Margaret had refused to wear her blue scarf again. The heat and weight were still too much for her. But covering her head would have made little difference to her pestilent appearance. She had no eyebrows; they had hardly begun to regrow. And even her expression seemed scalped and ominous. But for the time being, she and Franklin were happy anyway to be together on Butter Hill and amused to be playing piggyback, despite the fear of what they might find below. Were they in love? Well, no, not yet. He was too young and inexperienced; she was too old and inexperienced. They were, though, getting there with every step. And they were as intimate as lovers. How could they not be, with her legs pushed open, wrapped around his back, her breath and lips against his nape, her arms embracing him, clasped across his breastbone, so that, she thought illogically, she could help him bear her own weight and share the weight of worrying? Franklin gripped her knee with his spare hand, spreading his thumb onto the clothing of her upper leg. How weak and newly thin she was.

Margaret and Franklin did not attempt to catch up with the family that was negotiating the decline with a string of pack mules ahead of them. Rather, they hung back. Margaret did not wish to chance upon a Ferrytowner or a stranger who might pass on the word to her family and neighbors of how this virgin had been wrapped around a young man’s back, or how personal he seemed with her. She’d be devalued all at once. Then what? It would be better if she’d joined her pa. She was almost thankful that her shaven head gave her and Franklin the excuse they needed to keep only their own company. Besides, you would not welcome any other company if you were with a person who at the very least (in Margaret’s view) had drawn the flux out of your feet or who (in Franklin’s view) had allowed such arousing intimacies.

Franklin concentrated on his balance and on the tribulations of the path, measuring his steps and rationing his breaths. He was determined not to show any weakness or tiredness. Here was his chance to prove to her how useful he might be and how mature. What luck had put this woman on his back? His damaged knee had proved to be an unexpected blessing.

Once they had sorted out the problem in Ferrytown, whatever it might be, thought Franklin, he could consider more fully what he ought to do about Margaret. He would not want to part from her at once. He’d not be happy to proceed without knowing her better. But what would Jackson say if his selfish, blushing brother insisted on delaying their departure from Ferrytown or if he made a decision on his own behalf for a change and chose to stay on there at least through the winter, at least until Margaret had recovered and could be persuaded, perhaps, to join them in their emigration east? What would he say if Franklin was determined to settle his future in Ferrytown and court this woman — what, six years older than himself? To take her as his wife?

Yes, this matter of their ages was an impediment. Franklin could not avoid admitting that to himself, whatever his brother might say. She was so much older. As old as his youngest aunt, in fact. But his size made up for that, surely. Her time on earth equaled the volume of his presence. Possibly, in his view, she was all the more enticing because of the age difference. Even with her illness and her shaven head, Margaret had struck him as being irresistibly adult.

Margaret herself was too drained and fearful to think much of the future. Certainly her personal porter was an agreeable young man, kindly-featured if not exactly handsome, sweet-smelling, biddable — and strong. She could not forget the patience and the tenderness he had lavished on her feet nor the mixed sensations it had given her, a breathless nausea together with a heat that was separate from the fever. It did not seem possible that he could carry her for such a length of time, down steep and difficult terrain, without stopping to rest once in a while or demanding that she at least try to walk the last part on her own two feet. She clung to his shoulders, exuberated by the closeness of his company yet also exhausted by his efforts, because each step he took shook every bone in her body. But she was not making any place for him in her life. He’d just be another one of those missed opportunities, another passerby whom she would miss for a day or two and then forget. All that mattered for the moment was the state of Ferrytown and her impatience for the sound of dogs and cocks.

What first disquieted them, when they emerged below the hill from the thicket of junipers, laurels, and scrub oaks that flourished on the lower slopes, was the smell — sour milk and mushrooms, earthy, reasty, and metallic. It was an unfamiliar smell that they recognized but could not name. It was as if this new experience were one that life itself had stored for them. The next thing that they spotted from the access path — alarming and unambiguous — was the mules and horses in the tetherings, not resting and expecting rain as Margaret had imagined, or at least hoped, but spread out and gaping, dead as stones and seemingly untouched, no wounds except the fresh ones inflicted by the crows and jays and turkey vultures that had already abandoned the hills to gather on their bodies. Dead animals, still picketed.

But their alarm was manageable until Franklin spotted what he did not mistake for long as dead piebald goats. Jackson’s coat was spread out in the middle of the tetherings beside a dead mule. There was no confusing its color and its length and who its owner was. No two mothers in the world could stitch together such a piece. The body underneath seemed small, but Franklin was sure, as he stumbled forward with Margaret bouncing on his back, that he’d discover no one else but his brother, dead drunk, he hoped, and not just dead. But the body rolled too readily as he pulled at the coat. Too light, too small. A boy. He tumbled out of the goatskins as easily and weightlessly as a dog might be rolled out of its blanket. Franklin was relieved and horrified, all at once. “Who’s this?”

Margaret had not seen, at first, what had induced such panic in her porter. She could barely see over his shoulder and had to stretch her neck to discover what had caused his sudden stumbling and his cry of alarm. She saw the puzzling coat in Franklin’s hand. She was puzzled even more when he began to shake its creases out and smell the fabric. “It’s Jackson’s coat,” he said. The brother’s name. Then Margaret spotted the body at Franklin’s feet and was in shock herself. This bundle was a neighbor’s son, the nightwatch boy called Nash, a boy she’d known very well since he’d been a baby and she, barely out of her teens, had been his little nurse. “What’s happened? Let me see him.”

She was too firmly trapped at Franklin’s back to release quickly, so he kneeled down by the side of the body, twisting so that she could see it clearly. Already it was smelling a little, like cured bacon. There wasn’t any blood on the earth or on the coat. No wounds. No sign of blows or bruises.

“There’s not a mark on him,” Franklin said. “Just look at those.” He lifted his chin to indicate the carcasses of mules, horses, and donkeys. There was as well a single dog. Franklin closed the boy’s eyes, then cleaned his fingers in the soil. “There’s not a mark on him,” he said again.

“There’s something else,” said Margaret. She had to concentrate to hit upon the oddity. She was not familiar with human corpses. But still it came to her, a chilling absence. “No flies. These tetherings are always full of flies. They love the horses. But there’s not a single one. Can you see one?” Both she and Franklin put their hands across their mouths and stepped away. They held their breath. No flies.

So Margaret’s premonition had been correct: here was pestilence, or flux of some new sort, that did not care if you were man or fly or horse or mule or (now that they were hurrying into Ferrytown and discovering more beastly cadavers at every step) chicken, hog or dog or rabbit. The ground outside the stockade was scattered with animals. Even before they found the second human victim, Margaret had begun to blame herself. Who else? She’d been the first to host this current flux, so maybe she had passed it on to her grandpa and he’d brought it back into the town once he had left her safely in the Pesthouse. And without the benefit of barbering and pigeons to protect them, every beating heart in the village had been stilled. Yes, every beating heart. She guessed exactly what she and Franklin would discover if they dared to go beyond the stockade and the palisades. Not a single fly. No living creatures, other than the few travelers and the birds that had arrived since death had done its work. No welcome from her family.