroline imagined that, waiting for a vast hand to paw her clumsily, pin her to the ground.

“There was one morning I recall when she told me she thought she’d best stay home that day.

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