Heart of the Lonely Exile (22 page)

As well she might be,
Grafton thought. Scarlet fever was a treacherous disease. In addition to making a body miserably ill, it often wreaked havoc on the vital organs, at times causing irreparable damage. Sometimes it even killed.

“It was the scarlet fever that left Johanna—as she is,” added the mother.

She meant the girl's deafness, of course. At Lewis Farmington's request, Grafton had examined the children when they first arrived from Ireland, had attended the older sister who eventually died of heart failure. He still remembered the younger sister, the deaf girl with the frightened eyes.

Nora Kavanagh turned her stricken gaze on the doctor. “Johanna—she was never able to hear or speak after she had the disease.”

Grafton bit his lip, then nodded reluctantly. “That happens.” He paused. “But we won't let it happen to Daniel, Mrs. Kavanagh. We'll bring him through this just fine. I'll keep a close watch on him, you can be sure.”

Her uncertain smile took obvious effort. It occurred to the doctor that Daniel's young mother was surprisingly lovely for one who had endured so much tragedy. Although her delicate features bore shadows of past grief, there was a quiet, serene beauty about the woman.

“Daniel should be isolated from the rest of the household,” he said, turning to Lewis Farmington. “Except for those who know for certain they've already had the disease. Of course, anyone here today has been exposed, so it may not do a great deal of good.”

Lewis Farmington frowned. “I wouldn't remember whether I've had it or not, but it doesn't matter—I never get ill.
Never,”
he added confidently. He looked at his daughter. “To the best of my knowledge, though, Sara has never had it.”

“I never get ill either,” Sara Farmington said with equal assurance. “I must take after you, Father.”

Farmington peered at his daughter with narrowed eyes, but she merely smiled at him cheerfully.

“Little Tom—Johanna's brother—I'd remember if he had it,” said Nora Kavanagh. “I'm sure he hasn't.”

The doctor looked at her closely. “And you?”

“Myself? Oh…well, more than likely, I did,” she answered vaguely. “As a child, you know.”

Grafton knew, all right. There would be no keeping the woman away from her son. She would expose herself without a thought, as would most mothers.

When asked, the Englishman declared he had scarlet fever as a boy. “I st-still remember the sore throat.” Then, turning to Lewis Farmington, he suggested, “Why d-don't we move Daniel to my rooms in the cottage? That will at least separate him from Little Tom—and from M-Miss Sara, as well.”

Sara Farmington waved a dismissing hand. “I'm not at all concerned about myself. But that's a good idea, Evan, if you really don't mind. It's going to be awfully hard to keep Little Tom away from Daniel otherwise.”

During the next few moments, Grafton helped to move the boy to the cottage behind the mansion, then wrote out detailed instructions for his care. Unfortunately, there was little in the way of medication that would help. A few drops of belladonna, night and morning. Spirits of nitre. Otherwise, cool drinks, bed rest, and warm baths.

“We'll need to watch for ear infections and dropsy. If he should start swelling up, send word to me at once.” Handing the belladonna to Daniel's mother, the doctor looked at her sharply. “Don't wear yourself out now, Mrs. Kavanagh,” he warned. “There are plenty of others here to help look after your son.”

The Englishman moved just a step closer. “You c-can be sure we'll all help, D-Doctor.”

Dr. Grafton saw the way the man looked at Daniel's mother, saw, too, the grateful gaze with which she answered.

So that's how it was, was it? Odd match—an Englishman and an Irish widow. Still, it was good she wasn't alone. She was in for a difficult time of it these next few days.

As was young Daniel, poor boy. Few things caused the body more distress than this ugly illness. And there was exasperatingly little they could do.

Watch him closely, and pray, that was about all. It had been Nicholas Grafton's experience that, with scarlet fever, prayer was just about the only thing that seemed to make any real difference.

22

Life and death are in thy hand, Lord, have mercy!

RICHARD D'ALTON WILLIAMS (1822–1862)

D
aniel knew it was night and knew he was awfully cold, for he was shivering hard enough to make his teeth chatter.

He was in a strange room, on a strange bed. No…no, it was not strange, after all. He had been here before, in Evan Whittaker's rooms. The bed was high, with a wide, deep mattress. A fine bed. But the room seemed to be circling the bed—or was the bed revolving? He desperately wished it would stop, for the movement made his head ache even more.

The heat raging over his body was like a blistering wind, seizing him and trapping him inside. He had never been so agonizingly hot in his entire life. A terrible thirst plagued him, but he was sure he could not force even a small sip of water down his swollen throat. The very act of swallowing was a torment.

He was confused by the room, frightened of the heat. When he closed his eyes, he saw nothing but a fog. When he opened them, he saw his mother leaning over him, hovering, her cool hand soothing his forehead. Evan Whittaker was there, too, watching him. And sometimes Sara Farmington, not smiling as she usually did, but instead thin-lipped and shadowed in the dim light.

He wanted to sleep, to drift away from the relentless pounding in his head and the pain in his throat. He longed for the sweet oblivion sleep would bring, but it would not come. Every time he closed his eyes and began to drift off, he would jerk awake again, more miserable than before.

Why did Evan Whittaker frown so as he bent over him? And Mother—Mother's face was so white. Like a specter, she was!

Somehow, the sight of her made Daniel feel guilty. He was worrying her again, and hadn't she had more than enough trouble? She should not have to worry about him….

He closed his eyes against the pain knifing through his head and his throat.

What was wrong with him? Was it the fever?

Was he back in Killala, then? Or aboard the coffin ship, the
Green Flag
—dying, like all the others, of the Black Fever?

No. He wasn't in Ireland or on the ship. He was in America. Why, then, was he so ill? Had the fever followed them here, to New York City?

He could not think. The effort made the hammering in his head seem louder still. With a long moan, he turned his face to the wall and again sought the blessed nothingness of sleep.

Evan could feel Nora's fear; the entire room seemed to throb with it.

Sitting beside her, near the bed, he was aware that her whole body was trembling, as if she, too, were in the throes of a relentless fever.

He took her hand, found her skin hot and clammy. Her other hand was drawn into a tight fist, pressed against her mouth as if to choke back a cry of despair.

Evan's eyes went to the boy. Daniel had not stopped his restless tossing and moaning since they'd put him to bed. By now the rash had erupted full-blown. In the flickering candlelight of the deeply shadowed room, the boy's skin appeared raw and angry. At the moment, he seemed lost in a fog of delirium, his only sounds an occasional groan or a muffled sob of pain.

Giving Nora's hand a reassuring squeeze, Evan got up to check the fire. He was keeping it low, according to the doctor's instructions that the room should be fairly cool but not cold. He hunched forward, poking the logs just enough that they wouldn't smother the flames. Straightening, he stood with his back to the fire, looking first at Daniel, then at Nora.

She leaned forward on the chair, gripping one of her son's hands between both of hers. Her eyes were huge, her features set in a rigid mask of fear.

Apprehension swept over him as he remembered a similar scene, this one in the small, mean cottage back in Ireland. Nora, white-faced and despairing, seated beside the bed of her elder son, gripping his hand as if to hold him back from the death that finally claimed him.

Chilled, Evan tried to shake off the memory. He was suddenly seized with the need to flee the room, to escape the air of foreboding that seemed to shroud his quarters.

When Ginger slipped quietly into the room at that moment with a tray of tea, he went to Nora and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I'll be b-back shortly,” he whispered. “I need a bit of air—and you n-need your shawl. It's too cool for you without a wrap.”

She looked up at him with anxious eyes but made no protest as he started for the door.

Evan tugged at his coat impatiently, exasperated at how even the most simple, ordinary act turned clumsy and difficult for a man with one arm.

He was reluctant to examine his sudden urgency to escape the cottage. God forgive him, he feared it was more cowardice than anything else. The sight of Nora hovering near Daniel's bedside, agonizing over the possibility of losing yet another son, slashed at his heart like a scythe.

Opening the cottage door, he stepped outside into a world of soft, white beauty, clean and silent. Over an inch of snow had fallen during the past few hours. With a graceful, almost dreamlike motion, large cottony flakes drifted to the ground.

Evan glanced down at his polished black dress shoes, then decided to go on. The snow on the pathway wasn't all that deep.

Welcoming the cold, bracing air, he walked slowly toward the “big house”—Mrs. Buckley's term for the mansion. In the late hush of the winter's night, the pale limestone structure looked more like an old world chateau than a family home. Its lines were French, its overall appearance one of restrained elegance: sturdy, yet graceful. Evan suspected that the mansion reflected more of Miss Sara's personality than that of her father. Mr. Farmington's taste, he sensed, would run more to top-heavy brownstones with turrets and cornices and lots of ornate iron battlements.

He stopped for a moment in the middle of the walkway, staring into
the dense stand of pines that bordered the west side and rear of the mansion. His heart aching, he recalled Nora's stricken face. Daniel was all that remained of her family, all she had left after the brutal ravages of the famine and her journey across the Atlantic.

Dear God, what if she were to lose him, too?

Evan shuddered. As he resumed walking, his thoughts turned to his own family, which consisted only of his father and his aunt Winifred.

Just last week a letter had come from Father, a letter that disturbed him more deeply each time he thought of it. Containing mostly minor bits of news about Portsmouth, the pages had nevertheless hinted of what was, for his father, an uncommon degree of sentimentality.

Evan's mother had died just after his twentieth birthday. Over the years, his clergyman father, always a bookish, somewhat remote man, had become more and more reticent. Charles Whittaker's affection for his only son had been, for the most part, understood—but unspoken and largely undemonstrated.

In his most recent letter, however, his father had actually admitted to missing Evan—and missing him rather badly. He had even gone so far as to indicate that both he and Evan's aunt Winifred—Father's younger sister—deeply bemoaned the fact that Evan dare not return to England. When Evan defied his employer, the notorious landlord Roger Gilpin, he had shut the door on his own homeland. Gilpin had a long and vicious memory; he would not forget Evan's betrayal, or his own lust for retribution.

Of Evan's actions he said merely, “One must act according to God's direction as one interprets it.” But he did hope Evan had not been too hasty in lending his aid to the victimized Irish at the expense of his own well-being. Gilpin was a powerful man, and he had no doubt been thoroughly incensed by Evan's abdication of responsibility. A mere employee's defiance was doubtless an act for which Gilpin would demand unmitigated justice.

To Evan's great surprise, his father had enclosed a small amount of money, with the admonition that Evan must not, under any circumstances, attempt to recoup his own savings from the London bank where he had formerly deposited it. “Do not give that dreadful man even a hint of your whereabouts, my boy. Not a hint.”

Evan was still somewhat puzzled by the money. His father knew he
was employed, after all, and earning a generous wage as Lewis Farmington's assistant.

Evan sighed. He
was
his father's only son—his only child. And Father was getting along in years. When Evan was growing up his father had seemed an elderly man, though, of course, he hadn't actually been
old.
Only a bit older than most of the parents of Evan's contemporaries.

Now, with an entire ocean separating the two of them, Father had only his sister—Aunt Winifred. And they were as different as a canary and a barn owl! Widowed twice and still attractive enough to turn male heads whenever she entered a room, Aunt Winnie was as outgoing and ebullient as Father was self-contained and laconic. Twelve years younger, at times she seemed more Charles Whittaker's daughter than his sister. She claimed to find her brother “as dry as old ashes,” while Father, for his part, viewed Aunt Winnie as “flighty and altogether frivolous.”

Yet they adored each other. Evan smiled a little in memory, a smile that quickly fled as he realized how greatly he missed the two of them. Over the past few months he had become more and more aware that people—especially family—gave a person a sense of identity and place. Like young Daniel, he, too, was an only son. It was a sobering but somehow reassuring thought to know his undemonstrative, often remote, father missed him.

With the thought, he was again overwhelmed by the enormity of all Nora had lost—and all she stood to lose if something were to happen to her only surviving son.

And so right there, in the middle of the walkway, despite the snow wetting his hair and stinging his skin, he began to pray aloud for Nora and her son—her
only
son.

“Lord, it is f-for You, Creator of life, to preserve Your creation or reclaim it. D-Daniel is Your child. Yet he is N-Nora's child, too, and she does love the boy so. She has lost so m-much, Lord
—
her other children, her husband, her home
—
only r-recently have the wounds of her grief even begun to heal.

“Oh, Lord…You who were willing to g-give up Your only Son, please have mercy on this frightened m-mother…and in Your compassion, spare her only son. Please, Lord…please spare Daniel Kavanagh.”

Evan opened his eyes, brushing away the tears that had spilled over as he prayed, mingling with the wetness of the snow tracking his cheeks. Then, drawing his coat more tightly about him, he again started up the pathway toward the mansion.