One day Zylphia saw a beggar on the wharf. She recognized the brown skin, the familiar hunch of shoulder. It was the housekeeper. Though she had once known the woman as her captor, Zylphia was kind, with a forgiving heart. She knew well what a woman alone was sometimes forced to do. She took the beggar back to her house, for the former servant was as alone in the world as she was, with nothing and no one to save her. The housekeeper who had been cast out was welcomed back to the house on Turner Street. Zylphia nursed her back to health.

Together they opened a cent shop and sold goods through the window to the towns people. The housekeeper instructed Zylphia in the ways of the islands. Long ago, back in her native land, she had been a practitioner of the healing arts. She taught Zylphia to formulate poultices using bread, milk, and herbs. They brewed cough syrup by boiling bark and bethroot. In the year they had spent together, the old woman and the captain’s wife became not just friends but sisters. The towns people came to the shop for medicines, for cures for everything from boils to pneumonia. Zylphia learned that a poison used to kill the huge rats that came off the ships could also be used in minute amounts to cure respiratory ailments.

And when the mast of the Maleous was one day sighted on the far horizon, Zylphia knew what she must do. She paid the housekeeper all the money she had in her accounts and said a tearful good-bye to the woman with whom she had grown so close. Then she waited for the ship to reach the wharf.

But the Maleous did not head directly into the harbor. Instead she stopped, as ships did in those days, on the Miseries to drop off her sick sailors, for there had been an outbreak of yellow fever and many of the crew were ill and dying of it. Falsely fearing contagion, the port of Salem would not allow the ship and its bounty to unload at the wharves with sick sailors on board. So Captain Browne discharged the ship’s ill and dying on the Miseries, neighboring islands aptly named for the sailors who were left to die within sight of the homes they were struggling desperately to reach.

Now, try as he might, the captain had not been able to kill his wife’s young lover in the long year they had been at sea.

With each day he feared their return to Salem and the loss of his young wife, whom he had begun to dream of feverishly every night as they got closer and closer to home. He began to pray that the sailor would die before they reached Salem. And as even our darkest prayers are sometimes answered, the unfortunate sailor contracted yellow fever. And so the captain left him on the Miseries, to die with the others before the waning of the moon.

The captain returned to port, and his wife was waiting on the wharf as the ship landed. His heart leaped at the sight of her. Was it possible? Did she finally love him? But it wasn’t to be. When she looked at him, her eyes held nothing but hate. Her gaze moved beyond him, scanning the crowd for her true love. His rage was murderous, and he shouted aloud without any thought to listening ears. “An entire year gone and not even a tender look for me?”

And though it would have been in her best interest to do so, she could not feign even the slightest warmth for the man who had taken her true love from her. She could not lie.

During his long months at sea, the captain had almost been able to convince himself that she would love him one day, but now he feared it would never be.

He rushed toward her, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her down the street. “Your lover is dead,” he told her coldly. “He died of the yellow fever, crying out in pain and suffering. And he never cried your name, but the name of the South Sea maiden he got the fever from.”

“You killed him,” she said, not believing his story about the maiden but desperately fearing that her true love might be dead.

“Don’t you hear me, girl?” he said, digging his fingers into her arm. “I told you he was dead. Infected, as all men are, by a faithless woman.” Then he dragged her back to the house while the towns people watched in horror.

He beat her until she cried out. But without her sailor, Zylphia had no will to live. She did not try to stop him. When he finally struck her with his closed fist, she fell to the floor, motionless and mute.

For the first time, the captain feared he might lose her, not to the sailor but to death. He cradled her in his arms, begging her to come back to him and vowing to nurse her back to health.

He carried her downstairs, to a room with cooler air and a view of the ocean. In the days to come, he cooked for her. But she would not eat. He bought fresh fruit and sugar, which he knew she had loved, but still she would take nothing. On the third day, the housekeeper appeared at the door, with a pig roast and apples and some soup made of mutton and celery.

“It is no use,” the captain said. “She is beyond nourishment and will take no food.”

“Let me see her,” the old woman suggested. “For it is her choice to live or to die.”

Desperate for her help, and knowing about the Haitian woman’s healing powers, the captain let the old woman into Zylphia’s sickroom.

“Leave us,” she said, and the captain obliged.

The old woman sat on the edge of the bed. “Your true love lives,” she whispered, and at those words Zylphia opened her eyes.

The captain was so grateful to the housekeeper that he offered to take her back with full wages, but she refused, saying she would stay only long enough to prepare their meal. When the food was ready and the table set, she returned to Zylphia and whispered softly in her true friend’s ear, “Make your peace now with your husband. Eat your evening meal at his table. Take what nourishment you can, for you will need your strength. But do not drink the porter. Not one drop.”

The housekeeper helped Zylphia to the table. Then she left the house.

The captain was so happy to see his wife alive that he ate a hearty meal and then drank heavily of the porter, filling himself with ideas of what he would buy his wife now that she had chosen to live.

When the convulsions began, his arms standing straight out by his sides, she sat wide-eyed and disbelieving. His head arched back until it almost touched the floor behind him. She stared as his body stiffened, then collapsed. She had no strength to move.

By the second round of convulsions, the housekeeper was at the door carrying clothes needed for travel and medicine to heal the sailor of his fever. “Come quickly,” she said.

Released from her nightmare, Zylphia followed the housekeeper out the door and down to the stolen dory. “Your true love is alive on the Miseries,” the housekeeper said. “Hurry on now, and do not look back.”

Zylphia, weak only moments before, now found the strength it took to row.

As she left the mouth of the harbor, she passed the Friendship, just hoisting sail and making ready to head out to sea. She passed one of the smaller fishing boats coming into port. She looked at neither but kept her eyes focused straight ahead, never taking them off the island where her true love waited…