Chapter 11

The fever came in December.

Not dramatically. Fevers rarely announce themselves with appropriate gravity. It arrived the way most terrible things arrive, quietly and incrementally, a warmth behind the eyes one morning that I noted and set aside, a heaviness in the limbs that I attributed to the cold and the poor food and the conditions of a cell that had never been designed with survival in mind.

By the second day I knew what it was.

I had seen enough fever in Flanders to recognize it without illusion. I knew its stages and its trajectory and what it did to a body over time and I sat with that knowledge the way I sat with most difficult knowledge, quietly and without ceremony, and I assessed my situation with the accuracy I had always brought to situations that required it.

The assessment was not encouraging.

I asked the young guard for paper. He looked at me with the discomfort he had shown before, the not yet perfected indifference, and I told him I wanted to write some things down before I was unable to and that this seemed like a reasonable request for a woman in my condition and that I would consider it a personal kindness.

He brought paper the next morning. And a decent nib.

I have been writing since.

I still do not know about Thomas.

I want to record that plainly because plainness is all I have left and because the not knowing has been the specific weight I have carried through every day in this cell, heavier than the fever, heavier than everything else.

I have constructed possibilities. I do this the way I do everything, systematically, without sentiment, assessing each scenario for probability and discarding the ones that do not hold up under examination.

Possibility one. He was taken with the crew and tried and hanged with the others in Port Royal. This is the most probable outcome and I have sat with it often enough that its edges have worn smooth. If this is what happened then he died quickly which is the best available death and he died knowing what I knew about him which is that he was exactly what he appeared to be, genuine and uncalculated and kind in the specific way that costs something, and that is more than most people manage in a lifetime three times the length of his.