Liberty Hill (Western Tide Series) (16 page)

Lucius began to mutter incoherently, his words misshapen products of a confused and bewildered mind.

“What did he say?” Evelyn asked, eager to understand this unfolding miracle.

Josephine pulled a crust of bread from the folds of her apron and offered it to the patient. Lucius received a large, happy bite, chewing slowly but rapturously. The single action required what little energy he possessed, so he sighed and allowed his eyelids to succumb to the gravity of weariness.

“Good gracious! He is taking food! Josephine, does this mean he shall recover?”

Too impatient for a response, Evelyn knelt beside Josephine and placed her hand against Lucius’ cheek.

It was cool. The fever had broken.

For a moment, all was still as Evelyn fought to comprehend what had happened, what was happening still. She was afraid to hope that perhaps the end had come- and victory along with it- when Josephine touched her and instantly, all was certain.

The girl’s tears had ceased and she wore a triumphant smile.

Lucius would live.

Evelyn drew a long breath and sank once more against the opposite wall.

“My God, I was so frightened. I was so terribly frightened.”

She closed her eyes. What time was it? She could feel the heaviness of the hour, but with relief came a small stream of emotion and the buoyancy of gratitude.

“Thank you, Josephine.”

 She could not remember a time in her life when she did not know him. She tried to think of what the world would look like without him, but she realized she did not want to know. And it did not matter. She did not have to wonder about that anymore. He was not invincible, or immortal, but he was alive.

A few doors down, someone emerged from their stateroom to retch. Startled, Evelyn’s eyes fluttered open to find Josephine looking back at her inquisitively.

The girl’s form was tense, her posture altering with the readiness to move on. She seemed to be requesting Evelyn’s permission to leave. There were other patients, other men who needed her.

Nervously, Evelyn looked at Lucius.

“Do you think me capable of nursing him without you?” she asked Josephine. “I have no idea… I do not know what to do.”

Josephine smiled and nodded, then continued tirelessly down the hall. In the dim light, her pale nightgown gave her the appearance of a ghost, her feet mingling with the shadows and disappearing beneath her.

For a moment, Evelyn simply stared at Lucius. His face gave off a pallid and frightful glow in the lamplight. Already his body had begun to wither, his cheeks and hands skeletal from the tremendous loss of nourishment. He lay limp and pitiful, mercifully drunk with sleep. 

Evelyn knelt beside him, aware that her expensive robe and nightgown were soiled beyond repair. She took up the cloth once more and began to clean Lucius’ face, but before long, her knees grew weary of the position, as the floor was wooden and coarse. She arranged herself beside him, further destroying her attire, and wrapped her arms around him, hoisting him onto her lap as Josephine had done with the man before him.

Lucius’ full weight was heavier than she anticipated. At this proximity, even his head was large, his shoulders broad. He had the body of a man, yet in this piteous, unconscious state, he possessed the vulnerability of a child. Evelyn gently ran the cloth along his forehead, tracing the line of his brow. She was astonished to see so much of the boy she had once known and so little of the haughty, vain young man he had become in latter years.

As she cleaned the refuse from his skin, she realized that a song from their youth was streaming through her mind. She began to hum it quietly, but the melody was overcome by the other sounds of the hall. Evelyn hummed a little louder, then began to sing it out.

She sang for a long while, and the song was not merely heard in Lucius’ dreams. Throughout the hall, the men’s cries turned to sighs as they listened rapturously to the rare voice of a woman, an angel in the dark.

When morning dawned, a soft blue light filtered into the hall, illuminating the faces of those who were suffering, as well as those who had ceased to suffer sometime in the past two days. Ashen and weary, a doctor and two other men emerged from the infirmary to observe the state of things. They began removing the bodies of the dead, and found that those yet living, whom they had set out to make comfortable, had already been made so at the diligent hands of a slight English maid.

The vision of Josephine and Evelyn was almost more than the poor doctor could bear, for his nerves were riddled with exhaustion, and he had little strength to suppress the tears that came to his eyes. He expressed his gratitude for their services and proceeded to excuse them from the hall, for he wished to examine the survivors.

“Go up on deck and take a draught of the clean morning,” he told them.

One of the men helped Evelyn to her feet, as the bottom half of her body had gone numb some hours before. He assisted her from the hall and when they emerged into the early light of day, she squinted against the brightness and filled her lungs with the sweet saline air.

Light. So there was such a thing.

The small journey was taxing and Evelyn sought a crate to rest upon, when a nearby gentleman appraised her unsightly appearance.

“What happened to her?” he asked her escort.

“She’s been tending the sick,” the man replied. “Go and fetch the poor girl a cup of coffee, would you?” He turned to Evelyn. “I think your little friend went to find you a change of clothes, miss. Tireless, ain’t she? I will be sure to let her know where you are. Just stay put, you hear?”

Evelyn nodded and the man departed.

Josephine quietly returned to the stateroom, her footsteps light and silent. The others slept heavily as she slipped out of her soiled frock and apron, bundling them in a sack to be thrown into the sea. She changed into fresh clothes, gathering an extra set for Evelyn and a clean, damp cloth for Lucius.

She exited the room as stealthily as she entered, shutting the door softly behind her. She steeled herself against the fetid odor of the hall, compassion washing over her anew. She surveyed the scene, taking in the work of the doctor and his assistants. Several bodies had been covered with sheets, and the dismal sight of them brought a new wave of emotion over the girl, forcing her to lean against the wall beneath its weight. She shed a few more tears, then looked on, noticing that the survivors were in the process of being cleaned and tended. Lucius was among the first the doctor had seen, his head propped up on a pillow and his legs covered with a wool blanket. A bucket of water with a ladle was positioned near his arm, ready to drink.

Josephine went to him and placed the cool cloth upon his forehead. He stirred and opened his eyes, recognition lighting his face. With a speed he did not know he possessed, he reached out and took hold of her hand, his grip sure but weak.

“It’s you,” he murmured, his voice broken. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry, so the girl took up the ladle and held it to his lips. As he could not lift his head, she used her other hand to assist him.

When he had drunk, he sighed.

“You tended me last night, didn’t you?” he asked.

Josephine nodded.

He recalled how she had overwhelmed his senses, though he had never actually seen her. He
thought
he had seen her, had
felt
her presence like one feels the rays of the sun. He had known it was her, as one knows light by the redness that seeps through an eyelid when it is shut.

“I felt you,” he told her.

He looked at her with heavy eyes, willing them to stay open as they fought for rest. He remembered the first time he had seen her, the first time he had ignored her. She was only a child, and he could not even remember her name.

He studied her face; so soft, so young, so gentle. Warm, yet cool, like the transition of winter into spring. And then those eyes… so green, so deep: like Ireland, like life itself.

“I could not see you, but I felt you. I knew you were there. And I heard you. I heard you singing.”

At this, the girl shook her head.

Of course. She was a mute. Did he know nothing about her?

She held his left hand and with her thumb, she traced the outline of his third finger, where his wedding band had once made its brief appearance.

He met her gaze with a question, to which she nodded.

She knew. But how could she know? Had Evelyn told her?

Evelyn. It was Evelyn who had sung to him. But why? She had forgotten the words, had left them in Ireland along with any semblance of love she had ever felt for him. They had grown apart. Why would she have sung over him? Why did she come to him? She could have been infected. She could have died! He had done nothing to deserve such an act of sacrifice, and indeed, he had not believed Evelyn capable of one.

He turned his face away from Josephine’s innocent stare. Her eyes were too pure to see him for who he really was: the boy who had wounded Evelyn when she was just a child, the young man who had lost his head and gotten her father killed.

How did one apologize for such things? How did one recover a friendship lost?

He sensed Josephine’s earnest gaze and felt the more wretched for it.

“Thank you for what you’ve done,” he told her dismissively, closing his eyes. “You may leave me now. I am in need of rest.”

After a turn about the ship, two cups of coffee, and a fresh set of clothing, Evelyn felt like a new woman. The nightmare had passed with the breaking of dawn. Lucius was on the mend. Together with Josephine, they had fought and won the battle of cholera.

The fog of exhaustion had cleared from her mind, and her thoughts raced to reconcile the traumas of night to the restoration of day. From the moment Lucius fell ill till the moment she left him sleeping in the hall, she had encountered such a vast array of emotions as she had not known since her father’s death: fear, anxiety, angst, pain, and sorrow. But when the fever broke, there were other emotions that for years had been removed from her: hope, happiness, anticipation, and triumph.

Evelyn’s muscles were heavy from exertion, but tense with caffeine. She felt tired but victorious, and the coffee had loosened her tongue. Beside her, Josephine sipped at her own coffee, eyes trained on the sky and reflecting the pearly clouds of daybreak.

Evelyn regarded her with admiration.

“I have never known anyone like you,” she told her.

In response, the child turned to her with a smile.

“You are special, you know. Your courage has saved many lives.”

Josephine received the praise with a nod of her head.

It was not enough. Evelyn’s mouth was working, her words refusing to cease.

“I wish to confide in you,” she told the girl. “I have a secret. It is a great secret that no one must know.”

Josephine nodded. Evelyn swallowed hard and opened her mouth to speak.

“Lucius is my husband.”

Chapter Fourteen

She waited for Josephine’s brows to lift in surprise, but the girl remained unmoved.

Evelyn felt the compulsion to explain.

“We were hardly more than children when we were betrothed, but our friendship had long since been at an end. The betrothal meant nothing to Lucius. Rather, he became quite unruly. He was recurrently discovered philandering with some hussy or another: a fact that was initially, I’ll admit, quite bothersome. I suppose I thought my father would take notice and call off the engagement, but he never did. I was frightfully angry. Angry with my father, who had turned a blind eye, and especially angry with Lucius, because he had been such a sensible child and yet here he was, making a complete idiot of himself before the entire city of New York. And no one did anything about it! I kept thinking, ‘Lucius, you are better than this!’ But after so much tomfoolery, I started to question whether he really was. Then I thought to myself, ‘Well,
he
may not be better, but
I
certainly am!’ And from that moment on, I wanted nothing more to do with him. And then there was the incident in the pub with my father. He was murdered, you know. Lucius was there, and it was actually him the man meant to kill. But my father stepped between them. It was dreadful. My God, I miss him so much. But that was the final ‘nail in the coffin’, as they say. I swore I would never speak to Lucius again.

“Yet how like a conniving little cockroach he is! Burning with gold fever, he came to me on our wedding day and informed me of his intentions to drag me to California. Our wedding day! Can you believe it? Now I cannot escape him! Each night I hear him murmur in his sleep, each afternoon I pass him in the hall, each evening at supper I suffer his presence across the table. Until last night, when we were informed of the outbreak, we had not spoken in days.

“And then, of all things, Lucius produced his violin, and it was as if we were thrust back to a time and place that existed before all of this silly nonsense, a time when Lucius and I were friends. Indeed, he was my
only
friend. That is, until he was forced to grow up, and I suppose a little piece of me felt as though he had abandoned me. Perhaps that was when my resentment was first conceived. After all these years, it has continued to feed upon every difference that arises between us. No doubt you have seen the way we repel one another. The truth is we are pretending not to be married, and when we arrive in California, it will only be a matter of time before the marriage is annulled. We have agreed that it is mutually beneficial to sever the bonds our fathers placed upon us. Lucius may do whatever he likes with his freedom, but I intend to return to Ireland, and perhaps one day, I shall marry for love. I imagine you have witnessed my disposition towards Mr. Donnigan, as I am quite taken with him. If he should find it in his heart to wait for me until I am an independent woman, then perhaps my story will have a happy ending at last.”

Evelyn looked down at her hands, her fingers tracing the edge of her coffee cup.