The Pesthouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

a while. 'I'm going to drown unless I come inside,' he said. She coughed at him. No
Stay Away
, no
Come
.
    Franklin pulled the door aside with his left hand, resting his right hand with the knife on the low lintel at his chin height. She held her candle out to get a better look at him and in its sudden guttering of light they saw each other for the first time: Red Margaret was startled first by the size of him, two times the weight and size of her grandpa, she thought, and then by what she took to be a face of honesty, not quite a handsome face, not quite a beauty boy, but narrow, healthy, promising, a face to rescue her from fear if only he would dare. Franklin saw the bald, round head of someone very sick and beautiful. A shaven head was unambiguous. It meant the woman and the hut were dangerous. He stepped back and turned his head away to breathe the safer, rain-soaked air. He was no longer visible to her. The door frame reached only his throat. He put the door back into place and reconciled himself to getting very wet and cold that night. 'A pesthouse, then,' he said out loud, to show — politely — that he understood and that his curtailed friendliness was sensible. Too late to call his brother back, though calling out for Jackson was Franklin's first instinct, because if there was disease in the Pesthouse, there could well be disease down there, among the inhabitants of Ferrytown.
    Now the woman was coughing once again. Her little hut was full of smoke, he'd noticed. And her lungs, no doubt, were heavy with pestilence, too. Dragging his tarps behind him, he crashed his way back through the clearing and undergrowth into the thickest of the trees, where the canopy would be his shelter. He had been cowardly, he knew. He had been sensible. Only a fool would socialize with death just to stay warm and dry for the night. He found a partly protected spot among the scrub oaks just at the top of Butter Hill where he could erect a makeshift tent from his stretched tarps and protect himself a little. His decision to stay up in the hills to rest had clearly been a foolish one. Jackson had been right as usual. A crazier, more reckless man would have faced the risks of pressing on, injury defied, and enjoyed the benefits of a warm bed, surely better for a limping emigrant than sharing a stormy night with bald disease, no matter how eye-catching it might be.
    Franklin's knee had worsened in the rain and during his latest stumbles through the sodden undergrowth. Its throbbing tormented him. It almost ached out loud, the nagging of a roosting dove,
Can't cook, cook, cook
. Even when, in the early quarters of the night, the storm had passed, and the moon, the stars and the silver lake had reappeared, he could not sleep. Her face was haunting him, her face in the candlelight (that celebrated flatterer) with its shorn scalp. He might have touched himself with her in mind, despite his pain, had not the valley raised its voice above the grumbling of his knee and the hastened beating of his newly captured heart. The dripping music of the woods was joined by lowland drums. There was the thud and clatter of slipping land, a sound he could not comprehend or recognize — he knew only that it was bad — and then the stony gust, the rumbling, the lesser set of sounds than thunder that agitated the younger horses and the ever-childish mules out in the safety of the tetherings.
    On Butter Hill, above the river crossing where west was granted access to the east, Franklin Lopez sat alarmed, entirely unasleep, in his wet tarps, the only living witness when the silver pendant shook and blistered — a pot, a lake, coming to the boil.
     
4
     
    JACKSON HAD TAKEN a liking to the modest town, with its smoke and smells and the clamor of voices, livestock and tools. Even though he had arrived at its boundary fences a little after dark, a few trading stalls were still set up, warmed and lit by braziers and lanterns, where he was greeted by dogs, his palms