On the fifth day, disaster struck in the form of a fever that swept through Henry overnight, leaving him flushed and shaking too weak to lift his own head from the pillow. Nathaniel was 2 days out checking fence lines in the northern pasture, snowed in past any hope of quick return, and Eleanor found herself alone in a house with a sick child and a girl who watched her with weary, frightened eyes. "Is he going to die?" Clara asked, standing in the doorway of Henry's room, her adult composure cracking for the first time since Eleanor had arrived. "Like Mama?"
"No." Eleanor said it with more certainty than she felt ringing a cool cloth and pressing it to Henry's forehead. It's a fever, Clara. Fevers break. I need your help, though.
Can you fetch me the willow bark from the pantry? The dried strips in the tin on the top shelf. For a moment, Clara didn't move. Frozen by fear too large for her small frame to hold. Clara Eleanor kept her voice steady, calm the voice of someone who refused to let panic take root in a room that already held enough of it.
"I need you right now. Can you do this for your brother?" Something shifted in the girl's face. She turned and ran, returning minutes later with the tin clutched to her chest, breathless. Good girl.
Eleanor steeped the bark in hot water, coaxed the bitter tea between Henry's cracked lips, a spoonful at a time, while Clara hovered at the bedside, gripping her brother's small hand like she could will the fever out of him through sheer force of love. They stayed like that through the night, the two of them trading off cools and prayers, neither said aloud until sometime near dawn. Henry's fever broke, and he slept finally peacefully, his breathing even for the first time in hours. Clara wept, then silent tears. She didn't bother to hide, and Eleanor, without thinking, without calculating whether the gesture would be welcome, pulled the girl into her arms.
Clara didn't pull away. "I was so scared," Clara whispered against Eleanor's shoulder. Everyone I love keeps leaving. Mama left. And I thought, I thought Henry.
I know. Eleanor held her tighter. I know, sweetheart. But he's here. He's still here.
You're going to leave, too, though. "You said one week." Eleanor closed her eyes. The week was up in 2 days time, and she'd meant every word when she'd said it, certain that a house full of someone else's grief was no place to rebuild a life shattered by her own. But looking down now at Clara's tear streaked face at Henry's peaceful sleep at the small, fragile family this house had barely managed to hold together, Eleanor found she could not in good conscience say yes.
"I don't know," she admitted, and it was the most honest thing she'd said since stepping off that stagecoach. "I truly don't know." Nathaniel returned 2 days later to find his son recovered his daughter softer than she'd been in months. And a woman he'd hired for one week now uncertain whether she could bring herself to leave. "She saved him," Clara told her father the moment he walked through the door before Eleanor could say a word.