Read Online The Pesthouse by Jim Crace - Free Book Online

house, with just moments left before the call to work. She could lie back and let the shapes absorb the light. But she knew at once that something had changed, both within her and beyond. Her body ached. Her mouth was still so dry and bitter that she could barely swallow. But she was feeling partially restored, not sinking now and fearful, but strengthening. Her feet and lower legs felt supple and alive. Her head was clear. Her scalp was bristling. She did not have to struggle to remember what had happened in the night. She could recall every movement of the young man's hands. He was responsible.
    Margaret raised herself quite easily onto her elbows and peered through the thinning gloom at the body slumped at the side of her bed, a silent silhouette as still and heavy as a sack of grain. Was he alive? He hardly seemed alive. She dared to push his shoulder with her foot. No sign from him. She'd not detected any body heat. Her panic was shortlived but strong enough to make her cry out loud. What had he said? The pigeon drew the toxins out through the soles of the feet. The illness was defeated, but the pigeon died. Its warm and beating heart would stop protesting and its body would be cold and silent. She stretched her leg again, pushed her toes against his chest and waited for a heartbeat. Yes, Franklin was still warm, but even so she was not sure. She pressed again. A kick, in fact. An ill-judged kick. The sort of kick to wake a dog or mule.
     
     
    ONCE MARGARET had washed herself and drunk a little water, and was, she said, 'now clean enough to show my face to the day', Franklin helped her to her feet. It would do her good to sit and recover in fresh air with views from the sunlit hillside down into the still-shaded valley of her home. This was the first time she had stood since her abandonment at the Pesthouse. He had to steady and support her for the few steps to the wooden door, and the more difficult fifty steps beyond to the fallen tree trunk that he had partly covered with one of his tarps, but he was glad of that, and glad as well to see her face in open light. Her eyes, without the distraction or the competition of any hair, were huge and thrilling.
    'Your color's good,' he said, something that she'd never heard when she had heavy auburn curls.
    Margaret could see at once that something odd had happened in Ferrytown. There was hardly any hearth smoke for a start. And at that time of day — too early in the town for the sun to make a difference — she would have expected to see the flames of braziers and courtyard lanterns, not yet doused in households lucky enough not to have to start work 'on the nose' at first cock.
    Everything was indistinct in those murkier moments of morning. Perhaps she was mistaken and nothing was unusual, except her own state of mind — and her eyesight. Her eyes were good enough when she was face to face with work or conversation. Anything beyond a hundred paces was blurred. But later, once the sun had directed its angles above the treetops on the far side of the river and into the valley, Margaret could see her home in slightly less blurred detail. By now there should be fifty fires or more, she thought. The lanes and roads should be busy, as animals were led out of the tetherings and neighbors went about their tasks. The ferrymen's raft should be taking its first plunge across the river with its paying cargo of animals, carts and emigrants. There should be at least some movement near the guest houses.
    'What do you see?' she asked Franklin. 'Can you see something moving?'
    He looked with her, although he didn't know what she expected him to see. 'Nothing,' he said, meaning Nothing to Worry About.
    'I can't see anything either,' Margaret said. 'Maybe there's something moving by the ferry beach. Is that a cart?'
    Indeed, it was a cart. But by the evening the cart would still be there at the river's edge with its bewildered owners and some others newly arrived that day, yet no one living,