A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Online Free Page B

Someone poured Charlotte some tea. Charlotte said, “I like the new color, very much, for the brightness.”
    And her mother-in-law, tall and stern, with her Queen Victoria hair, in her at-home quilted gown, her bone-ribbed corset laced up like a trap, in a chair by the fire, with coal light flickering on her glasses, glanced up at Charlotte from a magazine she was reading,
The Saturday Evening Post.
And she said to the doctor, because it was not a good idea in the household to do anything without consulting her, “You didn’t mention you planned to allow her out of bed.”
    “She’s getting well,” he answered. When he left the room, Charlotte felt alone. Her mother-in-law turned back to her magazine. Tea was resumed. That was the first time Charlotte thought, in actual words, Hays gave up on me.
    “Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!” His words rang out in the cold. He began to run after her, and his hat fell off into the snow, and the woman bent down to retrieve it. He was wearing his dress shoes, not his boots. He didn’t run after her very long.
    She flicked to the horses to turn the corner, away from the square. They were glad to start trotting. She didn’t doubt, in theory, her basic ability to get to Boston on her own (even though she had never done it before). But she made it seem that she was turning for home. As soon as she was out of her husband’s sight, she turned again, and headed toward the one part of town where no one would expect her to go.
    “Charlotte,” she said to herself, “you have got to get some help.”

N o one died in the strange epidemic of poisoning last spring. It could have been much, much worse. Charlotte’s illness was unconnected. She only ate food from the household’s kitchen, and anyway, when it happened, she was already sick.
    Her section of town stayed free of it. But suddenly in Big Pond Hollow, the thing broke out wildly. There were dozens of cases of skin rashes that looked like poison ivy, and fever, fainting, intestinal cramps, and terrible stomach disorders. And a constant
rat-ta-tat-tat
aching of the head, which was the worst symptom of all, and felt (people said down there) as if you were a tree, and your head was where the bark was stripped away, and a woodpecker was drumming his beak there, without pausing.
    Big Pond Hollow was built up along the town side of the pond, with farms opposite, and the pond was a substantial one: big enough to fish in out of small boats and be harvested for ice in the winter.
    The neighborhood was made up of some twenty-five or thirty bungalows, each with its own garden, outhouse, and shed. The more prosperous families also had horses and barns, but there weren’t many of them.
    Some of the men who lived here were employed at the farms; some worked for taverns and inns on the Boston Road. Some ran gambling enterprises; some made and sold beer and spirits; and some were involved in the collecting of horse droppings in the bigger towns and in Boston, which were carted and sold to a company to the south that operated an enormous flower-growing business: a big part of it was poppies for opium, people said, but that might not have been true. Some were laborers going out on hire for rail work, and some, like their wives, sisters, and mothers, worked in service, and were said (in the other parts of town) to be lucky, as they had their own roofs and did not have to live with the families they worked for.
    Besides the houses, there was a small Congregational church, a saloon which was actually a rough cabin built onto someone’s house, and Everett Gerson’s commercial bakery, which had offered employment to four bakers (who did not reside in the Hollow) and three times as many others (who did) for clerking and general assistance. The building was a reconstructed storage house, brick-made, of one story, originally used for grains in the days when the town had its own mill; there used to be a fast-running creek, but it had dried, and the