The Pesthouse by Jim Crace

that he could touch her without fear?
     
     
    ENCOURAGED BY a day of sun and by the full sling of nuts that he had foraged as a gift, Franklin found the courage in the afternoon to go back to the Pesthouse. Margaret was still barely awake and could manage only a faint 'Yes?' to let him in when he pish-pished.
    'Are you well?' he asked, the common greeting between strangers but heavily appropriate on this occasion.
    'I'm tired,' she said. But not dead, apparently. Instinctively she felt her armpits to check for any goose eggs. She could hardly check for boubons in her groin with Franklin watching her. She took comfort from the fading of the blotches on her arms and from the absence of any dried blood around her nose or mouth or, indeed, what would have been a certain sign of approaching death, three pock-shaped black marks on her hands or, worse, the clot of blood — a present from the Devil — that corpses were said to clutch in their palms to pay their entrance fee to Hell. Perhaps she would not die, after all. Perhaps she'd have the good luck denied to Pa, as her mother had promised. Margaret even chanced a smile toward the stranger at the door. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked the man.
    'I haven't seen your eyes,' he said. 'It's dark in here.' He blushed, of course.
    'Not red, not bloody red?'
    'I'll see. Can I come close?' Her eyes looked clear enough. 'No blood,' he said.
    'No blood is good.' She closed her eyes again.
    'You ought to eat.' He showed her the heavy sling of cloth and chose the plumpest nut for her.
    'Can't chew.' Her jaw and throat felt stiff and timbery.
    'Maybe I could make a soup... from... the woods are full of things.' From leaves, from nuts, from roots, from birds. From mushrooms, possibly.
    'Nothing, no.'
    'What can I do for you?'
    She shook her head — there's nothing to be done, she thought, except to sleep and hope for the best. The last thing that she needed in her state was a mouthful of dry nuts or a stomach-load of soup from the woods. She felt both half awake and dreaming. Deeply conscious, in a way, but inebriated, too, by the toxins that accumulate when hunger, fever and exhaustion are confederates. 'What color are my eyes?' she asked again, almost sleeping now.
    'Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?' asked Franklin, not wishing to bully her with questions but worried that she might be slipping into unconsciousness rather than slumber.
    She raised her head just high enough to see him for an instant. A silhouette. No expression on her face. It didn't matter who he was. 'I don't know you.' But she managed to lift her head again and study him for a moment longer. 'What do they want?'
    'Who do you mean when you say
they
? Your family? Are they the people in the town?'
    'I don't know who they are.'.
    He had to let her sleep again. He left her to it and went out into the clearing to check the hill for any sign of Jackson and to bring his two dried tarps and his possessions into the Pesthouse. He had persuaded himself- too readily — that he would be safer, drier, warmer with the feverish woman than he would be outside for another night. More useful, too. The Pesthouse smoke would protect him from her contagion. He sat down at the far end of her bed, his back warmed by the fire, looking out through the open door across the clearing as the light lifted and receded once again and the cold returned. The last few of that day's travelers led their carts and horses to the lip of the hill and disappeared from sight, leaving just their voices and their bells to briefly dent the quiet.
    That evening, emboldened by the darkness and keen to wake her lest she slip too far, Franklin sat and spoke about himself, as strangers should. Occasionally he could tell by her breathing or by some note of interest or sympathy that she was listening in between her bouts of sleep. He gave his name, his age; he told her about his father's death, the family farm, their animals, the mocking sets of storms