Welcome back to Mercy's Quiet Rebellion: Secrets of the 1776 Apothecary.
The danger of discovery may have passed, but Mercy Hathaway now faces a battle that cannot be fought with clever words or hidden messages. As Jeremiah Finch's fever worsens, old memories resurface, forcing Mercy to confront a loss she has carried for years.
Chapter 3: Fever Like Obadiah's
The fever had arrived in the night.
Mercy knelt beside the narrow cot in the cramped back room, her knees pressing into the same floorboard she had scrubbed clean of blood four days ago. The candle on the crate had burned past its midpoint, and the shadows it threw across Jeremiah Finch's face made him look younger than his twenty-eight years. His skin had gone the color of old tallow, and the heat rising from him was a presence in the room, a third body that crowded them both.
She had seen this before. The shallow, ragged breathing. The way his eyes moved beneath the lids, tracking phantoms. The sweat that beaded at his temples and ran in slow lines toward the pillow. Her hands, which had measured powders and steeped infusions for three decades, trembled as she lifted the cloth from the basin.
Obadiah had been six years old. The fever had taken him in three days. Mercy had not allowed herself to count the hours since Jeremiah's skin had turned hot to the touch, but the arithmetic was there, ticking beneath every thought.
"You are not my son," she whispered, pressing the cloth to Finch's forehead. "And I will not let you die."
The door to the alley opened on a whisper of hinges.
Patience stepped inside, a shawl pulled tight around her shoulders against the autumn damp. She had come without being summoned, and she carried a fresh pitcher of water without being asked. The girl set it beside the basin and lowered herself to the floor, her back against the wall, her bright eyes moving from Mercy's face to the man on the cot.
"The shop is closed," Patience said. "I put the bar across the front door."
Mercy nodded. She had forgotten the front door entirely.
"His wound," Patience said. "Is it—"
"The wound is healing clean. This is something else." Mercy dipped the cloth again, wrung it, laid it across Finch's brow. "The body fights what it cannot see, and sometimes the fight itself becomes the danger."
Patience drew her knees up beneath her chin. She had not asked who the man was, or why he was here, or what Mercy intended to do with him. She had simply appeared at dusk with a bowl of broth and had not left since. The girl had learned more in four days than Mercy had intended to teach in a year, and she had absorbed it all without flinching.
"You knew someone," Patience said. "Before. Someone who had this kind of fever."
Mercy's hand stilled on the cloth. The candle flame leaned toward her, then straightened. She could feel the shape of the answer in her throat, a hard knot of words she had never spoken aloud to anyone. Obadiah's name was a stone she had carried so long she had forgotten it was there, until moments like this, when its weight pressed against her lungs and made the air thin.
"My son," Mercy said. "He was six."
Patience did not offer comfort. She did not say she was sorry, or that she understood, or any of the things people said when they wanted to close a wound they could not see.
Instead she reached across the space between them and laid her hand over Mercy's, her small fingers cool against Mercy's knuckles. She held on.
They worked through the night.
Mercy sent Patience to the shop to fetch dried yarrow and a measure of spirits from the locked cabinet, and when the girl returned, Mercy crushed the herbs with a mortar and pestle, the familiar rhythm steadying her hands. She steeped the yarrow in hot water and spooned it between Finch's cracked lips. She packed his chest with a poultice of mustard and flour, the heat of it drawing blood to the surface, and when he coughed, she turned his head so he would not choke.
The hours blurred. The candle burned down and was replaced. Patience brought more water, more cloths, more of the sharp-scented herbs from the shop. She asked no more questions, but her eyes missed nothing. When Mercy's hands began to shake again, Patience took over the spooning of the infusion, her movements careful and precise, her young face set with a concentration that made her look older than seventeen.
Somewhere in the deep hours before dawn, Finch's breathing changed. The ragged edge smoothed. The heat beneath his skin began to retreat, degree by degree, until the cloth Mercy laid across his forehead stayed cool against her wrist.
She sat back on her heels and let out a breath she had been holding since the fever had spiked.
"He will live," she said.
Patience looked up from the basin. Her cap was askew, and there was a smudge of mustard poultice on her cheek.
"You knew he would."
"No," Mercy said. "I didn't."
She had not known, not with Obadiah, not with this man. She had simply refused to stop. The refusal itself had become a kind of knowing.
The alley door opened without a knock.
Silas Thorne slipped inside, his lean frame filling the doorway for only a moment before he pulled the door shut behind him. He carried a small package wrapped in brown paper and twine, and his face was grim in the candlelight.
"The fever," he said. "Is it—"
"Broken," Mercy said. "He'll be weak, but he'll live."
Silas nodded once, a short, sharp motion. He held out the package.
"This came through the cooper's barrels an hour ago. I wouldn't have brought it, but there's no time to wait."
Mercy took the package. It was light in her hands, and when she unwrapped it, she found a small bundle of dried herbs tied with twine. She recognized the scent before she lifted it to her nose: feverfew, the bitter medicinal herb she kept in the locked cabinet for customers who complained of headaches and joint pain.
But this was not a remedy.
She broke open the bundle. Inside, tucked among the dried leaves, was a slip of paper folded into a tight square. She smoothed it flat against her knee and read the cramped handwriting by candlelight.
The message was brief.
A British patrol had intercepted Patriot communications. An ambush was planned for the morning, three miles north of the river crossing, where a Patriot encampment lay unaware. The intelligence had to reach the camp before dawn, or the men there would be slaughtered.
"There's a checkpoint on the north road," Mercy said.
"They're stopping everyone."
"I know," Silas said. "But the checkpoint changes guards at dawn. There's a window."
"How long?"
"Fifteen minutes. Maybe less."
Mercy looked at the paper in her hands.
Then she looked at Jeremiah Finch, whose chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of healing sleep.
She looked at Patience, who had risen to her feet and was watching her with an expression that held no surprise, only a quiet, steady readiness.
"I'll need a basket," Mercy said. "And enough herbs to look like a delivery."
Patience was already moving toward the shop.
"I'll prepare it."
Silas met Mercy's eyes.
"If they stop you—"
"They won't," Mercy said.
She folded the paper and tucked it into her sleeve.
Outside, the first grey light of dawn was beginning to seep beneath the alley door. She could hear the distant tramp of boots on cobblestones, the changing of the guard, the small window of time opening and closing like a shutter in the wind.
She stood.
Her knees ached from the hours of kneeling, and her hands smelled of yarrow and mustard and the sharp mineral scent of dried feverfew.
Somewhere in the back room, Jeremiah Finch slept on, his fever broken, his life spared by a woman who had once been unable to save a child.
She would not be unable again.
Mercy's Quiet Rebellion concludes with Chapter 4, A Wooden Bird in the Basket, as Mercy faces her most dangerous mission yet and discovers that even the smallest acts of courage can change lives.
— Tami Roberts