Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

He stood, numb and confused, after she closed the door behind her. What was going on in this house, where the servants now gave orders? What was Susannah doing, and why was Arthur Adam still absent? The room was clean and bare and smelled faintly of nutmeg and flour. There was not even a chair where he might sit.

He was still standing when Annie knocked at the door. “Yes?”

“Here’s your hot water,” she said. “And some soap and a sponge, and a blanket to cover you when you’re done. Get those clothes off you, now.”

He looked down at his filthy pants and his stained, worn shirt and coat, unable to argue with Annie’s caution. “I will,” he said. “I’ll do that right now. Thank you. But could you bring me something of Mr. Rowley’s to put on when I’m done? Even a dressing gown would be fine.”

Annie drew herself up. “That would not be possible,” she said. “We have put all his clothes in storage, against the moth.”

“But Annie — I can’t see Mrs. Rowley wrapped in a blanket, now can I?”

Annie sighed. “You tell me what you’d like from your house,” she said. “I’ll go over there and get what clothes you’d like from your housekeeper.”

“That seems foolish. All I need are a few things.”

He started to argue that Arthur Adam surely wouldn’t mind the loan, but Annie cut him off. “Mr. Rowley’s things are not available,” she said stiffly. “But it would be no trouble for me to fetch something from your house.”

Lauchlin looked down at the cooling water. “Fine,” he said. He gave her instructions and then, as soon as she’d gone, tore off his clothes and tossed them out the window to the ground below. Then he began to bathe. Against his skin, the warm water felt heavenly. The storeroom was almost dark, except for the rectangle of dusky sky let into the rear wall; in the kitchen the scullery maid hummed to herself as if she’d forgotten about him.

Annie set off for Lauchlin’s house but turned back a few yards down the street. The doctor would be wanting supper, she knew. Mrs. Rowley would come home late, as always, and would bathe and change her clothes in the storeroom, the way Annie had trained her: then she’d discover her waiting doctor friend and offer to feed him, with no thought as to where that food might come from. It was Mrs. Heagerty’s day off. Annie, knowing Mrs. Rowley would only pick at some little scrap on her return, had not fixed anything more than a chicken pie, which she’d expected would be more than enough for her and Sissy and the other servants after Mrs. Rowley had taken her two bites.

She ducked back into the kitchen and seized a basket. Sissy cringed. “It’s nothing to do with you,” Annie snapped. “You finish cleaning that silver before I’m back.” Then she was off again; first the market and then the doctor’s house.

At the market, in the square facing the Basilica, she looked through the butchers’ stalls. Chickens were shockingly high, and none looked as fresh as she would have liked; geese were even higher and the mutton she examined was distinctly off. She bought some oysters, which were cheap and fresh, and a pair of lively lobsters — an oyster stew, she thought, warm and sustaining; then the lobsters split and broiled. She and Sissy would eat the leftovers tomorrow in a salad. The wild raspberries had a wonderful smell and she bought a large pail, undecided yet as to whether she’d serve them plain with cream, or in a tart. Lettuce, radishes, green onions; cream and butter of course. Because Mrs. Heagerty wasn’t around to bake, and because she knew she’d be pressed for time, she allowed herself the luxury of a dozen hot rolls.

Then she set off for the doctor’s house. She knew where it was, having carried gifts of preserves and extra produce from the Rowleys’ garden there on occasion; Mrs. Rowley was overly generous with the bounty of Mr. Rowley’s household. Annie walked past the convent, the courthouse, the livery stable, and two hotels. The hotels appeared to be almost empty, which was no surprise; who would visit this city if they could avoid it, now that the fever had come? Behind her she heard the rattle of a pair of carts, and although she averted her eyes she could not help seeing the coffins they carried.

At Lauchlin’s house, she registered the disrepair with surprise. Nasty weeds poking up through the flagstone walk; tall saplings waving arrogantly from the places they’d stolen in the hedge; a stain creeping down the wall where rain had poured through a broken gutter. Ashamed of himself, Annie thought. That’s what the doctor should be. She blamed him for letting things fall apart. If he’d been here where he belonged, and not off at that horrid island, his house would look at least partly respectable.

Annie knocked at the door. The Rowleys’ house might look like this, were it not for the unceasing efforts of herself and Mrs. Heagerty and the others, all joined to keep the place intact for Mr. Rowley, so that he might not be ashamed when he returned. At night sometimes, lying alone in her small attic room counting Mrs. Rowley’s faults, she’d been tempted to let the house crumble in just the way Mrs. Rowley’s inattention deserved. But who could bear it? She touched the grimy doorknob with distaste. Still no one came to the door. Then she heard voices, just a few feet away, too ignorant to realize she could hear them.

“ You get it,” a girl said. “It’s not my place, it never was.”

“Well it’s not mine either,” a boy said. “I wouldn’t be in here at all, if it weren’t that I’d come in to eat. You want I should open the door with stable-muck all over my breeches?”

“Don’t care. You open that.”

“Won’t.”

Annie rapped sharply on the door. “Whatever are the pair of you doing in there?” she called. It was shocking, how far this household had fallen. “You open this door right now — I’ve a message from Dr. Grant.”

A terrified silence, and then a boy, as dirty as promised and with a wild head of blond hair, pulled the door inward.

“Fetch the housekeeper for me,” Annie said to the girl. Tall and poorly dressed, the girl was nearly as sluttish as Sissy but looked to be German or Norwegian. She vanished and returned with a middle-aged woman in tow.

“I’m Mrs. Carlson,” the woman said. Portly, suddenly filled with dignity, she drew herself up. “And you would be?”

Annie also stood very tall and identified herself. “Dr. Grant has come to call on us,” she continued. “On Mrs. Rowley, that is — Mr. Rowley being still in England, on very important business. Dr. Grant has had a small accident with his clothes, and he requires that you gather a new set for him, from the skin out. I am to bring the items back to him at the Rowleys’.”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Carlson said. “And how am I to know. you’re telling the truth? What could the doctor have done to himself, to need everything from linens to a coat?”

Annie swallowed the implied insult in silence; this woman was too far beneath her to argue with. “It’s the sickness that’s on him,” she said, lowering her voice dramatically. “From that island. It’s on his clothes, and he doesn’t want to bring it into the Rowleys’. When he leaves there tonight he’ll be coming here. Perhaps he’ll give those old clothes to you then, to have washed.”

Mrs. Carlson stared silently for a long minute. Then she indicated a chair where Annie might wait, and vanished up the stairs in the direction of what Annie could only assume was the doctor’s dressing room.

In Annie’s absence, the other servants at the Rowleys’ seemed to forget that Lauchlin was in the house. When he let himself out of the storeroom, he found the kitchen empty. The front hall was empty as well and finally, feeling very embarrassed to be wandering the rooms in a blanket, he slipped into the library and closed the door behind him. The windows were closed and the room was stuffy, smelling faintly of leather and cut flowers left to stand too long. He opened two windows and then gingerly set himself down in one of Arthur Adam’s magnificent armchairs and arranged the folds of his blanket for maximum modesty. Warm, soft, clean; all these things were delightful but he was very hungry. When he placed his bare feet on the hassock before him, he saw that his toenails were as broken and ridged as those of an old man. His diet, perhaps. Or simply an utter lack of care. On the elbow poking out of the blanket the skin was loose and dry around his fresh bruise. Briefly he let himself wonder what he’d look like by the end of the shipping season, should he survive that long. Eight physicians had already died on the island; he put the thought out of his mind.