It was not a sickness.

No sickness of the body could spread like that, as if through her simple presence. Lately, there have been odd new theories, she had heard about, illnesses being caused by tiny animals living in the body, spreading through breath and blood and urine.

They barely had time to bury her poor husband, his body tight and swollen like a pus-filled zit, black liquid oozing out of his orifices, that she had turned into a pariah. The first servant to catch the malaise was, ironically, not the one who had spent the most time with her. Robert, one of the gardeners. He had been coming from time to time, taking care of the lawn.

She had seen him from the window. He gurgled as something akin to mold spread from out of his nostrils to cover his neck and chest. He had fought for a bit, thrashing and rolling on the lawn, kicking the gravel with beam-stiff legs. Then he had arched his back in utter pain and he died, just like that, without any real fuss, not like her husband, who had managed to be more noticeable in his death than he ever did in his life.

The servants noticed. They disappeared like candles turning dark for the night, leaving her alone in a home that was turning dirtier by the day.

It was not just dust piling up the corners. Dirty dishes, clothes, sheets. She was never used to it.

At night she walked through the empty corridors, holding a lamp to check if everything was closed, every door and every window and even the chimney – then she stood paralyzed, waiting for the shadows to move, for something to come out and grasp her.

She had to relocate. Franca had never cooked a meal in her life – she survived on bread and marmalade, canned peaches and dried meat for a while, but the stress was causing her to lactate a lot less, and the baby had started to refuse her milk.

She had tasted it.

It was sour.

One beautiful spring day, she hoped on a coach and left the house of her dreams, its empty walls and emptier rooms, holding Alexander in her arms, comforted by the fact the baby had not been harmed. Not him. Not her little Alexander, her joy, her pride. He would be spared, she would protect him.

She still possessed most of the contacts she had gathered in her years of free-running, together with all her looks. Every morning she turned to mirror in fear: would this be the morning when her hair turned grey, when her cheeks wrinkled, her nose hooked? But every day and every night she was just as fresh as always.

She stood in their apartment in London for a few days. And for a blessed time, it seemed as if the malaise had not followed her.

Until the morning when the servant girl came to carry her breakfast to bed – she caught her throat and stumbled forward, coughing blood and black phlegm.

Naturally, things began to turn a tiny bit suspicious. How could it be that this beautiful lady, who had seemingly not aged a day, was leaving behind her such a trail of horrible deaths? Surely her husband’s death could be a regrettable case of bad luck – or good luck if one considers the person who inherited all of his fortune, but such a string of cases?

Her contacts turned her down. The duke of Moravia was out campaigning. The Prince of Monaco had no time to see her. And with each day, she feared the police, or worse, would knock on her door.

She gathered her things, wrote her signature on a long list of papers: sold everything and with the money she moved south, to lower France, in a small village looking towards the sea. Her new apartment was modest. It turned out in her haste she had made a few mistakes on the pile of documents she had signed and transferred ownership of most of her once-considerable assets to the law firm that had ‘helped’ with the papers.

It did not matter, or so she replied to herself. Her new house – a cottage, to be honest – was still cozy and nice enough to allow her comfortable living, and she would find another husband, or at least another suitor, pretty soon. Alexander was a little troubled by the scared look on his mother’s face and all that moving, but he still smiled and called her mom and that was all that mattered, was it not?

It was all that mattered.

She had three weeks of peace before the residents of the village started to lament headaches, sore throats.

It was bound to be nothing. It was almost summer, sometimes things like that happened. Most of them were old people. It meant nothing.

It meant nothing, when the harvest was eaten by blight.

It meant nothing, when people fell dead in the street, coughing blood.

It meant something, when word finally spread and a throng of people came to her home, finding it empty.

She had left France the day before – she was starting to understand how much time she had before the malaise caught up to her.

For a few months she lived like that: jumping and hopping from place to place, always southward. She stayed twelve days in Milan.

Seven in Rome.

Four in Naples.

Yet words stopped following her and began to come before: she became infamous, the witch that spread plague, the dark-haired beauty that was as stunning as she was deadly.

People stopped accepting her money. The few ones who still did stole the rest.

And so it was that she found herself once again upon a boat.

This time, though, she was holding her most precious thing in her arms. This time, she was coming back home.

“Everything will be alright, little one,” she whispered to her son.

Because it would.

She’d make sure it did.