Duchess By Night
The fever and the chills chased each other in an endless circle. Harriet sang song after song.
Nights were so much worse than days. Sometimes the fever waned slightly in the daytime, though it raged at night.
Sometimes in the daytime when Harriet said, “Hello, sweetheart,” to Eugenia, she would open her eyes. Every once in a while she woke up and seemed completely rational. Even when she cried and said it hurt, they took it as a sign of strength.
But at night she never slept for more than an hour. When she wasn’t sleeping, she went back to fighting, as Jem described it. She thrashed her head, back and forth, and shouted until her voice cracked. When she did sleep, it wasn’t a natural sleep, but the kind from which people don’t always wake.
One day Harriet realized that Eugenia had been ill, really ill, for two weeks. She was sitting by the bed, wringing out a cold cloth to put on Eugenia’s forehead when she heard Jem outside the door. “Can’t you do anything?” he asked the new doctor fiercely.
And the man’s voice, low. “God, and I wish that I could. We just don’t know enough. There’s people studying fevers, but they’ve little to say about rat-bite fever.”
And then she heard Jem walk away, down the hall, break into a near run. He never cried in front of her. But every day his face was more strained, the lines by his mouth more cruel.
When he returned, later that day, Harriet went to take a bath. The house was quiet, just a huge house and somewhere in it the rat that had given Eugenia a fever.
Just a house, and a father and his dying daughter.
She stopped and rested her forehead against the corridor wall.
Days stretched into another week.
Eugenia was shrinking every day. Her little face grew more peaked and tired, her eyes larger.
One day Harriet went out for a walk, and when she came back, she saw with fresh eyes what she had known inside for days. Eugenia was dying. It literally felt as if her heart stopped, and not silently, but with some great screeching pain.
Eugenia was shaking her head again, back and forth, back and forth. Her cheeks were red and she was moaning, a little slipstream mumble of words, but Harriet knew what they were: a litany of pain.
She stumbled forward and fell on her knees by the bed.
“You can’t know that,” Harriet whispered. “No one can know.”
“She can’t bear this much longer.”
Harriet swallowed, buried her head in the covers, as if not to hear.
“The doctor says perhaps today.” Jem’s voice didn’t even sound like his own. It sounded like a voice echoing from far away.
Harriet’s tears burned her hands, burned the inside of her nose, burned her heart. “Would you like to be alone with her?” she said, raising her head. Tears dripped from her cheeks.
He shook his head. “Stay with me. With us.”
So they sat together.
The day wore on. Toward evening, Harriet found herself thinking the oddest thoughts: that twilight is not really dark. It’s gray. The sun gone, the world turns gray, without emotion, without color. It seemed a fitting time for a little girl to slip free of all this pain, to let go.
But Eugenia never did. She would fall into silence, and panic would grip Harriet’s heart, and then she would start shaking her head again.
“She’s fighting it,” Jem said suddenly, after hours of silence. His voice cracked mid-sentence. “She won’t let go.”
Harriet managed to smile at Eugenia. “Good girl,” she said.
“No.”
“No?”
“She can’t hear you,” Harriet said.
“Yes, she can.” He bent over the bed, cradled his daughter’s little face, told her again. And again.
Harriet buried her head in the covers and wept. Then she suddenly heard him say in a different voice: “Hello, poppet.”
She reared up her head. Eugenia was looking blearily, irritably, at her father. “’Lo, Papa.”
They were the most beautiful two words that Harriet had ever heard.
Eugenia frowned. “Stop telling me to go, Papa. I’m too tired to go anywhere.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Of course you are. I know that.”
“Where’s Harry?”
Harriet leapt up and tangled on her own feet and half fell on top of Eugenia. “I’m here.”
“Sing me that song,” Eugenia said, closing her eyes again. “I want that song, Harry. My favorite song.”
So Harriet sat down on the bed and started to sing. Her voice wavered and cracked. “Drink to me only, with thine eyes…” she sang. “And I will pledge with mine.”
“Put your hand on my cheek,” Eugenia ordered. “Like you did before, Harry.”
So she did. “Yet leave a kiss but in the cup—” She couldn’t manage the high note and slid low instead. “And I’ll not ask for wine.”
As they watched, Eugenia fell into sleep. It was a deep sleep this time. She was so far away that her chest hardly moved.
“I can’t take it,” Jem said suddenly, stumbling to his feet. A great cracked sob came from his chest. “I can’t—Harriet—”
“Go for a walk,” she said, looking up at him. “She won’t die, not this hour. Not this moment.”
“Go,” she said, loving him, loving Eugenia. “I promise I’ll watch and she won’t die. Not yet.”
He stumbled from the room. She lied, she had lied. It seemed obvious to her, as it undoubtedly was to Jem, that Eugenia was leaving them now. If not this minute, in five minutes, in an hour.
Chapter Thirty-five
Yet Leave a Kiss But in the Cup…
March 15, 1784
H arriet picked up Eugenia and carried her over by the fire to the rocking chair. Her little body was all bones.
She stayed by the fire, rocking back and forth, tears sometimes falling on Eugenia’s face. The odd, funny little girl with a logical mind and a passionate wish for babies had crept into her heart.
When Benjamin was alive and they were first married, she had thought they would surely have children. Those unborn children tumbled through her dreams, teething on chess pieces, strutting the way Benjamin did, smiling at her with his eyes.
But then the children never came and somehow those dreams became faded and tired, rather like their marriage.
More tears fell on Eugenia’s hair. She had found a child, only to lose her.
Once Eugenia stirred, but Harriet shushed her, kissing her forehead, and singing a few bars. She slipped back into that deep sleep.
Harriet was still rocking when Jem came back.
He walked in the door and she saw the question in his eyes and shook her head quickly. “She’s here, still here.”