The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare [59]
Rachel greeted her reproachfully. "You're very late. Kit. It was wrong of you to stay away from Lecture. Your uncle was very displeased. And John Holbrook walked back with us to say goodbye to you and Mercy."
"Goodbye? Where is John going?"
Rachel looked across the room at Judith, who was setting the table near the fire. But Judith, her eyes red from weeping, said nothing.
"What has happened, Aunt Rachel?" asked Kit, bewildered.
"John has enlisted in the militia. There's a detachment going out from Hartford to aid some of the towns north of Hadley in Massachusetts against the Indian attacks, and John volunteered to go with them."
"To fight?" Kit was too astonished to be tactful. "Why, John is the last person I'd think to be a soldier."
"'Tis a doctor they needed, and John has learned a good deal of medicine this year."
"But why now, right in the middle of his studies?"
"I think it was his way of breaking with Dr. Bulkeley," explained Rachel. "He has tried so hard, poor boy, to reconcile Gershom's ideas with his own bringing up. Now it seems the doctor is going to publish a treatise in favor of Governor Andros and the new government, and John just couldn't stomach it any longer. We all think it is to his credit."
"I don't!" spoke up Judith. "I think it is nothing but stubbornness."
"That's not fair, Judith," Mercy spoke from the hearth. She looked a little more pale and tired than usual. "I think you should be proud of him."
"Well, I'm not," answered Judith. "What difference does it make what Dr. Bulkeley writes? Now John won't get a church of his own, and he can never get married or build a house!" Her tears broke out afresh.
"He'll come back," Rachel reminded her. "The trip was only to be for a few weeks."
"He'll be gone for Christmas. If he cared anything about me he wouldn't have gone at all."
"For shame, Judith!" said her mother. "You had better dry those tears before your father comes in."
Mercy spoke thoughtfully. "Try to understand, Judith," she said slowly. "Sometimes it isn't that a man doesn't care. Sometimes he has to prove something to himself. I don't think John wanted to go away. I think, somehow, he had to."
Judith had shut her mind to any consolation. "I don't know what you're talking about," she snapped. "All I know is we were perfectly happy, and now he has spoiled everything!"
CHAPTER 17
FIVE DAYS after John Holbrook's departure Judith fell ill. Her mother, inclined at first to attribute her complaints to moping, took a second look at her flushed cheeks and put her to bed. Within two more days alarm had spread to every corner of Wethersfield. Sixteen children and young people were stricken with the mysterious fever, and none of the familiar remedies seemed to be of any benefit. For days Judith tossed on the cot they had spread for her in front of the hearth, burning with fever, fretful with pain, and often too delirious to recognize the three women who hovered about her. A young surgeon was summoned from Hartford to bleed her, and a nauseous brew of ground roasted toads was forced between her cracked lips, to no avail. The fever simply had to run its course.
On the fourth day Kit felt chilly and lightheaded, and by twilight she was thankful to sink down on the mat they dragged to the fireside near her cousin. Her bout with the malady was short, however. Her wiry young body, nourished by Barbados fruits and sunshine, had an elastic vitality, and she was back on her feet while Judith was still barely sitting up to sip her gruel. Dressing rather shakily, Kit was compelled to ask Mercy's assistance with the buttons down her back, and was shocked when her older cousin suddenly bent double in a violent fit of coughing. Kit whirled round on her.
"How long have you been coughing like that?" she demanded. "Let me feel your hand! Aunt Rachel, for heaven's sakes,