Matt drove to the mud-splattered lane beyond the village limits where the Wrights had always lived and kept on until his van got stuck. He damned the road and the van and himself, then got out and ran the rest of the way, right through the brambles which stuck to his trousers and his jacket, ignoring the sodden earth that was flung up as he went, so that his face was smeared with mud. There was stinging nettle he did his best to avoid. Though he was breathing hard, he noticed that no birds were singing, not a one.
“What’s this now?” Ian narrowed his eyes as his gaze focused on the long view he could spy from the kitchen window. Something strange had happened to the sky. Ian had just embarrassed himself by questioning his mother about love, which was foreign territory to him. He had planned to be offhand and casual, but the minute he said Sally’s name his mother laughed, and then he understood she already knew and that she was amused to see him torn up the way he was.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” she told him.
“Fine,” he’d said. “I’m through discussing it.” As the figure outside grew closer Ian was surprised to see who it was. “Matt Poole’s arriving.”
“Ian,” Matt shouted from the front yard. “Something’s gone wrong.”
Ian cast a fleeting look at his mother, whose eyes were closed. She had picked up the scent of death. She often was called to deathbeds, to ease the transition of the dying, and she recognized the bittersweet tinge in the air. She threw open the door and Matt came racing in, shaking, his clothes soaked through with sweat.
“Somethings happened in the village,” he said. “A red cloud of illness has settled over the roofs.”
He didn’t need to say more. Ian had read about such things, diseases called down in Egypt and Persia, rains of death, of toads and frogs, of snakes and illness, a rain of revenge. Summon a red rain and you never knew who might be sacrificed. Margaret had heard of the Red Death as well, and was already paging through her Grimoire, that her mother and her grandmother and her great-gran had used. To purify, to end illness, to battle maledictions. Rosemary, lavender, basil, mint, and woodbine for purification. Garlic, ginger, golden seal, clove, all antibacterial elements, along with an elixir of honey and boiled nettle.
“We’ll go to town now,” she told Ian, who nodded, quickly going to the entryway for his coat on the peg and pulling on the old boots he wore to trek through the fens. “Get my bag,” Margaret called to him. He knew what she meant, the one she took around to houses when she was called upon to heal the sick; it, too, had belonged to her great-gran and had been handsewn by a bootmaker in Thornfield a hundred years earlier.
“Don’t let your mum go,” Matt told Ian. “It’s not safe out there.”
“She won’t let people sicken without helping,” Ian said. “You should know that.”
Ian picked up the keys to Matt’s van. No matter how defiant he’d been as a boy, he’d been well aware that his mother put others first. He’d been cross about her generosity to strangers and neighbors alike back then, for she seemed to ignore his most basic desires and concentrated on those who came to her for help. All he’d wanted was a room of his own and a normal house like everyone else. Now he felt a good deal of pride as his mother packed up her bag of elixirs. “Ready,” she said. She turned to Matt and told him to remain in the cottage and stay out of the rain. He’d had asthma as a boy, and she’d been called in many times when his mother feared he wouldn’t be able to draw another breath.
“The van’s stuck,” Matt informed them.
“I’ve got wooden slats to put under the tires,” Margaret told him. “When you live here you assume there will be mud.”
“I could drive you,” Matt said, though he was utterly shaken.
“Don’t worry,” Ian assured him. “I know how to drive.”