“Mummy is bo-ring,” Percy sang, hopping on one foot and then the other. He shook his blond curls from his eyes. “If I go into Mummy’s room, she’ll pinch my cheeks and make me recite my Latin.”
Hazel wondered if their brother George had been like this as a child, if he had been whiny and so demanding of attention, requiring a witness to applaud and kiss him on the cheek for every horse ride and lesson completed. It seemed impossible. Besides, their mother hadn’t been so fearful or suffocating back then.
George had been quiet and introspective. His smiles felt like secrets shared from across the room every time. At the age of seven, Percy already knew how to wield his smiles as weapons. Did Percy even remember George? He had been so young when their brother died.
Percy sighed. “Fine. We can play pirates,” Percy said as if he were making a concession, as if Hazel herself had barged into his room and begged him to play pirates, and only now, in his benevolence, did Percy agree.
Hazel rolled her eyes.
Percy thrust his lower lip out into an exaggerated frown. “If you don’t say yes, I’ll scream and get Mummy and she’ll be cross with you.”
Another cloud shifted. A patch of light crept up the bottom of Hazel’s dress, the warmth of it amplified through her layers of skirts. “Why don’t you go down to the kitchens and ask Cook what she’s making for tea? I bet if you ask now, she’ll make your favorite lemon cakes.”
Percy considered. He frowned at Hazel and whatever she was hiding behind her skirt, but after a moment’s thought, he turned and scampered away, no doubt down the narrow stairs to torment Cook and Mrs. Herberts. Hazel had bet right: there was no competition between playing with her and eating lemon cakes.
There wasn’t much time left, but before she continued, Hazel needed to lock her door. There could be no more intruders. She walked inside and twisted the heavy key in its lock until she heard the satisfying thud. And then she dashed back to the balcony, where a few drops of water had fallen in the few seconds she was gone, dotting the mossy stone almost black. If this was going to happen, it would be now.
She lifted the kitchen fork again and waved it over each of the frog’s limbs like a shaman. Nothing. Perhaps the demonstration Bernard had seen was a trick. Maybe there was never a corpse at all, but a man hiding under the table, his neck poking out through a hole in the wood with theater makeup deadening his skin until it was flat and colorless. What a laugh the actor—the liar—and the Galvini boy had probably had after the show, counting the paper money they took in, getting drunk with their fellow two-bit performers in grease makeup.
—And then the frog moved.
Had it moved? Had it just been a trick of the light? Or a breeze blowing through the valley? Hazel hadn’t felt anything. Her skirts hadn’t rustled. She waved the fork over the dead, impaled frog, again and again, faster and faster, but nothing else happened. And then she realized.
She pulled the giant key from her pocket and gently lowered it toward the frog, and the frog began to dance. The frog, which moments before had dangled lifeless on its pike, now jittered with energy. It still had the will to live, as if it were trying to escape. It was something out of a fairy tale, Hazel thought. Let me off this poker, the frog seemed to say, and I’ll grant you three wishes! Or maybe it was out of a nightmare, like the stories in those penny-fiction pamphlets Percy’s tutor sometimes slipped her with a wink. The dead come alive, and they want revenge on the living.
It was working! What was it? Magnetism? The key was a conductor for electricity, that much was clear, but what type of metal was the key made of, anyway? She would need to do a full examination, a run of trials using every combination of metals she could identify.
Gleeful, Hazel continued to trace the key along the frog’s twitching limbs. But within a minute, the jerking slowed, and then stopped altogether. Whatever magic had been present in the weather, in the dead frog’s humors, in the fire poker, in the bedroom key—it had been spent.
The frog was dead again, and now, from the other room, Hazel could hear her mother weeping. She had wept most days since the fever took George.
From Dr. Beecham’s Treatise on Anatomy: or, The Prevention and Cure of Modern Diseases （24th Edition, 1816） by Dr. William R. Beecham, Amended by Dr. William Beecham III:
The Roman fever （Plaga Romanus） first reveals itself through symptoms of boils on the patient’s back. Within two days, the boils begin to burst, staining the back of the patient’s shirt with blood （hence the name “the Roman fever,” for the resemblance of several stab wounds to the back like Julius Caesar’s）。 Other symptoms include blackened gums, lethargy, decreased urination, and aches. Colloquial names for the disease: Roman Sickness, the Boils, Bricklayer’s Fever, the Red Death. Almost always fatal. An outbreak centered in Edinburgh occurred in the summer of 1815, claiming over five thousand souls.