She was at her door in seconds. He was standing in the hallway in his nightshirt, swaying slightly. His face flushed a color she felt hit her in the stomach before her mind had fully named what she was seeing. "Sam," she said. "I don't feel good," he said, and his voice had that particular texture, thick and slightly blurred, that comes with a fever climbing.
She pressed her hand to his forehead. It was burning. The same kind of fever that took Eleanor, was the thought that moved through her head, cold and immediate, and she put it away. She had work to do. She pressed her hand to his forehead and felt the heat radiating up through her palm, like the boy had swallowed a coal from the stove.
"All right," she said, and her voice came out steady, because she made it steady, because that was the one thing she could control right now. "All right, Sam, come with me." She got him back to his bed and pulled the covers up and stood for exactly 3 seconds deciding. Then she went and knocked on Mabel's door. Mabel opened it almost immediately, which told Clara the girl had not been fully asleep, had perhaps never been the kind of sleeper who went all the way under, not in 3 years.
Not when she was always listening for something to need her in the night. "Sam's got a fever," Clara said. Mabel's face changed. Not dramatically, she was too controlled for that, but something went through her eyes that was quick and cold and afraid. "How bad?"
She said. "Bad enough that I need your help. I need you to tell me where your mother kept her medicine supplies. Anything she used for fever, anything at all." Mabel was already moving.
She went to a cabinet in the hallway that Clara had assumed was storage, it looked like storage, Plain door. Nothing to mark it as significant, and she opened it, and inside were the organized remnants of what had clearly once been Eleanor Holloway's domain. Cloth strips folded with care, three small brown bottles. A tin of dried herbs that Clara leaned forward to smell immediately. "Yarrow and elderflower," she said, almost to herself.
"Ma used them for fever," Mabel said. She knew about plants. She knew about a lot of things. A pause. "I never paid enough attention."
"You were 13," Clara said, already reaching for the tin. "Go fill the biggest pot you have with cold water. And I need clean rags, as many as you can." Mabel went. Clara carried the tin to Sam's room and sat beside him on the bed.
He was awake, barely. His eyelids heavy, and his breathing shallow. He looked smaller than he ever had. The flush in his cheeks was deep, and the heat coming off him had not lessened. "You're going to stay with me, Sam," she said, and she meant it the way you mean something when you are not asking.
"My head hurts," he said. "I know," she said. "I'm going to fix that." "Promise?" He said.