Within a week of Charlotte’s retreat to Willingdon, it seemed a plague had come to Sanditon. It began with a catarrh and an insidious enervation, a growing pallor and a vicious fever that racked the sufferer with blazes and shaking chills. It took hold among the working folk, whose poor diets and drafty homes made them vulnerable, the old and the young stricken first, but it was blind to class and station. It made its way to the tradesmen, the gentry, even to the great houses; Sanditon House and Trafalgar House and Arundel Park, the estate Lord Babington had let, all had their afflicted. After only a few days, Arundel Park’s garden was overgrown, missing the assiduous care of its gardener, the tea was late at Sanditon House and the Trafalgar House was loud with the cried of the unattended children and then, as they fell ill, Alicia first and then the rest, most terribly quiet.
After first, Dr. Fuchs had not been troubled. He’d prescribed tonics and broths, calf’s foot jelly and calendula compresses; he had seen fevers come and go, run their course, carry off babes in the cradle and the elderly grandam whose age was beyond recall. He’d offered reassurance, calmly, confidently, as it was not smallpox and not the blue death. But the days passed and more fell ill, the babies but also the sturdy ten year olds, apple-cheeked nursemaids and housemaids and Cooks no one would dare dispute, the wiry coxswain of the foreman’s team from the Regatta, Lady Denham’s implacable butler, the younger Miss Beaufort crying out for her mother and trying to weave a garland of blossoms she plucked from the air. He had thought he could manage and by the time he knew he couldn’t, he was not sure who would come to help. Sanditon was not Bath and despite Mr. Tom Parker’s efforts, it had not yet shed its reputation as a poor imitation of an elegant town; physicians would not come flocking when there were so few eminent patients. Dr. Fuchs was a man of science, but he began to pray with the desperate devotion his childhood pastor would have commended.
At first, Mary Parker had not been troubled. She’d nursed her sisters and brother through fevers and agues at home at Broadwater and they’d all come through. It was said in her family she had the touch, passed down from a great-grandmother who’d been known to brew a tea from herbs that could bring a man back from the brink, a sense of what the patient needed—now a blanket, now a draught of spirits steeped with boneset and mint, disgusting of course, but effective. She’d carried five babes and birthed four and she hadn’t worried overmuch about Alicia or Henry, not when they pushed away cakes dusted with sugar. Not when they woke in the night afraid of fiery monsters. The third morning they lay in their beds, too listless to rise, to fret, still as Jenny’s china dolls, Mary began to be afraid. When Sunday came, not one of the children was well enough to attend church, not well enough to leave to the care of the housemaid. Tom was blithe as ever, his temperament constitutionally ill-prepared for disaster, and thus was no help. Mary wrung her hands and mixed up medicines with a spoon full of honey and wished for a prie-dieu, made do with the rag rug beside Jenny’s low bed.
Sidney had not left for London as he’d planned. Eliza had departed Sanditon as quickly as she could, returning to her stylish town-house in London, her fashionable barouche, and the reliable rigors of the ton. Sidney dreaded it all; the prospect of a loveless marriage rendered the delights of the beau monde as sawdust, its tedium sure to be excruciating without Charlotte’s bright eyes sharing a glance; he remembered how acutely she’d mimicked him in the street and knew she would have made him laugh the night through with her mockery of the high and mighty and those who very much wished to be. When he closed his eyes, he saw her face again at their final parting, her cheeks streaked with tears, the shadow cast by her bonnet’s brim nothing to the ones beneath her eyes. Her sweet mouth had been held tight—to keep from trembling? To remind him he had forfeited any right to a farewell kiss, even the softest brush of his lips against hers, little enough to sustain him through all the long years yet to come without her. He could not bear to join Eliza in the city, a far cry from the decade ago when it had been his heart’s one desire, one he’d been sure would never change, both in the wanting and the being denied. Now, neither was true and he knew what a young fool he’d been. What an old fool he was becoming, at his best as a fond uncle to Tom’s children. And yet, he could do little for them now that they sick in their beds, Mary increasingly tense and drawn. He ferried bowls of broth and possets they turned their heads from and coaxed spoonfuls in with promises of a seaside adventure; he visited the near-empty shops and oversaw the household accounts. He kept Tom occupied and sat with him at meals neither wanted. He ordered Georgiana a half-a-dozen new books from London and kept her from Trafalgar House, hoping to spare her the illness. It was everything he could think of to do—and it was not enough.
Cook soldiered on but Betty, the nursemaid, fell ill as did Sally the housemaid and Reynolds the butler. The children were listless, growing too weak to cry, and Mary’s hair streamed down her back, her eyes red-rimmed. Tom began to look worried. Sidney stopped responding to Eliza’s letters, unable to think of what else he could say to make her understand why he could not leave. The morning Jenny tried to build a sandcastle on her white counterpane, batting at the cotton in frustration, Mary looked up at Sidney from the child’s bedside and spoke.
“I’ve written, I’ve asked Charlotte to return. I don’t know what else to do, they cry for her so.”
Sidney did not try to parse his emotions, not then, not as Jenny whined for a cockleshell, her piping voice a rasp.
“Will she come, do you think?”
“Her note said no later than tomorrow.”
No later than tomorrow. Sidney felt the time rushing toward him like an incoming tide, rushing out again. Jenny was suddenly very quiet and Sidney wondered whether tomorrow would even come at all. He didn’t want Charlotte sick, fevered, and he couldn’t imagine another day at Trafalgar House, in Sanditon, without her.
