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a thousand times over for one extra day for her brother.   Why could God not have taken him in Gerard’s place?
    She had no intention of marrying the Count now.   Indeed, she would never wed at all unless she ever found a man worthy of her esteem in every way.   She had no need of a man to take care of her.   Henceforth, she would depend on no one but herself.
    Her family was gone.   She was the only remaining survivor.   For the rest of her life she would study how to atone for her fatal act of disobedience, seeking only to uphold the honor of the family she had destroyed.
     
    Two weeks earlier:
    Lamotte tucked the precious bottles wrapped in thick rags into his shirt, where they would lie in safety against his skin.   He had paid a King’s ransom and more for them.   A charm to keep the plague away was worth more than its weight in gold in times like this, when rumors of sickness in the outlying counties were reaching even the ears of self-absorbed Parisians.   The King’s physician himself had prepared the medicine he now carried so carefully with him.
    Within the hour he had left the city, carrying little but a small amount of food and a clean shirt in his saddlebags.   His horse would carry him further and faster if it was more lightly loaded.   Gerard had need of him – and of what he carried with him.   He would not tarry on the way.
    For the first few days, the wayside inns were welcoming – offering him a warm fire and hot food to fill his belly.   He traveled far and fast, stopping only when his horse began to stumble with weariness and the road was too dark to see.
    As he got further into the provinces, people looked at his travel-worn clothes and flagging horse suspiciously.   Even his gold was little use to him here.   More than once he was turned away from an inn late at night and had to sleep out under the stars, his clothes wet with the dew and his belly rumbling with hunger.
    Rumors of sickness were rife.   Once he passed by an quiet farmhouse and thought to exchange a few sous for a loaf of bread and a glass of fresh milk.   He knocked on the door, but none answered.   The door had not been latched securely and it came open with the force of his knocking.   Such a stench of putrefaction and death came from the opening that he immediately turned tail and fled.   He was too late to help the dead who rested within, and he had no desire to feast his eyes on the ghastly spectacle that lay behind the door.   He could imagine it only too well.
    How he hoped that Gerard’s family had been spared the worst.   Gerard’s letter had told him little – only that his sister, Sophie, was sick.   Sophie, his best friend’s twin sister, and the woman he had contracted to marry.
    He fingered the miniature he carried in his breast pocket, next to his heart.   Gentleness and femininity shone out of her clear blue eyes, so like her brother’s in color, though, as befitted a woman, lacking his martial spark.   Her soft brown hair hung in pretty ringlets about her white neck as she gave a half smile at the painter who captured her spirit on the canvas.  
    She looked all softness and beauty – everything he admired in a woman and valued in a wife – and he was half in love with her already.   He ached to be her savior and protector – shielding her from all that would destroy the delicate blossom of her innocence.   He could not bear to lose her to Death before he had even begun to know her.   If the medicine he carried next to his heart could save her, he would count himself a lucky man.
    He was barely three day’s ride away from his journey’s end when he came upon the mob of peasants on the road.   Hatless and shirtless most of them were, and dressed in little better than rags, but their faces all bore the same look of grim determination and desperation.  
    The foremost of them shook a pitchfork in his direction.   “Halt,” he called in a guttural voice when Lamotte had