Taking Wing

The Plague Mask

Isabel’s days settle into a rich and busy routine. Each dawn she rises to work with her merlin. Each afternoon she joins Olivia for lessons, during which Aunt de Vere teaches them Greek, Latin, mathematics, and astronomy, along with wonderful stories told in the same spirit as Master Hart used to tell them back in London.

Twice a week the girls accompany Aunt de Vere to her clinic, where she explains the four humors, the use of leeches, and how the positions of the sun and moon are believed to affect a patient’s ailments. Isabel finds the stars and the phases of the moon her favorite part of the day. Still, she is coming to love the clinic work nearly as much. She has grown far less squeamish, both about handling raw meat for her hawk and about tending patients. She is quietly proud to imagine that she might someday become a medic like her aunt.

One day Aunt de Vere makes an astonishing suggestion. With Cole’s help, Isabel should take over the young merlin’s training herself. Her aunt says Isabel is clearly fascinated with the birds and learns quickly; the hawk is hers now. Isabel can hardly believe her ears. Shyly, she asks whether she might give the hawk a name, and her aunt smiles and agrees. Isabel breathes out the name at once: Nicolette, after the heroine of one of her favorite stories.

Training a hawk, Isabel soon learns, demands enormous patience and self-discipline. Every morning she works with Nicolette, coaxing her to trust. Little by little, she lengthens the leash so the bird can range farther. They practice with a lure, a stuffed shape of cloth and feathers, to sharpen the instincts Nicolette will need to hunt on her own. Isabel loses all trace of her old squeamishness, feeding Nicolette morsels of raw meat and fetching dead mice out of the traps herself.

Isabel confides to her aunt how strange it feels to imagine finally letting Nicolette fly completely free, with only hope that the hawk will choose to come home. She asks what happens if the hawk decides she wants to be free forever. Her aunt only gives a wry smile. “She is a female,” she says. “Like all females, she is permitted to fly free, but only within limits that you and Cole have taught her.”

One day Aunt de Vere leaves the girls alone at the clinic while she travels to Northampton on business. She has instructed the girls to handle only simple complaints and to send anyone with more serious symptoms back the next day. Isabel is eager to prove her new skills. Together, she and Olivia treat a man shivering violently with an ague and a small boy who has pushed a bean up his nose. Olivia extracts the bean carefully with a mirror and a pair of tweezers while Isabel holds the boy still.

Then a mother arrives with a wheezing, rasping baby, and Isabel recognizes the symptoms of asthma at once. Proud to manage the case entirely on her own, she consults the herbal ledger, notes the recommended dosage, and hands over a remedy of bryony.

As the girls are closing the clinic for the day, Olivia stops Isabel and asks, almost idly, whether she gave the baby the same dosage listed in the book. Isabel says yes. Olivia turns pale with horror. That dosage is meant for a grown adult, enough to kill an infant.

The girls gallop on horseback to the family’s tumbledown cottage, terrified they will be too late. To their relief, they find that the mother has not yet fed the baby the remedy. To spare Isabel from the mother’s anger, Olivia claims that Isabel has thought of an even better remedy, and hands over the correct dosage for a child. The grateful mother showers them both with thanks.

That evening, dreading the consequence, Isabel finds her aunt in the knot garden and confesses everything. She braces herself for anger, or worse. But Aunt de Vere only stoops to smell a moss rose with creamy, pink-tipped petals, and speaks to Isabel gently. She explains that Isabel let herself get carried away by her own heroic imaginings, and that a child very nearly paid for it.

Her aunt says all people need dreams, dreams that make them who they are. But women especially must always keep their feet firmly on the ground, or their imaginings can cause real harm. She asks for Isabel’s word that she will never make such a mistake again. Isabel gives it at once, almost weeping with gratitude when her aunt promises the matter will never be mentioned between them again.

Weeks later, on a fragrant spring morning thick with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and the rosewater the household women are distilling from the swelling hedgerow roses, Isabel finally rides Nicolette out toward the water meadows to try flying her completely free. The hawk sits calm and alert on her wrist, her speckled feathers ruffled by the morning breeze. Isabel senses she is finally ready.

Before Isabel can release her, though, loud shouts interrupt the peaceful morning. A young groom comes galloping up on a horse lathered from hard riding, so shaken he barely remembers to bow to Aunt de Vere. He explains that his master’s wife, Mistress Reynolds, has fallen into a raging fever after a journey back from London, and that Master Reynolds fears it may be the plague. The family has already sent for a physician, Dr. Cornelius. But the groom mutters darkly that his master considers the man a thieving charlatan.

Isabel and her aunt ride at once to the Reynolds’ house, a fine home recently built on the edge of Northampton, where Master Reynolds, a respected local lawyer, has been anxiously awaiting them. Inside, Isabel follows her aunt up the stairs and starts with fright at the sight of Dr. Cornelius already looming over the sick woman.

Dr. Cornelius wears a hideous metal plague mask shaped into a monstrous beak, its hollow compartment stuffed with sweet-scented herbs he believes will protect him from infection. Isabel wonders how any patient survives the fright of seeing such a nightmarish figure bent over their sickbed.

Dr. Cornelius blusters at Aunt de Vere’s arrival, dismissing her judgment as quackery and insisting Mistress Reynolds needs a physician, not an amateur with her herbal remedies. But Master Reynolds, unafraid and desperate for his wife’s recovery, insists that Aunt de Vere be allowed to examine her, too. Aunt de Vere approaches the delirious, thrashing woman and inspects her skin with care, paying particular attention to her armpits, her groin, and her neck. At last she straightens and delivers her verdict. There are no plague boils and no blisters, only a severe case of quinsy causing the swelling and delirium in her throat.

Dr. Cornelius is angry at being contradicted, spitting in fury and declaring that someone should teach the woman her place. He whips off his mask, revealing a furious, whiskery face underneath, and storms out, leaving Aunt de Vere to take charge of the patient.

For hours, Isabel and her aunt work to bring Mistress Reynolds’s fever down, sponging her face and body with cooling rosewater and directing that she be given barley water and an herbal tincture four times a day until her symptoms ease. By the time they leave, Mistress Reynolds is calm and lucid.

Days later, when Isabel and her aunt return to check on her, Master Reynolds meets them in tears of relief, thanking them again and again for saving his wife’s life.

But the ride home carries its own quiet terrors. Isabel glimpses a dead, hairless rat rotting in a ditch and cottages with their windows boarded and a crude red cross painted on the door, marking houses the plague has already visited.

At one point their horses grow skittish, sensing something amiss on the road. Isabel’s manservant urges them onward past what might have been brigands lying in wait. She silently thanks the small protective charm Meg once gave her for seeing them safely past.

The plague, which had always felt to Isabel like nothing more than a lesson from Master Hart, no more real than old wars or invasions or religious persecutions safely buried in the past, suddenly feels entirely, terribly present.

When they finally reach home, they find Olivia pacing anxiously in the hall with a letter in her hand. Isabel recognizes the handwriting instantly as Sabine’s. Aunt de Vere reads the first lines herself, then gently warns Isabel to prepare herself. It may be a matter of life or death.

Sabine’s letter opens with apologies for not writing sooner, along with happy news that she and her husband, Henry, are now settled on his country estate only a few miles from Aunt de Vere’s own home, and that they would love to have Isabel visit. But the letter quickly turns grave.

With Father traveling overseas on business, Aunt Elinor has been left in sole charge of the household. Her morbid fear of the plague has led her to dismiss every servant except baby Hope’s old nurse, Alice. Now Hope has fallen gravely ill. Sabine fears that Alice’s fraying nerves and Aunt Elinor’s own hysteria leave no one capable of caring for her properly.

Isabel is terrified that her baby sister might already be gone. But she does not hesitate, insisting she must go to them. Aunt de Vere warns her gently of the terrible risk, since no street in London has escaped the plague’s touch. She says she would go with Isabel herself if her own patients did not need her here. Isabel only shakes her head. She has no choice; her family needs her. She can only pray that she is not already too late.