She pressed her hand to his cheek. "Yes," she said. It was not a promise she had the right to make with absolute certainty, and she made it anyway. She heard the sound of heavy boots on the stairs a few minutes later, and knew before the door opened that it was Nate. Not James, whose step she already knew was quick and light.
Not Ethan, who moved quietly. Nate had a particular way of moving through a house, deliberate, measured, that she had learned to recognize the way you learn to recognize weather coming. He stopped in the doorway. His eyes went to Sam first, the way a father's eyes always go to the child, and she saw the exact moment he registered what he was looking at. She had seen that expression before, not on Nate, but she recognized it, the expression of a man encountering something that has ambushed him from his own past.
His face went still in a way that was entirely different from his usual stillness. This was not controlled quiet. This was the stillness of someone who has just stepped somewhere they recognize and cannot move. "How long?" He said.
"I don't know exactly," she said. "He came to my door an hour ago. It may have started before that." "This is how Eleanor," he said and stopped. "Nate," she said, and she used his name deliberately because she needed him to hear her and not the ghost in the room.
I need you to listen to me right now." He looked at her. "This is not the same," she said. "Sam is strong and we are here and we are not going to sit and wait. I need you to do exactly what I tell you.
Can you do that?" A pause. "Yes," he said. "Ride to town for doctor." "Willis," she said.
"I don't care what time it is. Tell him it's a high fever in a child. He'll come. It'll take 2 hours," he said. "Then you'd better go now," she said.
He was already turning. She heard his boots on the stairs, heard the back door, heard the horse in the yard a few minutes later, the sound of hooves moving fast away from the house into the dark. She let out a breath she had not entirely been aware of holding. Mabel appeared in the doorway with a basin of cold water and a stack of cloths. "Good," Clara said.
"Come here. I'll show you what to do." They worked side by side through the rest of that night, the way two people work when there is something that needs doing and no energy to spare for anything that does not serve the task. Clara showed Mabel how to wring the cloth to the right dampness, not dripping, not too dry, and where to place it across Sam's forehead and the back of his neck and his wrists. She prepared the yarrow tea from her own knowledge and her mother's notebook, measuring carefully, talking through what she was doing and why.
Not because Mabel asked her to, but because she had found that speaking out loud made the hands steadier. "How do you know all this?" Mabel asked once, somewhere in the middle of the second hour, her voice low so as not to disturb Sam. "My mother was a practical woman," Clara said. "She believed the best thing you could do for someone sick was be useful and stay calm and not treat them like they were already gone."