Shadow Grave by Marina Cohen

Author:Marina Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

13

Alice could do nothing but wait. And hope. And pray. Libby was much worse, and Mama had already taken ill. She was being tended to by both Mrs. Hawthorn and Papa.

No one, save for Doc Brown, dared enter the home. He had made several trips already, but each time his expression seemed grimmer and his whispers more urgent.

Two weeks had passed since Alice’s birthday—the day she had paraded about town in the infected dress, placing all those who came in contact with her in jeopardy. If the others had disliked her before, they despised her now. And though she had apologized until her throat was raw, she could escape neither shame nor blame.

Doc Brown had said it would be a miracle if even half those she had come into close contact with managed to avoid the illness that British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay called “the most terrible of all the ministers of death … turning a babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.”

“The poet Orinda phrases it best,” he told Papa. He quoted a stanza:

That fierce Disease, which knows not how to spare

The young, the Great, the Knowing, or the Fair.

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