"He's not my master, he's my brother-in-law."

Dead Mary looked at him sideways. "So Alvin married an Africaine? Or you have married his sister?"

"I'm adopted," said Arthur Stuart.

"So you're free?"

"I'm no man's slave," said Arthur Stuart. "But it's not exactly the same as being free, not when everybody says, You're too young to do this and you're too young to do that and you're too black to go here and you're too inexperienced to go there."

"I'm not black," said Dead Mary, "but I rather be a slave than what I am."

"Being French ain't so bad," said Arthur Stuart.

"I mean one who sees who is sick."

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I was joking. Course, like Alvin says, if you have to tell folks you was joking, it wasn't much of a joke, was it?"

"This Alvin," said Dead Mary. "What is he?"

"My brother-in-law," said Arthur Stuart.

"Non, non," said the mother. "How he make me so better?"

Suddenly Arthur was suspicious. They come in the middle of the night and ask questions about Alvin. Perfectly good explanations for all of it-why not be curious about Alvin!- but it could also be somebody had set out to trap Arthur Stuart into telling more than he should.

"I expect you can ask him yourself in the morning."

"Got to be gone by morning," said Dead Mary. "Before light. People watch this house. They see us, they follow us, they kill us. Hang us for witches, like in New England."

"They haven't done that in New England in years," said Arthur Stuart.

"Your Alvin," said the mother. "Did he touch this bread?"

Alvin had, in fact, bought the baguettes. So Arthur hesitated a moment before saying, "How should I know?" He knew that the hesitation was more of an answer than his words. And without knowing why, he wanted to snatch the bread back and send them on their way.

As if she had read his desire, or perhaps because she thought her mother had been too obvious, Dead Mary said, "We go now."

"Inmediatement," echoed her mother.

"Thank you for the food," said Dead Mary.

Even as she was thanking him, her mother was putting a couple more baguettes into her apron. Arthur would have stopped her-that was supposed to be part of breakfast in the morning-but he thought of them out in the swamps for days with nothing to eat and little to drink and he held his tongue. He'd go fetch more baguettes in the morning.

He followed them out the door.

"Non," said the mother.

"You shouldn't go with us," said Dead Mary.

"I'm not," said Arthur Stuart. "I got to go sit in the privy again. So you best move fast, cause I don't want the ensuing odor to offend your delicate sensibilities."

"What?" said Dead Mary.

"I'm gonna let fly in the privy right quick, ma'am, so hightail it if you value your nose."

They hightailed it, and Arthur Stuart went back to groaning over the privy pot.

It began with a few stones thrown against the house late the next night, and a muffled shout that no one inside understood.

Next morning, a group of men marched back and forth in front of the house carrying a coffin, calling out, "Why ain't nobody sick in there!"

Since Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were still nursing three children who had been seized by the fever despite Alvin's preventive healing, it was tempting to invite the men inside to see that their claim was a lie. But everyone knew that showing three sick children wouldn't be much of an answer, when in this neighborhood more children were dying than anywhere else in Barcy, while not one child in the house of Moose and Squirrel had been carried out in a box.

It wasn't because Alvin had confined his ministrations to the children of the orphanage. He had searched out other heartfires in other houses, and had saved many. But it took time, working one by one, and while he saved many, far more died beyond his reach, ones he had not even looked at. There were limits to what he could do.

No longer did he pretend to run errands or do chores. The baguettes Arthur Stuart had shared with Dead Mary and her mother were the last he bought; and when he slept it was because he could stay awake no longer. He dozed fitfully, waking from nightmares in which children died under his hands. And the worst nightmare of all, a vision of Dead Mary's mother filled with invisible disease, walking about giving people the yellow fever just by bumping into them or speaking to them or whispering in their ear. Tousling the head of a child, she'd move on and the child would drop dead behind her. And each dead person would turn to Alvin and say, "Why did you save her and let her walk around to kill us all?"

Then he'd wake up and search out more heartfires dimmed by disease and try to repair their ravaged bodies.

It never occurred to him not to reach first for those nearest to where he was at the moment. But the result was that deaths from the fever increased in direct relationship to one's distance from the orphanage. It was as if God had put a blessing on the place that spilled over to neighboring houses.

Or, as the marchers outside the house were broadly hinting, it was as if the devil was protecting his own.

That night there were more stones, and marchers with torches, and drunks who threw bottles that crashed. Children woke up and cried, and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel led them into the back rooms of the house.

Still Alvin lay on his bed, reaching out with his doodlebug to heal and heal, concentrating now on children, saving all that he could.

Arthur Stuart dared not interrupt his work-or wake him, if by chance he was asleep. He knew that somehow Alvin blamed himself for the plague-he understood the grim relentlessness of Alvin's labors. This was personal; Alvin was trying to undo some terrible mistake. That much he had hinted at before he went completely silent. And now Alvin was silent, and Arthur Stuart was on his own.

Arthur had no power to heal anyone. But he had learned some makering, and thought now to use it to protect the house. It was something Squirrel said that triggered his action: "What I'm a-feared of are the torches. What if they try to burn us out?"

So he reached out to the torch-bearing men and tried to get a sense of the fire. He had worked in metal before, but little else. Wood and cloth were organic and hard to get into, hard for him to feel and know. But soon he found that what was burning was the oil the torches had been soaked in, and that was a fluid that made more sense to his half-blind groping doodlebug.

He didn't know how fire worked, so he couldn't stop the burning. But he could dissipate the fluid, turn it into gas the way he had turned metal into liquid. And when he had vaporized it, the torch would soon go out.

One by one, the torches nearest the house began to go dark.

It wasn't until Papa Moose said, "What's happening? God help us, why are the torches going out?" that Arthur Stuart realized that he might be doing something wrong.

There was fear in Papa Moose's voice. "The nearest torches are going out."

Arthur Stuart opened his eyes and looked. Me had blacked out about a dozen of the torches. But now he saw that the remaining torchbearers had backed away from the house, and the street was now littered with the discarded sticks, scattered about like the bones of some long-dead creature.

"If they ever wanted proof that this house was a cursy place, this was it," said Mama Squirrel. "Whoever came near, his torch went out."

Arthur Stuart was sick at heart. He was about to confess what he had done when the crowd began to move away.

"Safe for tonight," said Papa Moose. "But they'll be back, and more of them, what with one more miracle to report."

"Arthur Stuart," said Mama Squirrel. "You don't think Alvin would be so foolish as to douse their torches like that, do you?"