She lived in the nineteenth century, the ailing wife of a mild-mannered patriarch, Everett, and mother to two children: adventurous daughter Constance and evangelical son August. They were Quakers, which I have found out by piecing together snippets of their story told by echoes, voices of the long dead; ephemeral glimpses that have appeared to me out of order. I’ve tried to jot down the details and rearrange them until the chronology fits, my own little portrait of the house’s history.

But seeing Frances on the verge of death makes my skin crawl. Her breathing had grown so labored that one could almost hear a ghost of it all throughout the house, the incessant groaning rattle of liquid in her lungs.

I back away from the doorway and nearly into the ghosts of her family.

Constance, thirteen or thereabouts, is cradling a cup of tarry water, filled to the brim. Blonde hair spills out from her bonnet. Her dress is wrinkled, and she is barefoot. Clearly Constance was not very adept at the household duties she had to take over for her mother; I have seen her prick her finger while mending clothes so many times that I imagine her small digits must be pocked as a pincushion.

Before she makes it to the doorway with the cup, her brother, August, stops her with a heavy grip on her shoulder. She glares at him over the cup as the water sloshes dangerously close to its lip.

“I’ll not see thee out there again.”

“Out where?” she asks with feigned innocence.

His eyes narrow on the cup of water. “I know where that came from. If you will not obey Father, then hark to me: do not be foolish.”

Constance frowns. “You’ve been to the swamp a dozen or more times. Why shan’t I?”

“Sakes alive, Constance, ’tis dangerous, that is why!” August lowers his voice. “You know that I go into the swamp to help those people because Father wants to help them. If it were up to me, I would not set one foot in that terrible place.”

I know who he is talking about. At the time, there were secret communities that lived in the swamp called maroons—escaped slaves forced to dwell in a place where no one else dared tread. Life in the swamp was a hard, toiling existence, with land too liquid for extensive farming or comfortable dwellings; one feels the heaviness of the air like a hot, wet cloak, infested with ravening mosquitoes and pressing one down into the sucking, sinking morass. These natural defenses kept out intruders but forced the maroons into a prison of their own devising—a deadly sort of freedom.

The Wakefields, with their home at the swamp’s edge, had helped fleeing slaves make their way into its depths, guiding the refugees by night.

“Not even to save Mother?”

August looks at the door hanging ajar on its hinges; perhaps he can smell the sickness within.

When he doesn’t respond, Constance continues, growing bolder, “The water of the swamp is said to have healing properties. If I only get her to drink—”