The Healing by Jonathan Odell

Author:Jonathan Odell [Odell, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781410447838
Publisher: Wheeler Publishing
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Two days later Granada and Polly stood on the hospital porch watching the drama unfold at the great house. Moments before the master’s carriage had pulled up to the back stairs and halted. Trunks and bags were lashed to the roof. Now Master Ben stood stiffly in the drive, holding open the carriage door.

Slowly the mistress emerged from the house, two housemaids flanking her as they descended the steps. She was wearing a heavy black dress and her face was dark behind a veil.

Granada shuddered.

“You seen all this before, ain’t you?” Polly asked.

Granada nodded weakly. “The dream,” she answered.

“You know more than you saying,” Polly accused.

Yes, Granada could have said more. But why should she? If she spilled all her secrets, then Polly and Silas would both have her hide. And it wouldn’t get Mistress Amanda back.

After the fire, the mistress couldn’t be calmed. She paced the room screaming in pain, crying out to both the living and the dead. Aunt Sylvie raced back to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of laudanum, Old Silas following a few steps behind.

Lizzie and Granada held Mistress Amanda down while Aunt Sylvie spooned the medicine carefully past the woman’s blistered lips. After a few minutes, she calmed enough for Sylvie to treat her tender spots with a thick coating of lard. It seemed to Granada that the only place on Mistress Amanda’s body that had not gotten a blistering were the bottoms of her feet and her backside. But it was her head that gave Granada a fright.

When Sylvie was done, she told the maids to drape all the upstairs mirrors, saving the mistress the additional pain of catching the grisly sight of her frizzled head and swollen, oozing eyes.

All the while they helped tend the mistress, Granada felt Silas’s eyes on her. When she stepped away from the bed, he spoke, low enough so that only she could hear, “You knew.”

“I dreamed—” But she stopped, not knowing how to explain. She looked down at her feet.

“Some of these burns look awful bad,” Aunt Sylvie called out from the bedside. “I reckon you best go fetch Polly.”

Grateful for an errand that would get her away from Silas’s questioning, Granada turned toward the door. But Silas grabbed her arm, holding her tight.

“Sylvie, let’s not go mixing that woman up in the family’s affairs,” he said. “Master won’t abide a slave woman doctoring on his wife. You know how he is.”

“Look at her, Silas!” Sylvie cried. “Eyes swelling shut and her face turning red as an Indian. And her hair, my Lord!” she cried. “Stubble and scalp. We got to do something! Master Ben will kill me.”

Silas released Granada to take his wife by the shoulders. “You can keep lard on her face as good as Polly Shine,” he said firmly, looking hard into her eyes. “And you know which flour barrel you hid the laudanum in. Nothing she can do, you can’t do better.”

Aunt Sylvie nodded, but with little conviction. Granada wasn’t so sure, either.

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