Free Property (Vintage Contemporaries) by Valerie Martin Page A

bell clanging in the back of the house, then silence. For a moment I feared I was ringing a bell inside a tomb, then, to my relief, I heard footsteps coming toward the door.
    It was Peek, Mother’s cook. She opened the inner door hesitantly, then, seeing me through the shutter, pulled the latch and floor bolt to let me in. Sarah had climbed down and stood beside me, her baby fretting against her shoulder. “Miss Manon,” Peek said. “Your mama is a little better today.”
    “Go straight back and quiet that child,” I told Sarah. “All a sick person needs is a whining baby in the house.” I went into the parlor. How dreary and dark it was, and how still. Sarah continued out through the dining room to the quarter. Peek stood on the step waiting for the driver to unfasten my trunk. My eyes fell upon a framed portrait of Father on the side table. He’d had it made for Mother when they were first married. He said the artist had romanticized him; that his hair had never been so thick, his jaw so prominent, but Mother maintained it was a good likeness. “I wish you were here,” I said. “I miss you so.” Then I went through the dining room to Mother’s bedroom door.

    MOTHER IS NOT an easy patient, and I am certainly not constituted to enjoy nursing duties. She is too weak to stand, petulant and weepy, unable to hold down anything but clear broth. Dr. Chapin has visited regularly and yesterday pronounced her to be improving, but he confided to me as we left the room that it is not uncommon in this disease for a patient to rally for a few days and then to be taken off suddenly. Her own view is that the doctor is killing her. Indeed, his treatment is bleeding and laxatives, which, to be effective, he insists must be administered at frequent intervals. As Mother’s fever has broken, he has relented, and the result has been a gradual strengthening of our patient. “Keep him away from me,” Mother says every time the bell rings. She prefers Peek’s poultices and teas, which smell strong enough to drive a devil from the room.
    I look forward to the doctor’s visits if Mother does not. He brings news from outside the cottage. The yellow fever is generally lessening, having, as he puts it, lost its hold on the population. The cholera has carried off over one hundred people this week, many of them negroes, at great expense to the community. The graveyards are overflowing; there are not enough gravediggers to keep up with the demand. No one goes out but to obtain food, there are no parties, no public gatherings of any kind. The city is as it might be under enemy siege. Yet, as the days slip by, I am strangely at peace. I sleep in my old room at the front of the house, and take my meals alone in the courtyard.
    Mother bought this cottage after Father died, to be close to her own mother, who was infirm. I was thirteen when we moved here. When I first saw it, I thought it would be too small for comfort or privacy; there are only four rooms in the front house, two on the street, two behind, but they are large, airy, and so designed that each can be closed off from the others. From the dining room two sets of casements open on to the courtyard, which is half covered by a gallery running between the kitchen and the two-room quarter. This creates a comfortable covered loggia which is always cool. There is a lovely old marble column dividing this space between two graceful arches, and beyond it a pool fed from the cistern. I sew there in the afternoons, and I can hear Mother’s bell should she wake from her nap. Sarah sits on the kitchen step peeling vegetables or skimming one of Peek’s noxious medicinal brews. She’s found a rocking cradle somewhere which she works with her foot. Even the steady creak of this device does not disturb me; in fact, it has a soothing effect, as if I were being rocked to sleep myself.
    Of course it occurs to me that should mother relapse and be taken by her illness, this little house would be my