The Widow's War (2 page)

PART 1

Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, October 1853

 

 

 

T
heir child is conceived in a time of plague. Here is how Carrie remembers it: She and William in her bed in her father’s house on the Ladeira da Glória with the shutters closed. Outside, panic in the streets as refugees flee the city, black flags in the port, ships in quarantine, the sound of church bells tolling ceaselessly. Inside, light slanting through the wooden slats of the shutters, the scent of freshly turned earth drifting in from the garden, William’s eyes filled with despair, the tenderness and fierceness of his lovemaking, his hair thick and soft as brown silk.

Speaking his name, she pulls him closer and tells herself they will be together for the rest of their lives. That is the moment she first realizes he is burning with fever. And when she sits up, sweating and shaking, she understands that she is burning, too . . .

S
he wakes several days later in an unfamiliar place where she can see nothing but a net of white lines and a brilliance so intense it makes her scream. Footsteps hurry toward her, shadowy white shapes loom up through the netting, and she’s examined by terrifying figures in black robes with huge white wings sprouting from their heads.
I’m dead
, she thinks,
and these are either angels come to take me to heaven or devils come to take me to hell.

She struggles to lift her head and the pain is so intense, she screams again. Every bone in her body feels as if it’s been broken. Dear God, if she’s dead, why is she in so much pain?

“
Senhorita,”
a female voice asks in Portuguese. “Who are you?”

She tries to reply, but she can’t form words, and she has forgotten her name. Heat rises from her feet to her head in a long, shuddering coil. This must be hell then. The devils are tormenting her for her sins, feeding her to the flames, turning her slowly over hot coals. Again she tries to speak, but the sweet smut of fever fills her mouth, choking her.

“
Senhorita
, your name. We need to know your name.”

Suddenly she remembers: the plague, her father’s death, the hellish two weeks of tending the dying, and then . . . A pain sharper than broken bones fills her chest. Where is William? He was so sick, so terribly sick. She remembers sponging him down with alcohol in a desperate attempt to break his fever, begging him to drink a little water, kissing him and crying over him. What happened to him? Where is he?

She tries to ask one of the things that is hovering over her, but she has gone mute, and no matter how hard she struggles, she can’t utter a single word. For a while she fights to speak, because she must know—even if she is dead and in hell—if William survived the smallpox epidemic. But the effort is too much and the pain too overwhelming. The net of light begins to dim, and a vast incoherent roaring fills her ears. She makes one last attempt to speak William’s name and then falls into blackness as if into a deep well.

When she wakes again, the pain is still there but beaten back to a more bearable level. This time she understands that the net of white lines is not an infernal trap but merely a loosely woven cotton bandage someone has tied over her eyes. She lies still for a long time, too exhausted to move. All around her she can hear women’s voices. They’re speaking Portuguese, which must mean she’s still in Brazil, perhaps still in Rio. Although they speak mostly in whispers, she understands a word here and there. She has been hearing Portuguese since she was six and her father and mother took her from her grandparents’ house and plunged her into the wild, beautiful tropics. For a moment she’s comforted by the sound of this melodious language, which she speaks as if she’d been born beneath the slopes of Corco vado. Then again, she remembers.

“
Senhoras!
” she cries. The conversations stop abruptly and footsteps approach. Through the bandage, she sees a large woman dressed in a black robe. The woman is wearing a starched white headdress that flutters like the wings of a bird. Not a devil or an angel but simply a nun in a wimple.

“So you’re awake at last,” the nun says.

Carrie manages to nod.

“What is your name, my child?”

“Carolyn Vinton.” Carrie’s tongue has finally been unlocked and the words slide out easily.

“You have been very ill, Dona Carolyn. We did not think you would live. You were given the
últimos ritos
.”

“The last rites? But I am not . . .”

“Not Catholic. We knew that. But in times of plague, rules can be broken. Father Gilberto baptized you and then anointed you with holy oil and prayed over you. And you see, it worked. Many died, but thanks to the grace of God, you survived. And now you are a good Catholic girl, and if you relapse and die, you’ll go straight to heaven.”

Carrie struggles to find the nun’s words comforting, but the idea that she might fall back into fever and die is terrifying. She wants to tell the nun that the priest didn’t need to baptize her. She’d been baptized at the age of three when Grandfather Hampton dunked her in a freezing cold creek in mid-March over her mother’s strenuous objections. Mama had yelled that Carrie would get pneumonia and die like her baby brothers, which had been a real possibility. There’d been no reason for that cold spring baptism except for Grandfather’s own, famous bullheadedness . . .

She realizes with a start that her mind has wandered back to early childhood. Her memory seems to be returning in pieces. She looks up and finds the nun still standing over her, waiting patiently. There are things Carrie wants to ask her, but first she needs to put her own thoughts in order.

She’s been ill, the sister said. Sometimes people wake from tropical diseases with their minds permanently scrambled, or worse yet, they return from the edge of death like little children, unable to read or write or remember their own pasts. Will her brain work normally once she recovers? Will she ever be herself again? Maybe if she could see . . .

“Could you please take this bandage off my eyes?” she asks. There’s a brief silence while the nun considers her request. Carrie’s mouth goes dry with fear. Something’s terribly wrong.

“Do you think you can stand the light, Dona Carolyn? The last time we removed the bandage, you began screaming and begged us to put it back on.”

“Am I going blind?”

The nun laughs softly. “No, quite the contrary. All your senses seem to have been sharpened to the point of agony. When the cat came into the room a few nights ago, you knew it was there, not because you could see it—that was impossible—but because you smelled it. You asked for us to put it up next to you, and we did. You slept with it for an hour or so, and then, as cats do, it wandered off, perhaps to hunt mice, which is why we allow it to live here.” The nun bends over in a sudden black-and-white blur and plucks the bandage from Carrie’s eyes. “There,” she says, “how’s that? No screaming? Ah, good.”

Carrie blinks and finds herself staring up into a pock-marked face with coarse features. The nun has dark eyebrows, a large nose, and small, watery eyes. She’s well into middle age and not at all pretty, but her smile is kind, and Carrie is grateful for it. She turns her head and discovers that her neck still aches, but the pain is minor compared to what it was before.

She is in a large room. The whitewashed walls are adorned with wooden crucifixes. Tall windows let in pink-tinted light—either sunrise or sunset; she’s in no state to determine which. To her left, a row of cots covered with mosquito netting stretches toward an arched doorway through which she can see a courtyard, a bougainvillea vine in full bloom, and a fountain made of those blue-and-white Portuguese tiles that go by the name of
azulejos
. She notices that only a few of the cots are occupied. Most are not only empty but missing sheets and mattresses.

“Where am I, Sister?”

“You lie in the hospital of the Irmandade da Santa Casa de Misericórdia. We found you unconscious on the street and brought you here in a cart along with a dozen others, all of whom had the pox.”

At the word
pox
another shiver moves through Carrie’s body. She can feel horrible, inchoate shapes lurking at the back of her mind like caged animals impatient to be let out, but she doesn’t know what they are. Memories? Nightmares? She knows her own name and her distant memories are clear, but she seems to have no recent past. Whatever’s waiting for her has something to do with the word
pox.
Instinctively, she reaches up and touches her cheek, feels the warmth of her flesh, the curved plain of her forehead, the bridge of her nose. When she moves her hand up to her head, she discovers they’ve cut her hair.

She remembers it had been waist-length, blond; that it curled in impossible tangles. She remembers fighting it with a hairbrush every morning and winding it into a crown of braids. Most of all, she remembers being pretty, not beautiful perhaps, but pretty: dark brown eyes with flecks of amber in them, an oval face, a complexion that tanned in the tropical sun rather than burned, leaving a line of freckles across her nose. She remembers not minding that her skin darkened even though ladies were supposed to be as pale as milk.

Shutting her eyes again, she conjures up herself in an imaginary mirror: small, round breasts; long legs. Too tall by a good three inches for current fashions, but slender and high-waisted with curved hips, delicate, long-fingered hands, and lips so red that someone, whose name she cannot remember, once accused her angrily of using paint. She lists her flaws: a crooked toe on her right foot that never healed properly after she broke it, an overbite, a turned up Irish nose—

Her hand returns to her cheek and freezes. She lies still fighting a terrible suspicion. Slowly she lowers her hand and opens her eyes. She has a question she wants to ask, but she isn’t sure she wants to hear the answer.

“I’ve had the pox, haven’t I? Tell me the truth, Sister: Am I horribly scarred?”

“No, not at all, Dona Carolyn. There isn’t a mark on you. You never caught the pox. You had some disease that we have no name for. Your fever was so great, we were sure you were going to die. You had a rash all over your body that we first assumed was the pox, but you never developed the blisters. Even so, your pain was beyond description. You suffered greatly. We prayed for you as we prayed for all who came to us during those terrible weeks, but in your case, by the grace of God, our prayers were answered.”

The nun looks down the row of mostly empty beds. “I don’t think you need to be afraid of catching the pox now. The plague has burned itself out. Some of the sick have recovered and gone home, but many died. Most of those empty beds were theirs. We’ve burned the sheets and mattresses and buried their bodies in our garden because there was no room left in our cemetery. We would have burned their bodies, too, but the poor souls could not go to God if we did that. For more than a week, they died nearly as fast as they came in. On the worst day we buried fourteen, two of whom were sisters in our order who nursed the sick until they fell down beside them and had to be nursed in turn. I don’t know why I was spared.”

She turns back to Carrie who is staring at her with a look of great agitation. “What is it? Are you feeling ill again? Is the fever back?”

“No, but your words have made me remember something.”

“Remember what, my child?”

“That my father died. I buried him in a garden, our garden. Someone . . . someone I love . . . William . . . yes, William helped me dig his grave.” William’s name suddenly comes back to her, releasing a torrent of memories so painful she begins to weep. She knows now why she hasn’t been able to remember the recent past. It’s unbearable.

“Where is he, Sister? Did he live or die? Tell me now, please. I can’t bear not knowing.” Sick with fear, she waits for the nun to answer.

“Did who live or die, my child?” There is a hint of weariness in the nun’s voice as if a display of grief were out of place in this room full of ghosts and empty beds.

“William,” Carrie says. “William Saylor. He’d come back to Rio, and we were going to be married, but as soon as his ship sailed into the bay, he saw the black flags. He’s a doctor, so he knew at once what they meant. Once he realized there was plague in the city, he became desperate to get to me, but the captain forbade anyone to go ashore and announced that he was going to set sail for São Paulo as soon as the tide turned because only a madman would enter Rio in the middle of an epidemic. William said all he could think of was the danger I was in, so he waited until dark, lowered himself down the side of the ship, swam to the docks, and came to me as quickly as he could. He found me at home tending my father. William tried to help me save Papa, but all his medical knowledge proved useless. Papa suffered so, dear God . . .”

Carrie begins crying again.