Free Belle Cora: A Novel by Phillip Margulies Page A

with your mama.”
    I started to go upstairs to see her, but Christina insisted on cleaning us up at a basin in the kitchen first. “How you both shiver!”
    Christina helped us up the stairs. As we reached the landing, the boards creaked to announce the approach of Dr. Boyle, whose name had been spoken so often in our house that it had been among my first words. He was tall and stout, well dressed, ruddy, a model of health and good appetite for his patients to imitate. “So these are the young fugitives!” He beamed down at us benevolently.
    Lewis began to vomit. Dr. Boyle stepped away to save his boots. He did it deftly, and with no change of expression, as if he had been expectingLewis to vomit and it was, medically, a good sign. Then he became interested in the vomit. He sat us both on the steps. He looked at his watch while holding Lewis’s wrist and feeling his forehead. Then he did the same for me and told Christina to put us to bed.
    I lay beneath many blankets, shivering, half awake, and distantly aware of Christina undressing Lewis.
    I dreamed of the blackened streets, the treasure drifting downriver, the smoldering ruins behind the marble pillars of the Exchange, and an angel, who with one arm wielded a sword he pointed north, east, south, and west, and with the other arm carried me safely through the air across the burning world. Worried faces surrounded me. I spat up into a bowl. Christina fed me beef broth, which I promptly spewed onto my nightshirt. My coughs carved deeper and wider spaces within my chest as if bent on hollowing me out completely. It occurred to me that I might die before my mother.
    Later, using all my strength, I turned my head slowly to watch Dr. Boyle hold a candle with which he was setting bits of paper alight on Lewis’s chest. He covered the paper with a wineglass. Then Dr. Boyle was holding a lancet. Lewis’s blood dripped into a white china basin. With another slice of the lancet, the blood flowed.
    Frank was brought in. He was sick, too. We were fed, cupped, bled, and purged.
    When I was conscious once more, the other beds in the room were empty, and my mother was stroking my hair. That she was alive was wonderful, and her touch was a comfort to me; yet I knew that something terrible had happened. “What is it?” I asked weakly. “What?”
    “Don’t talk,” she said, her eyes brimming.
    Next I was sitting up in bed, eating Irish potatoes. Christina was there with my mother.
    “Who?” I asked. My mother turned away.
    “Your brother Frank is in heaven,” said Christina.

IV
    IT WAS NEVER DETERMINED WHAT HAD CAUSED our general attack of “fever,” as Dr. Boyle called it. The suspects were bad food—maybe an inferior ham that Sally had purchased, which we had finished off the night of the fire—and bad air from an open drain. No one said the word “infection.” I suppose there were doctors who thought that illnesses were contagious, but they were backward or foreign; Dr. Boyle was not one of them. He believed in ventilation.
    I had a lingering bronchitis afterward, and for months I was obliged to spend several hours each day in bed or sitting in a chair. I passed the time reading books. I read
The Fairchild Family
twice. I read Genesis in the family’s big picture Bible. Robert began reading
Robinson Crusoe
aloud to me, and when he wasn’t there, I went on by myself. It was much harder than the Bible or
The Fairchild Family
. I remember how the last page looked, down to a little pea-soup stain, on the day I finished it, and that at first no one believed that a seven-and-a-half-year-old child had really read such a grown-up book. Eventually, I was given Frank’s books.
    MY GRANDFATHER WAS WELL KNOWN by this time as the abolitionist merchant who helped to found an antislavery newspaper, and who had the minister of the Abyssinian Presbyterian Church as a guest at his table. Today it is believed that all Northerners were foes of slavery, but in fact the cause dearest