End Time (24 page)

A Parcheesi board lay on the floor by the fire, on a bright braided throw rug next to a pair of large leather pillows, elbow-dented where people reclined on them to play. The Parcheesi board was newish—painted on a square of wood, yellow and blue and red, the pieces left in mid-game.

On the flat ledge of the hob by the iron kettle sat a sterling toast rack with a single browned slice of white bread. Crumbs were scattered across the small ledge, and across a butter knife. The remains of a pat of butter melted to almost nothing lay on a little dish. Play Parcheesi; eat buttered toast. Sounded like fun. Corky and Peaches sniffed the piece of bread, the pat of butter. Usually the two greyhounds would have gone for it in a heartbeat—but something didn't smell quite right.

“Maybe they miss the jam,” Guy said. “You always give them jam.”

Suddenly a comic line popped into Lauren's head, and she said to Guy, “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.” The silly words from
Alice Through the Looking Glass
.

A splash of laughter from above made Lauren gasp; her hand flew to her mouth. Guy and the dogs snapped their eyes to the stairs. The little girl again, staring at them through the stairway spindles; she smiled coyly and ran
clap-clap-clap
toward the upper part of the house.

Guy and Lauren slowly mounted the stairs, keeping a safe and cautious distance. As he passed the front door and front windows, Guy glanced out into the street. Dark nighttime through the glass; gas lamps lit cobblestones in a yellowish glow. From the full green leaves in the trees he could tell it was about the same time of the year as now—June—and through the open windows he heard the patter of raindrops and felt the cool air of a chilly summer evening.

Their bedroom door stood open, lamplight pouring into the darkened hallway. Lauren crept to the bar of light on the landing and peeked inside. “Guy, you gotta look at this.” Quiet as a mouse, he leaned over her shoulder. Their bedroom looked almost the same, the furniture basically in the same place: older chairs where their new chairs sat, same compact writing desk, bed in the same place. Only this bed was a four-poster draped in fine muslin. Of course, there were no screens in the cottage—just muslin, old-fashioned mosquito netting.

Their little girl sat on the quilt covering the mattress playing with two dolls: a Marie Antoinette with high poofy white hair in the curious style called Macaroni and a dour black-clad citoyen of the Revolution. The little girl was trying to make the handsome gentleman kiss his mistress's hand.

A woman sat writing at the compact writing desk, dipping pen into ink and quietly scratching into a diary by the light of an oil lamp. The writing desk was newer, with a tilted, framed, inset leather blotter, ball-and-claw legs. The woman—the little girl's mother?—finished her passage, blotted the ink, and closed the diary, slipping it into a drawer on the side of the box-like cabinet. She stared at her daughter on the bed.

The girl's dolly game had changed. The stern citoyen was making a chopping motion with his stiff hand, and the girl's high voice piped out: “I, Saint-Just, by Order of the Committee, condemn you, Marie Antoinette—” The doll's hand came down, and Marie's head fell off.

“Now you've done it,” the woman at the desk said. “If the Committee for Public Safety has decided who goes to Madame Defarge and the guillotine, I think that means it's time for cake.” What struck Guy was how closely the lady at the writing desk resembled Lauren. Must be Auntie Whitcomb's great-great-grandmother. And the little girl—who? Auntie W's great-grandmama? Guy's head got tangled in the branches of the family tree. Too hard to sort out even when he wasn't peering through a window in time.

The woman at the desk looked sharply at Guy and Lauren peeking around the door frame, frowned a little, and asked, “What are you doing here?”

The two voyeurs froze, like deer on a road. Was she talking to them?

“Miss me?” said a man's deep voice.

The two Peeping Toms grabbed each other with a shout of
“Whoa!”
and jumped back into the hall. A tall, strong man stood before the open bedroom door, almost on top of them—dark hobnailed boots, dark pants, open peacoat, and a week of beard on a swarthy face. Then before they could swallow their surprise the nighttime vision went away in a pulse of light.

They were standing in the upstairs hallway in broad daylight. Nobody in the hall, nobody in their room, just another Saturday at home.

Guy leaned against his empty hallway and put a hand to his chest, clutching his heart. “Ye gods and little fishes,” he muttered. Then after a moment, “I think it really is time for cake.”

Lauren was very pale. “Okay, but I want to look in the desk.”

“We've looked in the desk. A hundred times.”

“Then another time won't matter.”

There were three drawers in the square cabinet-like desk one on top of the other, with wooden pull knobs. Yep. Nothing much. Lauren kept boxes of buttons and scores of saved restaurant matches in the top drawer. The second drawer she stuffed with instruction booklets, expired warranties from washers and dryers, the innumerable thirty-page pamphlets in seven languages that come with iPads and the like. The electronics crap you never read.

The last drawer was swollen and always stuck about halfway out. Funny how you never opened the slightly swollen drawers all the way out. Lauren tugged, getting it two-thirds the way out for the first time in a century. But that was enough. She could look behind, inside the cabinet.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Guy murmured.

Down at the base of the desk, within the third drawer space, sat the Whitcomb woman's diary. Black, leather bound. Or the remains of it. The old relic was overgrown with mold and a mouse had made it a house; chewed fluff, droppings, the leather cover partially eaten. “Get me some rubber gloves,” Lauren asked.

“You're not really going to touch—”

“Guy! Get the gloves.”

Armed with rubber gloves and Lysol spray against possible mouse dung, Lauren spread the worn, leather-bound journal on the kitchen counter under the window light on a layer of newspaper. She gingerly opened the old rotten thing with a pair of cooking tongs and a carving knife to hold down the back cover. The diary cracked and split—more paper crumbling everywhere. There was precious little left to read. The happy vermin had eaten most of the way down to the spine. A few half-pages here and there—stained, faded, and nearly unreadable.

Lauren tried to dope it out, but it was slow going, fragments really:

June 25, 1855—
“I think it's 1855,” she said, “there's a '55 on the corner of a broken page.”

Johnny's ship, in from Norfolk, the schooner Righteous—docked last night. He brought some Cuban pineapples he'd bartered off a ship from Havana in the next slip. Two of the pineapples were spoiled, as mice made their nest in the box, but one still good. A cloud of mosquitoes flew out when we opened the lid, but mother wafted them through the front door outside. I think we caught them—
all? The writing crumbled away.

More than a score of eaten pages later, one fragment intact, bottom of a page:

August (unreadable) New York has refused refugees. Along with Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Hundreds of boats in the Hudson, all trying to leave off people from the city. But it doesn't matter for us: they put an X on the front door of the house two days ago. We haven't been outside in a week. Pastor Simmons has been very kind and brought us food. We leave the money on the stoop.…

And that was it: a mere page amongst the crumbling dusty fragments. And one last thing. Between two slivers of very thin glass an old photo.

“I think it's called a cyanotype,” Lauren said. “See, it's blue. They were hard to preserve, light sensitive. They refresh when they're stored in the dark.”

The square four-by-four photo showed the Keeping Room. Guy could tell by the fireplace. No fire there. Sunlight slanted across the floor. Two padded wing chairs placed on either side of the hearth. A man and woman sat in each, posing for the photo. They were dressed in their Sunday best—man in high collar, morning coat, cravat, pressed pants, his best shoes. The woman in a white pleated dress, lace collar, lace at the sleeves, hair piled on top of her head, a brooch at her throat.

The man and woman were clasping hands, reaching halfway chair to chair, a gesture of fealty and love; in an odd contrivance a black ribbon seemed to be holding their palms together, wound about their wrists a turn or two then tied in a bow. That's when Lauren and Guy noticed the man and woman's eyes were closed.

Not only that—the features of their faces were simply smooth and lifeless: no spark of cognizance, no turn of the mouth or cock of the eyebrows. Dead. The holding hands seemed to be saying,
In death as in life.…

“This is a death photo,” Lauren said softly. “People used to do that. Take pictures of their loved ones right after—” Her voice broke off. There was a third figure in the death photo—the girl from the stairs. Only she wasn't dead—she was very much alive, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the two adults, her striped pinafore covering her knobby knees. She cradled her two dolls, Marie Antoinette and the frock-coated revolutionary citoyen Saint-Just of the Committee for Public Safety. The monarch's doll head was back on her doll shoulders, so perhaps the Committee for Public Safety had bestowed a last-minute stay of execution on the queen.

Great-great-great young Auntie stared at the camera, her eyes sober and dry—as though the girl had seen things much worse than this, this moment a kind of reprieve from whatever came before.…

In the few moments Guy and Lauren stared at the strange image, it faded and finally vanished from between the glass as if it had never been. Lauren put it carefully between the leaves and rotten leather cover of the old diary.

“Maybe it will come back again if we keep it in the dark,” Guy said.

“I think I know what they died of,” Lauren murmured.

A few moments later Guy and Lauren huddled at the PC in the den doing a search; there must have been five hundred entries in the archives of the
New York Times
from 1852 through late fall 1855 on the keywords
yellow fever
. You could tell by the drift of the articles that outbreaks of yellow fever had diminished somewhat over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet if the sheer number of notices, articles, and dispatches were any measure, the disease had killed a lot of people and scared the bloody pus out of millions more, even with outbreaks years or decades apart. Whole cities quarantined, populations fleeing slums and ports. Yeah, the outbreaks had dropped off mid-century, but still …

One entry worth reading: In 1855 the ports of Norfolk, Virginia, and its neighbor Portsmouth were hit pretty hard. The whole East Coast had been thrown into panic.

A daunting August 14th dispatch from the stricken area:

We have already told how our Health Officers are “whipping the devil round the stump,” in the quarantine ports of Virginia. The
Ben Franklin
remained in port for twenty days, and no yellow fever made its appearance. But as soon as the
Ben Franklin
began to “break bulk”—to discharge her cargo—the disease spread like wildfire among all classes and still continues to prevail in the most malignant form.

More on the same day:

Reports from Portsmouth and Norfolk, of the ravages of yellow fever there, are of the most alarming character. Notwithstanding, a vast majority of the population of both cities has fled—

Guy made Lauren look up the phrase
whipping the devil round the stump,
and was dismayed to find it meant, “To evade responsibility or a difficult task.” Clearly, the civil authorities in Virginia of 1855 were failing miserably to contain the disease.

Another dispatch from the ports published a day later:

The yellow fever still ravages our community, though it is estimated that up to this period fully 8,000 have left town.

Guy felt his throat grow dry. Then one of those no-see-ums tickled his arm. He resisted the urge to scratch it, but couldn't help himself. Lauren stopped over another entry, shaking her head in mild disbelief. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In a feel-good piece on the readiness of New York City, written to allay panic and published a week later, this little gem about three hundred words into the article, contradicting the whole thrust:

Brooklyn is ill-prepared to resist the ravages of a pestilence. It is a large city; it has no sewers. Each house has attached to it two disease-breeders, in a cesspool and an outhouse, and the filth thrown into the streets lies festering there, creating a foul and offensive stench.

Same day, as reprinted from the
Baltimore American:
THE YELLOW FEVER. NEW YORK LADIES ATTENDING THE AFFLICTED.
Several paragraphs in:

DEAR SIR: The condition of things in our town at the present is most serious and alarming. Deaths are occurring all around us, new cases are multiplying hourly and our means of treating them are hourly diminished.

Lauren snorted—part scorn, part resignation—at the way things always turned out. The streets festered. How typical. About two weeks later, in September, New York City authorities shook off their lethargy:
QUARANTINE—YELLOW FEVER PORTS.

The Board of Health held a special meeting at City Hall yesterday. The Mayor, Aldermen and Commonalty of the City of New York, convened as a Board of Health, ordain as follows—

Clearly the time for stern measures had arrived. Any vessel from the port of Baltimore or any port or place south thereof was to be quarantined for thirty days.

The Baltimore papers had something to say about that a couple of days later, as the
Times
reported: