Free City of Liars and Thieves by Eve Karlin

but I had the uneasy feeling that she had been calling Levi’s name again.
    The doctor reached for his bag. “Her eyes are clear, so I don’t think she’s in danger, but keep others away and take this.” He pressed a clear glass vial into my hand. Impossibly light, it was smaller than a robin’s egg, and as fragile. I could see that the liquid inside was the color of blood. “It’s laudanum,” he said, “to relieve her discomfort. Dispense only a drop at a time and only if she is in pain.”
    My palm grew warm and I shuddered. Derived from opium, laudanum was known to be addictive and potentially lethal. “Is it necessary?” I asked.
    The doctor folded my fingers closed. “Have it on hand.”
    I have often wondered what would have happened if I had simply refused, pushed it back at him with a firm
No, thank thee
. After the men left, I went to Elma’s bureau. The top drawer squeaked open as if protesting the intrusion. Pushing aside stockings and undergarments, I buried the vial deep in back, relieved to be rid of it.
    —
    Days passed and, like a lost soul who had innocently paddled into a riptide, I felt that I was on the verge of drowning. Yellow fever claimed its first victim of that summer: a prominent merchant and war hero. Days later, the midwife who helped bring Patience into the world fell ill. Doctors performed bleeding and purges but were unable to stop the flow of blood and bile. Both her children followed her to the grave. The following week, three cases were reported in a single night. The number doubled, and doubled again, until fever consumed the city.
    The public was warned to avoid fatigue, hot sun, and night air, to walk in the center of the street away from infected homes, not to shake hands. The daily papers printed advertisements blaming the use of strong malt liquor and distilled spirits for weakening men’s resistance. A leading scholar wrote a two-volume work claiming the epidemic was caused by volcanic eruptions in Sicily. Others said the poor were dying because they ate an abundance of watermelon. The Common Council faulted “manifold sins, immorality, and profaneness.” Federalists labeled the scourge a foreign contagion, while Republicans cited abominable filth and the incompetence of Federalist magistrates.
    The acrid stench of death filled the air as I entered the market. With its pyramids of ripe fruit, the Fly Market had always been lively and colorful. Now roosters roamed free, pecking rotting produce. People hurried through the deserted aisles. Most clutched garlic to their noses and mouths or wore satchels of camphor around their necks to ward off the fever. The coffee tents were gone, replaced by rows of caskets, the pine still green as if the trees could not mature fast enough to keep up with demand.
    “Coffins of all sizes!” boys cried, hawking their wares.
    “Where’s your pretty cousin?” the fruit vendor asked as I chose berries. He was an Italian man with smiling eyes who had always paid special attention to Elma.
    “She has been ill. Thankfully, it was nothing serious.” Elma’s fever had broken a week earlier, and yesterday she was well enough to share stories with Charles.
    “Moral squalor causes yellow fever,” said a slight woman sniffing tomatoes.
    I wanted to ask her if a bad tomato had caused her pinched expression, but when she set it down, her features remained sour.
    “Forty-five people died yesterday,” she added. “The dead cart’s overflowing and the pits at potter’s field are full. Course, that’s the only place families are allowed to bury fever victims.”
    I nearly dropped the berries as I silently vowed to keep the children inside, in my bedroom, if need be.
    “Sailors are burning corpses at the Battery,” the woman said. “At this rate, the city will soon be a ghost town.”
    The vendor looked past her, clearly eager for her to go. The macabre chatter was not good for business. “Isaac!” he called.
    I caught a glimpse of a