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Though Jestine no longer liked to be around children, she had been keeping Rachel’s with her, in case the fever was one that might spread. She hadn’t hesitated to take them in. Now Rachel returned to the house on stilts. All of her children were asleep on quilts spread upon the floor, breathing softly, lulled by the sound of the sea.

“I need you to help me,” she told Jestine.

Rachel’s hair was in tangles and she wore an old skirt, one she used to put on when they escaped into the hills to do as they pleased for an afternoon. Again, Jestine didn’t hesitate. They woke David, the eldest, and told him he was in charge. He was sixteen, old enough to be responsible. If he was shocked by his stepmother’s appearance and how rail thin she was, he didn’t say.

Jestine found a lantern and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. They went into the hills, to an herb man Adelle often went to for help. Jestine had been there once as a child and believed she might be able to find his house. Rachel thought about Paris as they walked through the dark, slapping away mosquitoes. The bells in the chapels, the stones on the streets, the doves in the parks, the lawns that were a deep, velvet green. If Frédéric had stayed there he would never have become ill. Rachel’s resolve to make her way to France was like a stone inside of her, rattling as she walked through the tall weeds. Frogs sang beside a stream. She wondered if Lyddie had already begun to forget everything she had known of their world: the dark woods that tumbled down the mountainside, the heavy curtain of dampness in the air, the purple flowers growing on vines, the hummingbirds that came to drink from blossoms in the gardens, her mother, her aunt Rachel, her life before she was taken.

Rachel and Jestine held hands as they made their way through the dark. Before they knew it they had found the cottage. The herb man stood on the threshold. He was old, but he hadn’t been sleeping. It was as if he’d known someone was coming here to him. They told him Adelle had spoken highly of him and his cures. He invited Jestine in but insisted that Rachel wait outside. Perhaps he didn’t trust her. She didn’t mind. Jestine went into his cottage alone. She told him there was a man suffering from fever and chills and the doctor could not name his disease. It seemed like yellow fever, but he burned with such intensity the doctor thought it was too late for him.

“This disease takes three cures,” the herbalist said.

“Does it?” Jestine was skeptical. “Does that mean you will charge me three prices?”

The herb man gave her a swift glance, but he did not answer. He made a tea mixture from the leaves of the silk-cotton tree that would be healing, and then he made a second packet of tea from the bark of a mahogany tree mixed with salt that would relieve fever. Finally he made a poultice from the tamarind tree, brought to this island from Africa, to relieve both fever and pain, especially in the liver, where yellow fever collected.

He wanted to be paid for his work, as any man would. All Jestine had to offer was Rachel’s mother’s pearls strung around her throat, which she handed over willingly. “I never liked them,” she told Rachel later. “They felt cold on my skin.”

After Jestine had paid for the cures, she came out of the herbalist’s house. She held a package tied with string. “He asked me to kiss him for luck,” she told Rachel. “I told him if this man of yours lives, I’ll send you back to kiss him, and he said that would be fine.”

They walked back through the vines.

Rachel was thoughtful. “He’s not my man.”

Jestine looked at her, then they both laughed.

“You can’t fool me,” Jestine said. “Just everybody else.”

They passed a ring of stones that was all that remained of a house that had been abandoned. A fire had recently been lit, leaving a charred odor. Cooking utensils were scattered about. Someone was moving in, trying to rebuild.

“Be careful with this,” Jestine said when she handed over the remedy. They had reached the outskirts of the city. Everything was midnight blue, the way it is in dreams. “Maybe his fate is already set down. If you save him you may change everything that would have happened if his illness had taken him, the good along with the bad.”

Rachel hardly listened. She already knew this time she would decide her own fate. She hurried home, running most of the way. Rosalie had been sitting up with Frédéric, and now Rachel told her she could go.

“What if you need me?” Rosalie said.

“I already needed you and you were always here, but Mr. Enrique doesn’t need to be lonely tonight.”

When Rosalie was gone, Rachel made the first tea and carried it to Frédéric’s room. He was disappearing; she could barely see him beneath the quilt. The room was so quiet she could hear a moth at the window. The same moth she had heard as a girl when she wished to wake up on the other side of the world, in a bed in Paris.

Frédéric sat up when she asked him to, but he was so weak that swallowing the tea was difficult. When she made the second tea, he could take only a few sips, so she had to feed him with a spoon. As he drank the tea she told him a story about a bird as tall as a man who danced in a marsh and made his beloved fall in love with him. She wept as she told the story, consumed with panic and the thought that Frédéric might die. She laid the poultice over his broad chest, covering his heart and lungs, and then his liver, where the illness dwelled. His body responded to her, he moved toward her without thinking. She did not know why she was shivering. It was brutally hot and Rachel was drenched with sweat. She took off everything but her white chemise underbodice and pantalets. Still she was burning. She feared she had caught the disease, but she didn’t care. She got into bed beside him and pulled the quilt over them.

Rosalie found them that way in the morning, wrapped around each other as drowning people are said to be, so that it is often impossible to tell who was meant to be the rescuer, and who had been drowning. She had been expecting as much, and she hadn’t been surprised when Rachel sent her away. She knew what love could do to a person. She would wait till the next day to collect the children, and let Rachel and this young man go on sleeping. They held on to each other, dreaming of rain.

THE NEW SYNAGOGUE WAS
finally finished in that year, with mahogany benches and an altar set in the center of the hall, in the Spanish style. It had taken a long time, but now it was perfect, and no fire or storm could pull it down. There was a low carved wall separating the women from the men. The floor was kept as sand, as it had been in the past in Spain and Portugal, though there were many Jews recently arrived from Denmark and Amsterdam who thought it madness to have this daily reminder of a brutal history when every prayer was a secret and every Jew was an enemy of the state. Rachel Pomié Petit was past thirty now, and although she’d been considered plain as a girl, she had become quite beautiful, her dark hair wound up and kept in place with tortoiseshell combs, her eyes like black water. Getting older had given her more definition. There was a ferocity to her features now. It was difficult to fault her, for after all her losses she’d managed better than most women in her situation. She ran her household frugally, her business was prospering at last, and her children were well mannered. The boys that had been her husband’s were both considered men now and worked in the store alongside the nephew from Paris.

As for that handsome man, Frédéric Pizzarro, he, too, had turned out to be standoffish after such a promising start. He refused all overtures of friendship, though he came to pray every morning and every evening. He excused himself from social events and dinners, even when the most accomplished women from the Sisterhood invited him. There were daughters who would have liked to have gotten to know him better, young women who were clearly interested. One, Maria Mendes, was so intent on charming him that she took to waiting outside the store on a daily basis, dressed in her finery. She was only nineteen, quite beautiful, but Frédéric treated her as if she were a child. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, after he’d realized she was pursuing him. “I am much too busy to do anything other than attend to business.”

She didn’t give up, for all men say they’re busy until they’re not, and then one day, as she stood there patiently, waiting for him to change his mind, a pitcher of water was poured down from an upstairs window, drenching her. She looked up, sputtering, and although the window was being closed and the person responsible was backing away, she told her friends she’d spied the widow’s shadow. Rachel Pomié Petit was like a spider, Maria said, her web stretched out to keep other women from Monsieur Pizzarro. Frédéric was still well thought of even though he was not socially inclined; he was considered to be a man of integrity who honored God every day. It was said he retreated to his room after work. His interests were mostly those of the mind. He was known to be a great reader, and he tutored the Petit children in mathematics. He was often seen with the children, who had grown more than accustomed to him, treating him as if he were an older, wiser brother. When work and studies were completed, he took them to the wharf to go fishing. He liked to run, for the sheer joy of it, and the boys often went running with him through the streets, down toward the beaches. There was nothing suspicious about all this, and yet there were those in the congregation who felt Pizzarro’s presence in the widow’s home was improper. He should find his own house, his own woman, these people said. He had helped her long enough.

One of the men from the congregation passed by the Petit store on a dark, blue night, and after he did, nothing was the same. Whether his knowledge of the situation was gained by accident or by design, he never said, but when this gentleman, a young cousin of Madame Jobart, glanced at the window he spied a woman in Frédéric Pizzarro’s room. The curtains were drawn, but he was able to see her, naked, on the bed. The truth was this prying man had crept quite close to the window. From his hiding place beneath a vine of bougainvillea he had heard a woman moaning with desire. He waited in the shrubbery, listening; when he reported his story he failed to mention that he had reached through the open window to lift the curtains, the better to see. It was Isaac Petit’s widow he spied, and despite what people said about her cold nature, she was clearly more than friendly to her young nephew, and it seemed she was sharing not only her home, but also his bed.

News of the scandal went from house to house, like the angel of death on the eve of Passover. It appeared like a mist, red in color, sifting down chimneys and through windows. Now when Rachel Petit walked through town she did not have to bypass anyone, they avoided her. Her path was red, for she had committed a sin in the eyes of their faith. People crossed the street rather than confront her, as they had when they saw Nathan Levy with his African wife. The rumors had not yet come inside the Petit house, and the couple thought no one knew. At the dinner table, with the children around them, Rachel and Frédéric made certain not to sit too near to each other. But at night, when everyone else was asleep, they drew the curtains, then closed the shutters tightly and latched them, as people did whenever there was a storm brewing. It was possible that they had the sense they had been spied upon, for now they always found each other in the dark.

TWO WOMEN FROM THE
congregation, old friends of Rachel’s mother, invited her to tea. She refused. She sent a note thanking them and stating she was far too busy. She had her children, the store, endless responsibilities, and therefore sent regrets. Her lack of time was not the only reason she did not wish to see them, and the older women knew this. They wanted to discuss the red mist, the rumors that had caused a division in their community and might soon have Europeans looking too closely at the congregation’s affairs. They wanted to remind Rachel of her debt to her mother’s memory, so they came to her. They waited outside the shop, and when Rachel came out, carrying her youngest child, Isaac, born months after his father’s death, with two other children trailing behind her, her mother’s friends followed her into the street and talked to her there, as they would a common whore. The women were Madame Halevy and Madame Jobart, Sara Pomié’s closest friends. They had been to the Pomié house nearly every week when Rachel’s mother was alive, and had attended both Rachel’s wedding and her parents’ funerals. They had been among the mourners at Isaac Petit’s funeral and had noticed that his widow did not cry. All the same, they’d had their maids deliver baskets of food for her children and black mourning clothing for Rachel, who insisted upon wearing a single black dress. Now they noticed she had on a pretty green frock, inappropriate for a woman who had lost her husband less than a year earlier.

“Many women are delirious after their husbands’ death,” Madame Halevy said to her. “They stay in a sort of madness for months, or even years. Madame Jobart and I are both widows. We understand your grief.” She looked at Rachel carefully. “If grief is what it is.”

“What are you suggesting?” Rachel said, curious to see just how brutally honest Madame Halevy would be.

“I’m suggesting you listen to someone older and wiser for once in your life.”

It was an honor to be addressed by Madame Halevy, but Rachel did not consider her advice worth having. She knew why her mother’s friends had come. It was not out of concern, but rather an issue of control. They would tell her that the situation in her house was improper and Rachel should be looking for a husband among the older, widowed men in the congregation.

“Some women turn to the wrong person for solace,” Madame Halevy told Rachel.

“Do they?” Rachel said. “Do they turn to you?”

“Let us help you,” Madame Jobart suggested. She was involved at the synagogue’s school, and had gone so far as to question Rachel’s children. They called Monsieur Pizzarro Freddy, and they didn’t seem to understand what she meant when she asked where he slept.
His room,
she had been told by one of the sons.
I don’t think he sleeps,
she had been told by the other. “Once you are involved in the right activities,” Madame Jobart now suggested to Rachel, “you avoid any actions that can lead to disaster.”