Free Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney Page A

the butcher block while the captain and the mate circumambulated the women.
    “I suppose I’ll take age and experience,” the captain said to his mate after a minute or two. “You break the filly.”
    The first day at sea, the mate had summoned Maria away from a mountain of potatoes and she went, not exactly sure what she was in for. Her mother found her curled up like a weevil in their tiny, windowless berth some hours later, nursing a fat, ferrous lip in addition to deeper bruises. She’d put up a pretty good fight, Maria.
    The next time, she hid when she heard the mate coming, but he found her and dragged her off by her arm. He seemed to enjoy the game of hide-and-seek. “Come along you little vixen, you wolverine,” he laughed. Eventually, she grew accustomed to it, as one can to almost anything. The thing she couldn’t stand was learning that her mother had known what she was doing when she signed them on.
Just

the

price

of

getting

to

a

better

world,
schatzie,

chin

up,
she’d said. But Maria couldn’t see ahead to a better world—she was really just a girl. She saw betrayal. When it was her mother’s turn to go over the side, she didn’t weep, just frowned and heaved. When our man thought he saw her clutching at her mother’s skirts, he was wrong. It was just her ragged fingernail catching in the weave. She’d been thinking,
Goddamn

her

for

dying

so

fast—the

captain’ll

be

after

me,

too,

now.
It didn’t happen, though, as the captain was also laid low. The epidemic was in full flower.
    This is how it spread: On the second-class deck, a lady who sported a consumptive complexion came down with a fever the night of the day the ship sailed. Maria and her mother took turns tending her and bringing her meals in her berth. She needed compresses, cups of hot consommé and fresh sheets at least once a day. Then there was her chamber pot, that terrible vat. They did it all and didn’t wash their hands—even less so on shipboard than normal, since fresh water was precious and must be conserved. Then they helped the cook make the vichyssoise and the apple-custard pies.
    But don’t blame Maria—she knew not what she did. It made no sense at all to her, the way the sickness started. She knew what caused fevers: It was stink. And so why hadn’t it hit the steerage first? She opened portholes, hatches and doors wherever she could. She’d never heard of a
vector.
If you’d tried to tell her that she, Maria, could carry a disease from one person to the next, she’d have knelt and said a Hail Mary, quite from reflex.
    The man we’re calling Will had been born into another world, a world in which he’d learned about Anton van Leeuwenhoek and his wee animalcules, Louis Pasteur and his milk. He’d peered into a squat black microscope and seen the unimaginable creatures that existed in a drop of water. The father may have sent the son away after his mother died, may have allowed his education to falter and ignored him entirely, but he couldn’t take away what the boy had seen: the laboratory, with its stone countertops, etched glass beakers and myriad fluid-filled phials, or the university student, Robert Koch, who eventually became his father’s protégé in the son’s stead and somehow nevertheless the son’s close friend. Will had not forgotten Robert Koch, but Koch was lost to him. He could never make contact with any of them again.
    For as innocent as he was of the crime he was wanted for in New York, he was guilty of another crime, committed back home, and he knew that in fleeing he’d as much as confessed it. So it wasn’t entirely misguided of the Whyos to be interested in him. He had the capacity to scheme. We all do, and in some of us it blooms—cultured by neglect, by cruelty, by dumb fate, by loss. It was Beanie’s skill—and Undertoe’s, too—to be able to see that instinct in him from a mile off.
    The first blow was his mother, of course. And then, after the funeral, he