They sat on a reed mat in front of her. Eliot, feeling a mild terror, flinched when the old woman, her seamed brown face like the masks Lockwood had brought from Africa, took his hand in hers and began to rub the back of it with the broad, bright green leaves of a plant. Next—and this almost made him yelp—she produced a headless pigeon from a basket beside her and dripped blood from its severed neck onto his hand, chanting as she did in a high, quavering voice and in a language neither he nor Will had heard before. Elvira accompanied her, the chant like a litany, with one word—“Babaluaye”—repeated several times. Rosaria interrupted once and, reverting to Spanish, said something to the younger woman, who repeated the chant. Although Eliot could understand none of it, he divined that Elvira was a pupil, engaged in some sort of recitation exercise. My God, he thought, he and Will were guinea pigs in a school for witch doctors! Nevertheless, he submitted to Rosaria’s ministrations, mostly because he was afraid he would insult her if he did not, partly because the treatment was having an effect, A soothing warmth penetrated his skin, like the camphor rubs his mother gave when he had a cough.

Rosaria nodded to Elvira, who dipped a strip of cotton cloth into the pot with a pair of wooden tongs, then passed it to Rosaria. The old woman lay a sprig of herbs across Eliot’s knuckles and bound it with the damp cloth, which sent waves of heat into his fractured joints. She spoke to Will.

“She says you’re to keep that on tonight and come back to her for a fresh one tomorrow,” Will translated.

“Okay, but I ain’t drinking any potions, Will.”

Rosaria gestured to Will to take his jersey off and told him to raise his arms above his head. He was surprised that it embarrassed him to bare his torso in front of Elvira; he’d never suffered such shyness in the whorehouses in New Haven and New York. She knelt beside him and began to massage his cracked ribs with a bundle of pungent leaves. Her strong hands moved over his side as softly as a mother washing an infant, and the chant she sang, following Rosaria’s lead, was hypnotic in its drumlike cadences.

She fell silent, rose, and dipped more cotton strips in the herbal brew and held them, steaming and dripping, over the pot before returning to the mat to kneel and bind them around Will’s chest. He caught the scents of aloe and sage, and Elvira’s cheek came within an inch of brushing his and warmed the air between their faces. The sensation suggested a touch, and the suggestion was more arousing than a touch itself would have been.