Frankie slipped from the bed and prodded at the fire, hoping the smoke could keep the bad air from the swamps at bay, if only for a little while.
Frankie had only been working at the Oglethorpe house for a few days when she sneaked off to the courtyard garden and plucked free a fresh bloom.
“I saw that.” The voice was male and much too close.
Frankie’s back stiffened. She felt the weight of rose petals in her pocket, and her hand itched to clasp tightly around them. But instead she kept still and silent, letting her chin dip forward in deference.
The owner of the voice drew near, polished leather boots crunching along the cracked oystershell path. In the distance a cannon blew, the enforcers of Portlay trying to clear miasma from the air.
Frankie expected the voice to demand an explanation and perhaps dismiss her on the spot, so she was surprised when long fingers wrapped softly around her wrist to draw her hand forward.
Everything inside her wanted to look up, to search out the expression on the man’s face, but she knew that the slightest hint of defiance, even a flash in her eyes, could get her dismissed. She couldn’t afford that.
She clutched the stem of the rose she’d just clipped and felt thorns break into her skin. Frankie refused to wince.
Gently, the man pried her fingers back until he could pluck the flower from her grasp. “My mother would be incensed if she found out,” the voice said.
So now Frankie’s fears were confirmed. He was part of the family, an Oglethorpe. Her lips began to tremble, and she bit at them furiously. She was in even more trouble than she could have thought.
Excuses ran through her mind. Not for the man standing in front of her—trying to beg her way out of this situation would be useless—but for her sister for when Frankie came home early with only final wages in her pocket.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Frankie murmured, trying to keep her voice even and subdued.
A silence stretched between them. The man still held his fingers around her wrist, and she became far too aware of the feel of his touch. His skin was so much softer than she’d ever imagined possible. Not like the thick calluses of her mother and sister or the blisters that peppered Frankie’s own palms.
“Why?”
At his question Frankie lifted her head, remembering too late to keep demure. She’d expected someone much older than the young man standing in front of her. By the ornamentation on his boots and the sharpness of the crease in his pants, Frankie had thought he must be a brother to the Mistress or perhaps a far-flung cousin. But this boy was hardly much older than she was.
His hair was oiled smooth and his skin scrubbed fresh. She could see where sandalwood powder dusted along the edges of his collar, giving him a crisp, heady smell that mingled with the roses surrounding them.
“Are you going to let me go if I answer?” Frankie asked.
He glanced down at where he gripped her, and his hand released her arm immediately, as if he was stunned to still be holding her.
“I meant, are you going to dismiss me?” she clarified, and just in case he misinterpreted that term as well, she added, “Fire me?”
He considered for a moment and then said, “If you lie.”
Already he wore the mantle of the Oglethorpe name easily along his shoulders, and Frankie wondered what it was about growing up in these houses that could make someone so sure of themselves so young. It was the exact opposite of how Frankie felt every moment of every day. She was always questioning, always wondering, as though her life were a hand-me-down pair of shoes that had previously conformed to someone else’s stride and never fit her own.
For a fleeting moment Frankie considered giving him the truth: her sister was ill, and she needed the rose petals to keep the stench of bad air at bay. But she couldn’t tell him that. If he knew where she went home to and where she came from every morning, he would tell his mother, and she’d call out the plague eaters, and before Frankie could make it home her sister would be gone.
And so she told him a part of a truth instead. “My mother was a maid here, and once, when I was little, she brought me to work.” Frankie’s eyes widened in panic as she realized how she’d misspoken, and she rushed to clarify. “I know she wasn’t supposed to, but my father had just . . .” She struggled for the right words.
“It’s okay,” the Oglethorpe boy said.
After a hesitation Frankie heaved a shaking breath and continued. “It was washday and I was supposed to stay quiet in the kitchens, but I followed one of the servants to deliver tea, and when she walked through the gardens I . . .” She struggled again for how to express the feeling of that morning and was stunned to feel tears burning at the corners of her eyes.
She dipped her chin back into her chest. “I’d never seen anything like that before. The pure beauty of roses speckled with dew waiting to be taken by the sun. That kind of thing doesn’t exist for people like me. And I guess I just wanted to remember what it was like to stand in the garden that morning, longing to cast off my clothes and roll across the lawn.”
Her cheeks blazed pink as she realized that perhaps she’d spoken too much, and when she risked a glance up at the Oglethorpe boy she noticed his face was a bit flushed as well.
She waited for him to say something, to demand a deeper truth, but he was silent as he seemed to consider her story.
One by one he plucked the petals from the rose he’d taken from her and placed them in the cupped palm of her hand. When he was done, he cast the thorny stem back into the thicket and curled her fingers closed.
“Don’t let my mother find out,” he told her. His touch lingered longer than necessary, his eyes darting around her face. Then he cleared his throat and strode away, his shiny boots crunching along the path.
Every day Frankie showed up to work at the Oglethorpe house, it was the same ritual: rough hands stripped her bare and pushed her toward a room with a large, overflowing tub. She was given five minutes on a good day but more like three when things got busy.
Frankie was never the first to arrive for work and so by the time it was her turn to wash, the water would have taken on a bit of murk and sheen. While the rooms upstairs were stocked with soft soaps subtly perfumed, the help were given a cup of gritty detergent that smelled of pine straw and licorice.
From the first day, Frankie learned to be quick and thorough scrubbing herself. If the house manager caught a whiff of unpleasant odor wafting from any employee, they’d be reprimanded and, on subsequent infractions, dismissed. The Mistress of Oglethorpe refused to allow a hint of miasma into her home, and since most of the servants lived in the neighborhoods along the swamp, she was diligent about every one of them going through a deep cleaning before being given entrance to the house.
Frankie found that if she washed quickly she could spend the last stolen seconds with her head dipped below water. It was this moment of the day she loved best: when her head slipped under the surface for as many heartbeats as she could bear, and the world fell silent and numb.
Underwater there were no beaked doctors or plague eaters, and she could forget about the night they came for her mother and the fever flush on her sister’s face in the evenings. She didn’t have to worry about the rumors that the doctors were taking healthy people from her neighborhood, somehow causing their monsters to alert on them even though they weren’t ill.
It was in those stolen moments that Frankie allowed herself to imagine a life different from the one she lived. Instead of dirt floors there would be carpets of woolen flowers; instead of plywood walls there would be rows of gilt frames boasting centuries of oil-captured ancestors. Instead of the sickly stench from the swamp there would be the gardens.
And in the gardens there would be the voice. There would be the touch of the boy who cupped his hand around hers, and he would pluck rose petals as he did before, but instead of dropping them into her palm he would brush them over her lips and eyelids and down along the ridge of her throat.
In her imaginings his touch would dip lower, but by this time Frankie’s lungs would be burning and no matter how hard she willed herself to stay below the surface, to keep the daydreams fresh and alive, her body would betray her and force her up for air.
Nothing was ever as acrid as that first lungful just as her lips broke free and the oil-slicked water sloshed around her chin and shoulders.
Even though she’d scrub her skin almost raw with rags, she could always remember the stench of the swamp that clung to everything in her neighborhood: decaying leaves piled upon dead animals and forgotten civilizations buried deep in dirt that had been damp for centuries, slowly churned over by worms and scavengers and steeped by rain that dripped from tree limbs casting everything in perpetual shade that never dried.
It was that smell that brought the fever, the minuscule bits of toxic rot floating in the air, drifting on currents and inhaled through nostrils and mouths to settle in lungs and leach into the bloodstream, touching death to what was left of life.
During her days at the Oglethorpe house, Frankie might smell pure and sweet, but it never lasted. At night the miasma of the swamp would seep into her pores and burrow under her hair as if to claim her and remind her that she was not, nor would she ever be, like the boy she had met in the garden of the Oglethorpe house.
Frankie was never supposed to step foot into the Mistress of Oglethorpe’s personal chambers, but one of the other maids was flushed and didn’t want to risk the chance of being seen and dismissed for the possibility of being sick. As a favor, Frankie offered to fill the rose water carafes and change out the incense burners in the family’s private suites.
She’d understood that the Mistress was out at tea most afternoons, and so Frankie chose that time to sneak up the back stairs and slip through the rooms, her goal to get through the task as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But when she made it to the Mistress’ bedchamber, she let out a soft gasp and could go no farther. The room was teeming with plants, their green leaves crisp and polished and unfurled against the sun streaming through triple sets of double windows. Tendrils and vines crawled up the posters on the bed and gripped the molding along the ceiling.
It was like living in a garden, down under the canopy where light turned green and raw. Frankie felt her lungs relaxing, even her skin delighting in the coolness of the room and the freshness of the air.
Tiny pinpricks of flowers dotted the foliage, and the scent of gardenias and tea olives was overwhelming, almost making Frankie drowsy with their headiness. She wanted to collapse on the bed with its thick down comforters and freshly pressed sheets and just spend the rest of eternity inhaling deeply.
But in the distance a cannon boomed, clearing the air along the lanes of the districts between the hills and the swamps, and the sound of it snapped Frankie out of her reverie. Reluctantly, she returned to her task, dribbling the fresh rose water as slowly as possible to prolong her exposure to the room.
If I could bring Cathy here, she thought to herself. The clean air would keep the sickness at bay and might even cure it. Frankie closed her eyes and allowed the thought to unfold in her mind. The sheer absurdity of it was enough to make Frankie’s heart pound thicker—which made her remember how, before the plague, she’d sneak out of the house and take wild dares like spending all night in the cemetery.
There had been a time when Frankie had been brave. But now she barely found the courage to linger in the Mistress’ bedchamber and dream.
Over the next few days Frankie invented a thousand excuses to go back to the family suites, but none of them came to fruition. She offered to take other maids’ duties on top of her own, to swap out chores—anything—but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finagle a way upstairs.
She’d been relegated to the washhouses and kitchens, which meant she spent the day bathed in heat and sweat. And once one had enough sweat, that person wasn’t allowed inside the main house for fear of the stench.
Frankie felt she might go insane if she didn’t see that room again. The memory of those few moments breathing in the freshest air she’d ever imagined and being surrounded by the bright green of plants had become almost an obsession for her. A craving for it had burrowed deep under her skin.
The next morning she arrived early for duty, so early that the sky was still black and the water for the servant baths retained a bit of warmth. After she’d scrubbed the smell of the swamp from her skin, she grabbed a stack of fresh linens and shuffled them up the back stairs.
The only light came from the scented oil sconces along the walls, their flames turned dim, and Frankie kept herself to the shadows as she crept toward the Mistress’ chambers. The Mistress would be asleep still—Frankie knew this—but she just needed to peek into the room and inhale the freshness of flowers.
As she drew closer, the sound of the Mistress’ snoring filtered through the air. Frankie bit her lips, cursing the loudness of each inhalation she took. The door stood ajar, and for a long time Frankie stared at it, willing the courage to poke her head inside.
Just for a moment. Just to take one deep breath.
But then behind her she heard the rattle of feet pounding on stairs—not in the back passages but from the main rooms downstairs, which were reserved only for family and guests. There was nowhere in the long stretch of hallway for Frankie to hide, no alcove or shadow deep enough to conceal her.
She hadn’t expected anyone to be awake, and even if they were, it never occurred to her to realize that servants were always moving about and she wouldn’t be noticed as out of place. But she knew she was where she shouldn’t be, and that was the only thought that flashed through her mind.
If she was caught, she was fired. If she was fired, they lost the small amount of wages that she’d been using to pay off the beaked doctors who came to the door relentlessly every evening for Cathy.
Frankie panicked and she couldn’t think. The steps on the stairs were gaining ground too quickly—they were like thunder in Frankie’s ears—and she reacted, needing to escape.
She slipped through the cracked door, straight into the Mistress’ chamber. It was a stupid decision, she realized, but it was done, and she held her breath as she waited to hear if the Mistress’ snoring changed pace or rhythm.
The steps slowed as they ate up the ground along the hallway, and then they were passing the door, and from the bed behind her Frankie heard a pause and then a snort and a snuffle.
Frankie squeezed her eyes shut. If she was found now she wouldn’t just be let go, they’d likely call the enforcers on her and have her locked up for her ingratitude. Drops of sweat gathered at the small of her back and began to trickle down.
Frankie knew that terror sweat smelled the worst. She’d spent nights with it as her sister tossed and turned on the bed next to her.
“Is that you, Charles?” a muffled voice called out from the bed.
The footsteps moved closer to the door, a shadow passing in front of the gap.
He’s going to push the door open, and there’s nowhere for me to go, thought Frankie. She knew that the floor was crisscrossed with vines, and if she stepped wrong she could accidentally pull a pot from one of the shelves. Blood careened through her veins as sweat beaded across her forehead and along the seams of her uniform.
“It is, Mother. I’m home.” The figure shifted, and Frankie saw Charles for the first time. She tasted blood from biting her lip so tightly to keep back the gasp of recognition—it was the boy from the garden, the one who had dropped rose petals in her hands.
She had to remind herself that he’d never traced the contours of her face with them or dipped his lips to her own. Those thoughts had been just in her dreams, but seeing him standing there, the darkness making the edges of him hazy, they seemed almost real.
Charles started toward the door and Frankie shook her head, as if by that gesture alone she could stop him from coming. He paused and tilted his head, and for a terrifying moment Frankie was convin
ced she was caught.
“You’re later than usual,” the Mistress said, her voice still sleep scratched.
Frankie could swear Charles was staring straight at her. She thought of the night the beaked doctors rode into town and how one of them had turned to look at her, though it must have been too dark and the goggles over his eyes too thick for him to see her.
The light from one of the oil sconces on the wall flickered over Charles’ face, making his cheekbones look sharp and his chin pointed. He was dressed all in black so that his head with its closely cropped hair seemed to float in the air. It was clear he’d been gone for quite a while, and Frankie wondered where he’d been all night and with whom.
She had no idea how people like him lived.
“Something smells off,” the Mistress’ voice took on a hard edge. Frankie dared a sniff. She reeked, her nervous body pouring sweat. If the Mistress could smell Frankie from the other side of a room washed in the sweetness of gardenias, then there was no way Charles couldn’t smell her as well.
Frankie kept her eyes pinned on his face, waiting for his features to shift to anger and for him to call her out.
“Did you wash afterward?” the Mistress asked.
A flash of disgust rolled over Charles’ face, and he moved away from the doorway. “As always, Mother,” he responded as his steps pounded down the hallway.
The Mistress shifted in her bed, and Frankie feared she’d light a candle or call for her maid. But instead the Mistress huffed a sigh and settled back into snoring, giving Frankie the opportunity to flee. She ducked her head and slipped out of the room, her movements no longer demure as she raced toward the servants’ stairs and made her way down to the kitchens.
For the rest of the day Frankie kept herself enveloped in the steam of the laundry, not caring that her hands became a raw red from the boiling water or that sweat drenched her uniform. She needed to get the stink of fear from her pores.