“David and Sophie are our responsibility now! And you don’t seem to care about them at all!”
Edward sounded like he was speaking through clenched teeth. “After everything I have done for those brats?—”
“Throwing money at David and Sophie is not the same as being a father to them!”
For a moment, Edward only fumed incoherently. “They were born in Charleston! They’re supposed to be protected from stranger’s fever!”
“Only if they have a mild case and survive it!”
“Maybe that’s what this is!”
A door slammed, and then the house went eerily quiet. Only Tessa’s sobbing drifted down to him. Finally a small thump drew Joseph’s attention to the parlor. Mignon appeared on the threshold and mewed up at him, as if he were asking:Is it safe to come out now?In the next moment, Joseph realized David had been sitting in the parlor a few yards away all this time. The boy must have heard everything. Joseph stepped toward his nephew.
David kept his eyes on Mignon. “Sophie is sick,” the boy explained. “We’ve already sent for Grandpa.”
“Stranger’s fever?” Joseph whispered.
“Aunt Tessa thinks so.”
Joseph closed his eyes in dread. But perhaps in this one instance,the children’s black blood would be a boon: far more negroes than whites survived the onslaught of this disease.
Over his niece, Joseph prayed:
“O God…extend Thy hand upon this girl who is afflicted at this tender age; and being restored to health, may she reach maturity, and ceaselessly render Thee a service of gratitude and fidelity…”
Joseph’s father confirmed their worst fears. He administered quinine and rhubarb. Still Sophie’s skin took on the jaundice that gave stranger’s fever its other name: yellow fever, the scourge of port cities from Philadelphia to Havana. To prevent another epidemic, Charleston’s militia dragged their cannons through the streets, firing off gunpowder to drive the miasma from the air.
No one knew what caused stranger’s fever (animal or vegetable putrefaction? some combination of heat and humidity?) but most scientists were convinced the disease was not contagious. Decades ago, a doctor had attempted repeatedly to infect himself without success. So Tessa defied her husband: despite her advancing pregnancy, she remained at Sophie’s bedside throughout that awful week. Every day, she assisted Hannah in bathing the girl’s body with the coolest water they could find.
In her delirium, Sophie murmured: “But I want to be a big sister…” and “We can’tleavehim! He’s our brother!” For a while, this puzzled Joseph—was she speaking of baby Ian?—but finally he dismissed it. Joseph knew many children could not accept the finality of death.
Even he struggled to do so, as the fever abated and then returned without mercy. At last Sophie coughed up the black vomit that meant she’d reached the crisis: the girl would either recover or…
Joseph anointed his niece, but she was too ill to receive Viaticum or make a final Confession. She was all of eight years old. Surely no mortal sins lay upon such a young soul.
“I cannot bear to watch her suffering like this,” Tessa wept. She fisted a hand against her rounding bodice. “I thought it was agony to lose my babies. But I neverknewthem—not like I’ve known Sophie. They never embraced me. They never called out to me. This is worse.” Tessa turned away from Joseph, shaking her head. “I never should have adopted David and Sophie. My reasons weren’t pure. I should have known this would happen. I am like poison, and?—”
“You are balm, Tessa, not poison.” Joseph allowed himself to caress her face, but only for an instant. “I’ve seen the difference you’ve made in the children’s lives these past months—especially Sophie’s. Her fate is in God’s hands, not yours. It always has been.Hewill decide whether to take her.”
He took her.
Joseph prayed over his niece’s coffin:
“God, Who art the Lover of holy purity, Thou hast now in Thy great mercy called the soul of this child to the Kingdom of Heaven. Deign, likewise, to dispense Thy mercy to us, so that we too may possess happiness without end…”
In the seven years of his Priesthood, Joseph had celebrated the Rites of Burial for hundreds of children. None had been as difficult as Sophie. She had survived so much. Two thousand miles from her parents’ graves, she had found contentment and a second chance, only to fall like this, barely a year later… Saint Paul’s words rang in Joseph’s head:“How incomprehensible are His judgments!”
The Lazare tomb would stand empty no longer. In the wall of the mausoleum, beneath the cenotaph for her parents and baby brother, Sophie’s coffin looked tiny inside its crypt. David stood staring at it for so long, Joseph feared he never intended to leave. His father urged Tessa and Hélène to retire from the August heat, so Joseph remained alone with his nephew.
When he touched the boy’s shoulder, David muttered: “It was allfor nothing. I did it for nothing! I should have just stayed at Independence Rock and let us all die together!”
“David!” Joseph turned the boy away from his sister’s coffin and knelt before him on the floor of the mausoleum. “Your bravery wasn’t ‘for nothing’! I cannot tell you how much it meant to us—to every member of your family and to Tessa—to have known Sophie, even for a little while. Her faith and resilience were shining examples to the rest of us.” He grasped his nephew’s limp arms. “Most of all, David, you gotyourselfto safety. You have a bright future here! You can go to medical school and save the lives of thousands of people like you saved Sophie’s.”
His nephew scoffed. “For thirteen whole months?”
“Every one of those days is a gift, David. We must not say that Sophie was ‘only eight’ when she died. We must say your sister had eight long years full of adventures and love, and now she has gone ahead of us to Heaven where she will never know pain or sadness again. She is with your mother and father and baby Ian—with the God Who made her and loves her more than any of us ever could.”
David glared at him. “What’s the use of becoming a doctor, then? Why don’t we all just stop eating and go to Heaven, if it’s so wonderful?”
