boiled and washed.
Some said the clothing and bedding of fever victims ought to be burned. With only a few paying pupils, Rose Vitrac could barely afford to put food on the table, much less buy new sheets and nightclothes, or even pay a laundress to do them. More than anything in the world he wanted to go down after her, to comfort her in the face of the approaching death of the girl who had been her pupil and her friend.
But all he could see in his mind was Ayasha with her lifeless fingers stretched toward the water pitcher, and there were no words in his mind to say. And in any case he would not leave the dying girl alone.
He was still sitting by Genevi?ve's bed, holding her burning hand, when he heard the stairs creak, and the rustle of skirts.
"I'm sorry. That was inexcusable of me."
In the dimness of the attic he could see that she'd slopped water on her face to take down the swelling of tears.
"I was here. And she wouldn't have known."
"They do know." She crossed from the door and sat on the bed next to Genevi?ve's pillow, stroked the hacked bristle of hair. "At least I did."
"Did you have the fever?"
She shook her head. "I..." She hesitated for a long time. Then, very carefully, "I was sick. Eight, nine years ago, just before I went away to school in New York. Father told me later I didn't know one person from another, but that isn't how I remember it. Cora..."
She broke off again, wrapped her arms around herself, though the attic was sweltering. Looked down into the face of the dying girl.
Her words came slowly, "I don't know whether this really happened or not. But I remember one night when Cora heard my father pass the door. She went out into the hall and told him, `The least you could do is go in there and hold on to her hand.' "
"Did he?" He saw it in his mind, as he saw Cora's small straight shadow disappearing in the darkness of the street: the shadow of the dark girl on the wall, tiny before the tall white man. Arms folded, looking up at him the way she'd looked up at January under the shadows of the Pellicots' kitchen gallery.
"His wife told him not to." Mademoiselle Vitrac sounded resigned about it, accepting that such was how things were.
"Were you contagious?"
It's not bad if you don't fight...
He knew Rose had not been contagious.
She was silent for perhaps a minute. Then, "I wasn't an easy child to have in the house." She touched Genevi?ve's hand, her own cut and bandaged fingers rendered exquisite and alien, like intricately jointed bamboo, by the knife of sunlight that fell across them. "Like Genevi?ve. And Victorine, and Isabel, and some of the others. The ones who can't be what their mothers were, or want them to be. The ones who see too clearly, and speak too frankly. The ones who... who damage themselves and their position in the house every time they open their mouths, but can't keep from doing so."
He saw in the long oval bones of her face the face of a proud, gawky child: erudite, stuck-up, above herself and everyone around her. As she would have been to him, he realized, had they not met as they had.
A shudder went through her, tears suppressed as they had always been suppressed. "She never had a chance." January gathered her against him as he would have gathered one of his sisters, had she been in pain, and felt the woman's body stiffen like wood. He released her, stepped back the instant before she wrenched herself from him...
"Don't..."
He stood back helplessly, his hands at his sides.
She was trembling, looking away from him. "I..." There wasn't a thing she could say without saying everything. He could feel the knot of it, wringing tighter and tighter, like a noose of pain.
To sever it he said, "She had what no one else could have given her: the assurance that there was a path for her, even if it was narrow and lonely." What he wanted to say was not that: what he wanted to say was, Don't turn away! I wasn't the one who hurt you! But he knew that did not matter, against the touch and the strength of a man's hands, and the smell of a man's sweat. Some women never recovered.
If you don't struggle it's not so bad.
He forced himself to