HE DIDN’T KNOW HE was ill at first, for the weather was changing, and there was the sudden damp chill that comes when the air is windy and blue. Summer was over, and he thought it was the coolness of the season rather his own constitution that made him feel so weak. He had been in Charlotte Amalie for eight months. More and more he considered going back to Paris to stop himself from acting on impulse, a challenge every day. He could have Mr. Enrique take over the day-to-day business, for they were equals when it came to such things, and he trusted the clerk’s good sense, but he stayed because he could not imagine the world without the widow. Paris became more and more distant, darker, a place of overcast skies, a mottled fish-colored river running through it.
And then the darkness gathered within him and he could feel it like a cloud inside his lungs, and he became ill. There were trade winds from Africa that rattled the leaves, and flocks of birds overhead flew south. The darkness of his home had followed him here. He was freezing cold. He couldn’t keep food down, and then he could not sleep. He felt something creep into his bones, as if he were under a spell. His sleep lasted too long and he couldn’t force himself to wake. On days when it was chilly he sweated through his clothes, and then in the bright sunlight he shivered. Maybe such things happened on this island, and a man had to fight this kind of exhaustion any way he could. He drank rum for its healing properties. He ate only fruit. He wore his jacket when he went to bed, and kept his boots on as well, to keep him warm. He saw the frog again, and he wondered if it had poisoned him. It sat beside his bed, but he was too tired to catch it and set it into the garden.
One morning he did not arrive at the office. Mr. Enrique found him in his chamber, shivering in his small bed, his clothes strewn around his room, plates of uneaten food on his desk. It was an unseasonably warm day, and the temperature was ninety-four degrees. Frédéric called for a quilt and then another blanket. The doctor came and said it might be yellow fever, they would have to wait and see. He let some of Frédéric’s blood. Frédéric didn’t seem to notice, not the cut with the scalpel or the loss of blood on the fact that he was talking out loud, saying what he should not. Rachel and Rosalie took turns holding cold wet clothes to his face. Once Rachel put her hand inside his shirt, and felt for his heart. He was burning there, too.
She went to the cemetery and brought the last of the boughs of that season’s red flowers. She begged her predecessor for help in keeping death away from him. She had cared for Esther’s children and loved them as though they were her own, surely she should be granted this one wish. But his illness grew worse. It seemed that Esther no longer listened to her. Her ghost had dissolved as soon as her husband joined her. It was no longer possible to reach her.
Monsieur DeLeon, along with some of the elders from the synagogue, came to pay their respects. They gathered around Frédéric’s bed and said the evening prayers. There were ten of them, a minyon, the number of men needed in the Jewish faith for an official gathering. “We are here for him,” Monsieur DeLeon said as the men left. “For his time in this world and in the next.”
All at once Rachel understood they expected Frédéric to die. She saw how veined with pallor he was, the tinge of yellow around his eyes, his listless form. Seeing him this way, she knew what must be done, just as she knew she didn’t much care what the doctor or the men from the congregation predicted.
Though Jestine no longer liked to be around children, she had been keeping Rachel’s with her, in case the fever was one that might spread. She hadn’t hesitated to take them in. Now Rachel returned to the house on stilts. All of her children were all asleep on quilts spread upon the floor, breathing softly, lulled by the sound of the sea.
“I need you to help me,” she told Jestine.
Rachel’s hair was in tangles and she wore an old skirt, one she used to put on when they escaped into the hills to do as they pleased for an afternoon. Again, Jestine didn’t hesitate. They woke David, the eldest, and told him he was in charge. He was sixteen, old enough to be responsible. If he was shocked by his stepmother’s appearance and how rail thin she was, he didn’t say.
Jestine found a lantern and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. They went into the hills, to an herb man Adelle often went to for help. Jestine had been there once as a child and believed she might be able to find his house. Rachel thought about Paris as they walked through the dark, slapping away mosquitoes. The bells in the chapels, the stones on the streets, the doves in the parks, the lawns that were a deep, velvet green. If Frédéric had stayed there he would never have become ill. Rachel’s resolve to make her way to France was like a stone inside of her, rattling as she walked through the tall weeds. Frogs sang beside a stream. She wondered if Lyddie had already begun to forget everything she had known of their world: the dark woods that tumbled down the mountainside, the heavy curtain of dampness in the air, the purple flowers growing on vines, the hummingbirds that came to drink from blossoms in the gardens, her mother, her godmother, her life before she was taken.