Franklin pulled his coat and collar up around his mouth, stepped farther into the Pesthouse, and — his first touch — pressed his hand on her forehead, her exposed arm, and then — he dared, but not without blushing — he felt her shoulders. She was warm and damp, but nevertheless she should stay wrapped, he judged, or she would take a chill on top of everything. Yet when he pulled the coverlet over her, she soon pushed it off again, still unwilling to bear the weight of cloth, even in her sleep. Her scalp, though, was cold. He imagined he could feel the first growth of her hair under his palm, more like the underbelly of a pup than like a peach skin. He turned the fire, banked the ashes, added fresh wood, and held his hands above the smoke in case his touch had picked up her infection. It seemed too like a fairy tale: the sleeping woman, troubled evidently by her dreams, unaware that she was visited, unconscious of the stranger who would come to save her with his…friendliness. What could he do to help her now? What magic could he summon that would drive her fever out and take away the rashes and the heat? What must he do, so that he could touch her without fear?

Encouraged by a day of sun and by the full sling of nuts that he had foraged as a gift, Franklin found the courage in the afternoon to go back to the Pesthouse. Margaret was still barely awake and could manage only a faint “Yes?” to let him in when he pish-pished.

“Are you well?” he asked, the common greeting between strangers but heavily appropriate on this occasion.

“I’m tired,” she said. But not dead, apparently. Instinctively she felt her armpits to check for any goose eggs. She could hardly check for buboes in her groin with Franklin watching her. She took comfort from the fading of the blotches on her arms and from the absence of any dried blood around her nose or mouth and, indeed, of what would have been a certain sign of approaching death, three pock-shaped black marks on her hands, or, worse, the clot of blood — a present from the Devil — that corpses were said to clutch in their palms to pay their entrance fee to Hell. Perhaps she would not die after all. Perhaps she’d have the good luck denied to Pa, as her mother had promised. Margaret even chanced a smile toward the stranger at the door. “What color are my eyes?” she asked the man.

“I haven’t seen your eyes,” he said. “It’s dark in here.” He blushed, of course.

“Not red, not bloody red?”

“I’ll see. Can I come close?” Her eyes looked clear enough. “No blood,” he said.

“No blood is good.” She closed her eyes again.

“You ought to eat.” He showed her the heavy sling of cloth and chose the plumpest nut for her.

“Can’t chew.” Her jaw and throat felt stiff and timbery.

“Maybe I could make a soup…from…the woods are full of things.” From leaves, from nuts, from roots, from birds. From mushrooms, possibly.

“Nothing, no.”

“What can I do for you?”

She shook her head. There’s nothing to be done, she thought, except to sleep and hope for the best. The last thing that she needed in her state was a mouthful of dry nuts or a stomachload of soup from the woods. She felt both half awake and dreaming. Deeply conscious, in a way, but inebriated, too, by the toxins that accumulate when hunger, fever, and exhaustion are confederates. “What color are my eyes?” she asked again, almost sleeping now.

“Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?” asked Franklin, not wishing to bully her with questions but worried that she might be slipping into unconsciousness rather than slumber.

She raised her head just high enough to see him for an instant. A silhouette. No expression on her face. It didn’t matter who he was. “I don’t know you.” But she managed to lift her head again and study him for a moment longer. “What do they want?”

“Who do you mean when you say they? Your family? Are they the people in the town?”

“I don’t know who they are.”

He had to let her sleep again. He left her to it and went out into the clearing to check the hill for any sign of Jackson and to bring his two dried tarps and his possessions into the Pesthouse. He had persuaded himself — too readily — that he would be safer, drier, warmer with the feverish woman than he would be outside for another night. More useful, too. The Pesthouse smoke would protect him from her contagion. He sat down at the far end of her bed, his back warmed by the fire, looking out through the open door across the clearing as the light lifted and receded once again and the cold returned. The last few of that day’s travelers led their carts and horses to the lip of the hill and disappeared from sight, leaving just their voices and their bells to briefly dent the quiet.

That evening, emboldened by the darkness and keen to wake her lest she slip too far, Franklin sat and spoke about himself, as strangers should. Occasionally he could tell by her breathing or by some note of interest or sympathy that she was listening in between her bouts of sleep. He gave his name, his age; he told her about his father’s death, the family farm, their animals, the mocking sets of storms and droughts that had destroyed their crops and fields, the famine and lawlessness, the day that he and Jackson had begun their journey to the ships and how his mother had busied herself indoors rather than witness their first steps of departure. He described their hardships on the road, the damage to his knee, how Jackson had volunteered to go down the hill to Ferrytown to replenish their supplies.

Her voice at last, less small than it had been. “They’ll take good care of him,” she said, glad to hear the mention of her home.

And then he told her what they hoped to find on ship: “those tiny rooms, just made of wood,” and great white birds among the sails, to show the way. He could not imagine exactly what awaited them when they set foot abroad, what type of people they might be, what language they might speak. But he was sure that life would be more prosperous. How could it not be better there? Safer, too. With opportunity, a word he’d come to love.

“And when we’re there,” he said, hoping to restore her with his optimism, “they say that there is land enough for everyone, and buildings made of decorated stone, and palaces and courts and gardens planted for their beauty, not for food. Because there is abundance in those places. Their harvests never fail. Three crops a year! Three meals a day!”

“They’ll all be fat.”

“They are all fat. Like barn hogs.”

That night he slept beside her bed, his feet below her head kept warm by the fire and his head by the Pesthouse door, where he could be on guard against any animals or visitors and breathe the colder but untainted air. Margaret was restless, though she seemed to sleep. She turned around in her bed, gasping for breath, disturbed by nightmares, troubled by the sore skin on her torso, legs, and arms. Not one of her bones seemed in its normal place.

Franklin did not remember how it happened, but when he woke in the early light, he found that Margaret was sleeping on her back and that she had shot her legs out of her bed coverings and that he had been sleeping holding a foot between his two hands, restraining it, perhaps, or keeping it warm. He knew at once, shivering, how risky that had been. Diseases depart from the body through the soles of the feet. That’s why, when pigeons were so plentiful and decent meat was served at every meal, the people of his parents’ generation had strapped a living pigeon to a sick child’s feet. He’d experienced this remedy himself. When he’d been eight or nine years old, he’d caught a tick disease that had paralyzed his body for a day or two, until his brother had been sent out with nets to trap a bird and his aunt had tied it to his feet, pinioning its wings and back against his insteps. “Stay there, don’t move until the illness passes into the pigeon,” she had instructed. She had remained with him, making sure he kept still, helping him to urinate and defecate into an earth jar, feeding him by spoon, until, after two more days of feeling its warm and beating heart against his insteps, the pigeon stopped protesting and went cold and silent. It had done the trick as well. His illness had passed, and he had been able to walk up with his father to the bone-yard and bury the bird and his disease under a stone. He could see that stone still in his mind’s eye, a gray, dismaying slab that had haunted him ever since. When the harder times had come and pigeon meat, even at feasts, was often all they had to eat, Franklin had preferred to go without. The flesh was tainted in his view: the bird was hazardous. Jackson always ate his share.