Too Soon for Flowers (23 page)

When it was finished, Diana folded her letter and got into bed. Upon blowing out the candle, she thought she heard a noise outside. She pulled back the window’s curtain. But nothing was to be seen, beyond vague forms of plants lit by starlight, for there was as yet no moon.

It was probably only an animal; an owl, a skunk, or even a porcupine—the last an animal that she had never encountered, and hoped to avoid in the future. But it could also have been a person, she imagined. Someone might even have been peeking into her window, from the garden.

Closing the curtain and lying back with a soft moan, Diana Longfellow spent some time trying to decide just which of her two Bracebridge gentlemen it might have been.

Sunday

O
N THE MORNING
of the Sabbath, little was planned by the Longfellow household beyond a simple breakfast. When that was over, Richard and Charlotte shared coffee with Cicero and Edmund Montagu, speaking little, and that softly, until the meetinghouse bell roused them. Mrs. Willett and her neighbor then walked arm in arm out into the sunshine, making their way to the glass house to praise the workings of Nature. Orpheus came along, savoring the air. And the two cats trailed behind, making occasional forays into clumps of grass.

“It’s a shame Diana can’t be out with us,” said her brother, pausing to tie his hair ribbon more tightly against the breeze. “This would be just the thing for her nerves.” Mrs. Willett smiled at this, realizing her neighbor had begun to miss his sister, after all.

“Do you think I could take her some strawberries today?” she asked.

“A good idea! A few were reddening, the last time I looked.”

At the greenhouse door they were met by moist, rich smells of humus and living fauna like no other in the neighborhood. Though the light inside was filtered, the lack of shadow under newly whitewashed panes made the place seem oddly bright, while the hues of many plants, arranged in pots along the tables and on the ground, were cheerfully heightened. At the moment, wind activated a wooden ventilating fan set into the roof, but it was still several degrees warmer within the enclosure than without.

Charlotte reached through a slit in her skirt and took a folding fan from a pocket that hung around her waist. As Longfellow paused at a collection of wild orchids, she waited another moment to compose her thoughts, cooled herself a little, and opened with one of several questions she had formulated the day before.

“You and I, Richard, have had more than one clear look at the Grim Reaper—”

“Too clear.”

“—and we both know that his face can change a good deal, from one appearance to another. But with Phoebe, her illness, if that is what it was, left no mark behind at all. I suppose Dr. Tucker did what he could—but do you think he was clever enough? Could someone else have examined her more carefully, to learn what happened?”

Longfellow looked up with surprise. “I suspect not. Most physicians merely guess at what bothers their patients, while listening to them complain; once a patient is dead … some will occasionally cut into a body to look for something more. But that was not a thing Tucker was prepared to do, especially with a corpse infected by smallpox.

“A gentleman in Padua,” he continued, looking up from a stem of white
phalenopsis
, “recently published his thoughts on some seven hundred autopsies which he had performed over sixty years. Quite a life’s work! But we are
hardly in Europe. We are not even in Cambridge! While examining a body might bring a little peace to a few of the living, it would surely lead many more of them into warfare with one another. Unless, I suppose, one wishes to dismember the corpse of a felon, for the law is not far beyond doing that itself, in drawing and quartering. But what would you expect Tucker to
find
inside, with no sign of anything suspicious on the outside?”

Charlotte looked up into the palm fronds that hung like fingers from the sky, before taking another tenuous step. “What,” she asked, “actually causes death, Richard, in someone who becomes ill? What lies beneath the changes the body goes through?”

“An excellent question, Carlotta. To which I haven’t much of an answer,” Longfellow went on, walking over to examine his pots of cabbages. “Wise men—those who believe in earthly causes of disease, rather than in spirits, or heavenly whim—these men are still split into several factions. They may diagnose an illness, and even cure it; but when asked to consider the question of what unites a symptom with its actual cause, they are rarely in agreement. Even in this great scientific era, there is no one Grand Theory to link cause and effect in healing. Some look for answers in numerology, or in observations of the sun and moon … some in climate, and atmospheric change. Expose yourself to cold and come down with the ague, you see. Others blame illness on our internal chemistry. They conclude some of us become too acid, or too alkaline, until we are encrusted in our vessels, or eaten away in our joints. But what, exactly, causes the ague, or the gout, or even a common fever? We worry when we’re feverish, but can we be completely certain that fever is an evil, when it often precedes recovery? In Leyden recently, the famed Dr. Boerhaave taught that fever is the body’s attempt to fight off death. But then, Boerhaave also held that we’re all little more than machines full of fluids,
whose conduits clog up from time to time—rather like clay pipe stems. Others have their eye on tiny worms found in tooth scrapings, or even in the blood; I’ve shown you some, you’ll recall, under my microscope. Yet none know what they are, or where they come from, though some do attempt to explain them with the old chestnut of spontaneous generation.”

“Which is—?” inquired Charlotte as she watched the cats play among the empty pots in a corner.

“Ah, so I do have your attention! Well, it’s long been believed, by men who otherwise seem intelligent, that living creatures can spring from non-living matter. It’s said they generate in corruption of some sort—mud, for instance. Frogs, flies, maggots, that sort of thing. Would you care to hear a recipe for creating mice?”

“Certainly, but I wonder that anyone would want to,” Charlotte replied, waving her fan at white flies rising from a bed of seedlings.

“One has only to put dirty linen into a willow basket with a little wheat, or a piece of cheese,” said her pleased instructor.

“I imagine that would work, eventually.”

“Yes, but you’re a farm woman, with enough sense to see how reproduction must occur, and that it does so without any kind of magic. Sadly, some of our great men are unable to grasp such a simple-minded idea.”

“You do flatter me.”

“Well, whatever else they may say of you, Carlotta, it is not that you lack a brain. The point is, anyone claiming to know the entire truth of disease and its cause is either seeking his own fame, or after someone else’s fortune.”

“Then you don’t believe in any of the theories you have mentioned?”

“I do not. I am convinced that most philosophers, natural or otherwise, are fools. I’m also certain that their theories tend to drain away much of our common sense,
especially when their theories are honored above observations that prove the exact opposite! To learn, Mrs. Willett, one must see for one’s self, without prejudice. Here’s a curious thing,” he added, lifting a finger as if sampling the wind. “It’s possible that all life is merely a chain of Eaters and Eaten. Dean Swift put the idea quite neatly, some years ago.

Mrs. Willett smiled at both the wit and its presentation, though she found the idea somewhat distasteful. “Is that why you’ve moved from telescope to microscope, lately?” she inquired.

“The microscope, too, has the ability to reveal amazing sights, which are nonetheless real for being unobservable with the naked eye. A Swede who now calls himself Linnaeus has just classified some of the world’s tiniest beings into a group he calls Chaos. I think we can do better than that, before long. It only requires lenses that go a bit deeper.”

“And what,” asked Charlotte thoughtfully, “if your chain were reversed, or some of its links jumped over?”

“How so?”

“Well, a carcass in the fields might feed a bear, or buzzards, and it will soon attract weasels, voles, horse flies, and so on; but it is the tiny worms that will finally dispose of it, and the rest of us, eventually. Of course we do not think they will feed on us while we live—but we know that leeches, and mosquitoes, surely will! What if—what if we’re also being bitten, while we live, by things far smaller, and unseen … whose bite carries an insect’s poison, like certain spiders, or scorpions? Could this poison cause the smallpox, do you suppose?”

“I doubt it, Carlotta! For one thing, the blood worms you have seen, though they do multiply in those who have certain illnesses, are not observed to increase greatly in those who clearly have other illnesses, including smallpox. Or the Great Pox, for that matter.”

“The French Disease, do you mean?” Charlotte asked quietly.

Longfellow paused to consider propriety, which naturally forbade the discussion with a woman of diseases that pass between male and female, before he decided in favor of knowledge. “Or
syphilis
, as the Italians have named it. Something we rarely speak of, yet since you have an admirable interest in healing, Mrs. Willett, I will go on, if you like, while doubting you will encounter it in Bracebridge any day soon.”

“Why is that?” In fact, Charlotte did know something of this old malady, which cleverly mimicked many others, from a medical treatise her brother had brought back with him on one of his visits. But she hoped now to hear something new.

“Because,” Longfellow continued, “it is said to be a disease that originates in poverty and immoral practices. So, of course, one discovers it most often among Europeans, and in cities. There is, unfortunately, no inoculation for the Great Pox as there is for the Small. And contracting it offers no protection, for the future is the victim’s greatest fear—though more often than not, time will bring no change. When it does, however, it can take the form of deafness, blindness, paralysis—as well as delusions and, finally, insanity. When this phase begins, some of the symptoms may come and go, but death is the eventual end—and by then it is a blessing.”

“Richard, if the Great Pox is so deadly, what keeps it from killing outright, like the smallpox? And is there no hope for cure?”

“No one knows why, Carlotta. And there is no cure. Some believe there is hope of avoiding symptoms in the application or ingestion of certain salts—but these are not without their own peril. I suspect it is likely that most treatment does nothing. Nature herself seems to spare a good half of those infected from any further problem. Fortunately, after a few years there is little risk of spreading the infection further, except by giving birth. Then, as the Bible tells us, the child will suffer for the sins of the father. As we are speaking of the Bible,” Longfellow went on, deciding Mrs. Willett should be given something else to ponder on the Sabbath, “I’m curious about what our own preacher said to you and my sister, on the day of Phoebe’s death.”