Duril followed me as I carried him to the parlor. I put him on a cushioned settee there, and told the sergeant, “Go to the kitchen. Get the cook fire started and put on a big pot of porridge. My father needs food, as do you, and simple food will do him best at first, if my own experience of the plague is any guide.”

“What are you going to do?” Duril asked me. My father had closed his eyes and sunk into stillness. I think Duril already knew the answer. “I have to go to my mother’s chamber. And Elisi’s.”

Duril looked guiltily relieved. We parted there.

The rest of that day comes back to me sometimes in my nightmares. That house had always been my home, a refuge to me. The large pleasant rooms, decorated to my mother’s tastes, had always seemed an oasis of calm and respite from the larger world. Now it was filled with death.

My family had been dead for days. Rosse was stiff in his bed, and I suspected he had been the last to die. My father had tried to tend him. A heap of soiled linens was at the foot of his bed. A clean blanket had been tucked around his body, and a napkin covered his face. My elder brother who had always gone before me in life had also gone before me into death.

My father’s heir son was dead. I refused to consider the full magnitude of that loss. I left his room quietly. Someone, probably Elisi, had sewn a hasty shroud for my mother. I had thought to bid her farewell with a last kiss, but the smell was so thick in the stuffy room that I could barely force myself to enter. Fat flies were bumping and buzzing against the window glass. I resolved to leave her covered and keep my last memory of her strong beauty intact. I thought of how I had nodded to her and then turned away, as if she were already a ghost. I regretted it as I regret few things in my life. I left her swaddled body without touching it and went on to Elisi’s bedchamber.

She and I had never been close. When I was born, I was not only the new baby in the family, but a son and a soldier son. I had displaced her in many ways, and that had always colored our relationship. Now she was gone, and that gap would never be mended. The last time I had been in her room, it had been a little girl’s room, with dolls on shelves next to expensive picture books with tinted illustrations. The years had changed it. Some of Elisi’s own watercolors of wildflowers were framed on the walls.

The dolls were long gone. The fresh flowers had rotted in their graceful vases, and Elisi herself was a contorted corpse on the bed. A lovely comforter embroidered with birds was rucked all around her as if she had struggled free of it. She lay on her side, mouth gaping horribly, her clawlike hands reaching toward an empty pitcher on her nightstand. The fragments of a broken cup crunched under my feet. I left her room, unable at that moment to deal with her horrid death.