Now, with Margaret’s cold and clammy feet in his hands, Franklin felt unwell himself. His body ached. His throat was dry. His shoulders and neck seemed fixed. His eyes were watering. His hands were tingling. But he chose to hold on to her feet and massage them, exactly as his mother had massaged his feet when he was young. He pressed his thumbs against each toe, he pushed against the hollows of her ankles, he worked his knuckles against the soles, he stroked each nail. She seemed to push her legs against his hands, as if she knew what he was drawing out of her. He did not want to let her go, not even when he heard the first arrivals of the day begin to come out of the woods and make their way down Butter Hill to reach the longed-for welcome at a town just blocked from sight, as usual at that time of the day, by mist.

Six

Perhaps she would have gotten better anyway, but as usual nature’s undramatic remedies would remain unrewarded. Margaret was bound to credit her rescue to Franklin’s busy hands. At first she had been startled by the pressure of his thumbs on her soles and heels and by his shocking, intimate invasion of the gaps between her toes. No one had played with Margaret’s feet since she’d been a child. Certainly since she had been ten years old or so, she had been taught how precious her body would be in securing a husband but how untouchable it should remain until that man had revealed and committed himself with an exchange of labor or of goods. The phrase “The virgin pulls the plow” did not mean that in Ferrytown the young unmarried women were put to work in the fields, but that a pure girl would be worth a pair of horses or a team of oxen in a marriage contract. You wouldn’t get a brace of rabbits for a girl who’d drifted.

When she’d been younger, Margaret had hardly dared even to touch herself for fear of losing value, but lately, as time and opportunity elapsed and it seemed less likely that any man in Ferrytown would volunteer to embrace a wife whose lovely, tempting copper hair was such an ancient omen of disaster and such a sign of waywardness, she had broken that taboo. She was, at thirty-one, she had admitted to herself, a woman who might be a daughter and a sister and an aunt, but never a wife or mother. Her body would retain its value and remain unshared.

But she’d been approached many times by the strangers who had traveled through her town and who evidently did not share her neighbors’ wariness of redheads. She’d had her rear slapped more than once. She’d had her fingers kissed. And one fine-mannered man, her father’s age, had proposed a midnight meeting place beyond the palisades where they might talk and hold each other’s hands. She’d often wondered what might have happened had she done what he’d suggested, where she might have ended up, if she hadn’t opted instead to seek Ma’s advice, with the result that it was her brothers and her father who went out at midnight with their sticks to honor his proposal.

So this caressing of the feet was something both alarming and overdue. She had been tempted to protest. To kick this stranger, even. To judge his touch as cheapening. But who doesn’t like their feet caressed? Who isn’t weakened and disarmed by such discreet attention? It helped that Franklin spoke to her while he was working on her feet, making less of a stranger of himself. He recounted how his mother had tipped him on his back and “loved his feet” when he was very small, and even not so small, a teenager. He talked about his patient aunt and the pigeon that had cured him when he was young. If this was something that a mother and an aunt might do, then surely it was innocent.

Except it could not feel entirely innocent. Margaret found it hard to tell if this narrow fever that encompassed her, this breathlessness, this pounding of her heart, this fresh disorder that seemed to want to shake and flex her by the spine, was something else new that could be blamed on her flux. Or was it something that she owed to Franklin’s thumbs and knuckles? She drifted in and out of it. She even dreamed that he brought shame on her by venturing beyond her feet along her hairless leg to press his thumbs and knuckles where only she had pressed before.

The first thing Margaret noticed when she woke was how quiet it was. She had to remind herself that she was no longer at home, waking in the family house, with just moments left before the call to work. She could lie back and let the shapes absorb the light. But she knew at once that something had changed, both within her and beyond. Her body ached. Her mouth was still so dry and bitter that she could barely swallow. But she was feeling partially restored, not sinking now and fearful, but strengthening. Her feet and lower legs felt supple and alive. Her head was clear. Her scalp was bristling. She did not have to struggle to remember what had happened in the night. She could recall every movement of the young man’s hands. He was responsible.

Margaret raised herself quite easily onto her elbows and peered through the thinning gloom at the body slumped at the side of her bed, a silent silhouette as still and heavy as a sack of grain. Was he alive? He hardly seemed alive. She dared to push his shoulder with her foot. No sign from him. She’d not detected any body heat. Her panic was short-lived, but strong enough to make her cry out loud. What had he said? The pigeon drew the toxins out through the soles of the feet. The illness was defeated but the pigeon died. Its warm and beating heart would stop protesting and its body would be cold and silent. She stretched her leg again, pushed her toes against his chest, and waited for a heartbeat. Yes, Franklin was still warm, but even so she was not sure. She pressed again. A kick, in fact. An ill-judged kick. The sort of kick to wake a dog or mule.

Once Margaret had washed herself and drunk a little water, and was, she said, “now clean enough to show my face to the day,” Franklin helped her to her feet. It would do her good to sit and recover in fresh air with views from the sunlit hillside down into the still-shaded valley of her home. This was the first time she had stood since her abandonment at the Pesthouse. He had to steady and support her for the few steps to the wooden door, and the more difficult fifty steps beyond to the fallen tree trunk that he had partly covered with one of his tarps, but he was glad of that, and glad as well to see her face in open light. Her eyes, without the distraction or the competition of any hair, were huge and thrilling.

“Your color’s good,” he said, something that she’d never heard when she had heavy auburn curls.

Margaret could see at once that something odd had happened in Ferrytown. There was hardly any hearth smoke, for a start. And at that time of day, too early in the town for the sun to make a difference, she would have expected to see the flames of braziers and courtyard lanterns, not yet doused in households lucky enough not to have to start work “on the nose” at first cock.

Everything was indistinct in those murkier moments of morning. Perhaps she was mistaken and nothing was unusual, except her own state of mind — and her eyesight. Her eyes were good enough when she was face-to-face with work or conversation. Anything beyond a hundred paces was blurred. But later, once the sun had directed its angles above the treetops on the far side of the river and into the valley, Margaret could see her home in slightly less blurred detail. By now there should be fifty fires or more, she thought. The lanes and roads should be busy as animals were led out of the tetherings and neighbors went about their tasks. The ferryman’s raft should be taking its first plunge across the river with its paying cargo of animals, carts, and emigrants. There should be at least some movement near the guesthouse.

“What do you see?” she asked Franklin. “Can you see something moving?”