“He’s cursed everyone,” Kylie managed to say. Including her, for by now her fever was so high she couldn’t think straight, and by the time Sally and Gillian managed to bring her upstairs to bed, she was burning up.
* * *
Outside, the roads were flooding with blood-colored puddles. Franny had been tending to the ill, using the black soap that had first been made with antibacterial ingredients by Hannah Owens during the Black Death. Franny now brought the soap and a basin up to the small room under the eaves where the children of the innkeeper had slept in the seventeenth century.
“You can cure her,” Sally said to her aunt, for what was done could be undone, and Franny was the person most able to fight this cursed disease.
The girl had all the symptoms. A pox was rising on her fair skin with patches of angry red-stained marks, and her every breath rattled in her chest. She seemed delirious, and recognized no one.
Gillian drew the curtains. She didn’t like the expression on their aunt’s face.
“Let’s get her comfortable,” Franny said. As Gillian and Sally eased off the raincoat, The Book of the Raven fell to the floor.
“That damn book,” Sally said. She intended to go after it and toss it away, but Franny was quicker.
“I’ll see to it,” Franny assured her.
Gillian and Sally removed Kylie’s muddy, sopping wet clothes and washed her body with warm water and black soap, the washcloths turning red. Her teeth were chattering as if she were still in the stream behind Lockland Manor. Franny opened the desk drawer, withdrawing the sewing kit. Fortunately, there was blue thread, which she strung around Kylie’s ankles and wrists, taking note of the burn on her wrist. In the palm of the right hand is the future you are born with, but the left hand holds the future you have made yourself, and the lines on Kylie’s left palm had stopped. Franny felt a chill up her spine. Soap and thread would not help. She slipped off the amulet Agnes Durant had given to her to wear for protection. “Make certain she wears this at all times,” she told Sally as she looped the cord over Kylie’s head. “I’ll do my best to stop the rain.”
The Grimoire was in Franny’s suitcase, but instead she turned to The Book of the Raven, which had been used to call down the red rain. She turned to the page Tom Lockland had studied so intently he’d left blotchy fingerprints on the page.
“Don’t use that book,” Sally warned.
“What started it will end it,” Franny said.
Franny lit a fire in a brass dish. She used red magic, cutting her palm with a letter opener and adding her blood to the mixture, then she tore off a piece of the curtain at the window and wrapped a figure formed of melted soap in a bit of the blue fabric for protection and good health. She paged through The Book of the Raven until she came upon an ancient Aramaic incantation Amelia Bassano had discovered long ago. Franny began to recite the verse that would cause the red rain to cease.
Gone are the evil spells and the ones that send it.
Protect the people in this house and in this village, not only now but for all generations, now and forever and ever.
Franny threw open the windows and repeated the spell without ceasing. The lethal red rain became a spattering, and then a haze, halted by the incantation, leaving the High Street a scarlet river. There still were no birds in the sky, but after a moment Franny could hear them stirring in the thicket beneath her window.
* * *
Margaret was seeing to the ill who had gathered in the pub, providing glasses of water mixed with mint and vervain to cool fevers. She heated water with honey and lemon and ginger for those afflicted by coughs, and quickly fixed poultices of rue and lavender to bring down the swellings of the pox and boils. There was a thick mixture of rowan berries, cooked nearly to a liquid in a kettle, slippery when skimmed over the skin, that brought down fever. With the end of the rain, people were coming out of their houses, looking for help and Vincent had persuaded Hal to open the door. “All for one and one for all,” he said. When Hal had continued to look blank, Vincent admonished him. “These are your neighbors, man.”