Free The Lazarus Curse by Tessa Harris

very Arab traders who had sold his mother into slavery in the first place. Not content to rob him of his freedom, they had stolen his identity, too.
    Phibbah tucked a coarse blanket under his chin, but it was so cold in the room that her own breath whirled around her head every time she spoke. Taking out a rag from her pocket, she began to dab his wet forehead. He was much younger than she, but she did not know how old. What she did know was that he had been a sickly child and it was a wonder that he had survived infancy. After he had been seasoned and bled for the cane fields, he had grown even weaker and was often unfit for work. That was why they had set him to domestic duties rather than on the plantations. He had a pretty face and a beguiling smile that seemed to endear him to white ladies. They cooed over him in his bright red turban and his baggy silk pants. “How charming,” they would say when he offered them their dish of tea. They spoke of him as they spoke of the mistress’s pug dog. He was a plaything. A pet. And now he lay fighting for his life.
    “You told Venus?” Phibbah asked Cato, as she knelt by the boy’s side.
    The great bear of a man nodded. He was a Coromantee, too, fierce and proud. Tilting his head toward the landing, he replied, “She come now.”
    Seconds later Venus, the housekeeper, appeared in the room and glided over to where the child lay. She was a mulatto woman, her skin the color of milky coffee, and she wore her black hair piled on top of her head the white woman’s way. From a belt around her small waist hung a bunch of keys, the keys that locked the doors at night so that the slaves could not run away. In effect she was their jailer, even though she, too, was denied her freedom, but she was kind enough. Rumor was that she had been born into the Carfax household, the result of a union between one of the master’s nephews and an Ashanti woman. There was a poise in her manner and an elegance in her gait that set her apart. She did not carry herself like a slave, always looking low, afraid to let her eyes roam freely. Her gaze was always steady and now it settled on the boy.
    “How long has he been like this?” she asked, leaning over the palliasse.
    “I found him downstairs. He had fainted away,” replied Phibbah. “He very bad.”
    “I can see that,” Venus replied, calmly looking down her long, thin nose at the child, whose breathing had become labored. She thought for a moment. “He needs medicine.”
    Cato nodded. “I fetch white doctor?”
    “No,” the housekeeper replied firmly. Her reproving gaze slid sideways. “You know the mistress will not let you call one. They cost too much.” Cato looked crestfallen, but a smirk crept over Venus’s lips. “I have something much better than white man’s medicine,” she said.
    Delving into the pocket in her skirt, she pulled out a small glass bottle and held it up to the square of light from the window. Inside was a pale liquid.
    “This was given to me by a myal man before we left Jamaica. He say, if you are troubled by any white man’s disease, this will make it better.” She nodded her head as her eyes flitted between Phibbah and Cato. They both seemed heartened by her words. They knew the myal medicine to work.
    “Hold his head,” Venus instructed as she uncorked the bottle.
    Kneeling down Phibbah slid one arm under Ebele’s neck, so that his body was forced up. His head tilted back limply, but Cato held it steady as the girl opened his lips with her free hand. Venus edged forward and poured the bottle’s contents into the boy’s mouth. He spluttered and jerked his body, but the housekeeper clamped his lips shut until she was sure he had swallowed the liquid. Taking a step back, she watched as the boy’s breathing relaxed almost immediately.
    “There!” she said triumphantly. “By tomorrow he will be back to work.”
    Phibbah and Cato glanced at each other and smiled. They both knew the myal men on Mr.