Beautifully Dead - Chapter 38
An Immortal Affections serialized novel
What the Dead Leave Behind
May 4, 2025
Fredericksburg, Virginia
I am Eleanor Caldwell.
I am twenty-three years old.
I am promised to Thomas Everett.
Dear God, let me remember. Let me remain myself.
I must—
A long drag across the page, ink thickening where Eleanor’s hand had finally stopped moving.
Amelia closed the journal.
She’d been awake since two. No nightmares, no sudden noise from the street. Just the slow, grinding awareness that her body had made a decision without consulting her. Her eyes had opened in the dark and her mind was already running, the way it had been doing for the past week: sharpest precisely when she least needed it to be.
She’d lain there for maybe twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, feeling the familiar warmth start building in her blood — that wrong-hour metabolism she was logging now, the way her energy climbed reliably between eleven PM and three AM like something in her had recalibrated its circadian rhythm and not bothered to tell the rest of her.
She’d tried to slow her breathing. Had tried not to think about James Merriweather’s notes sitting three feet away on the desk.
At two-thirty she gave up.
The journal had been in its archival sleeve since she’d photographed it two nights ago. She’d been careful. Cotton gloves, acid-free polyester, proper storage away from the window. She’d been telling herself she wasn’t ready to read it all the way through. That she needed to establish the full context first. That professional historians don’t read primary sources at midnight in a hotel room because they can’t sleep.
She’d gone straight through it in under two hours, never mind the pictures she had taken.
The kettle was one of those cheap cylindrical units bolted to the bathroom counter, the kind that took forever and sounded like it was considering giving up entirely. She filled it from the tap and stood in the doorway while it worked, not turning on the bathroom light. She didn’t need it. The streetlamp outside threw a thin orange line under the curtain edge, and it was more than enough.
That was new too. Or newer. She’d been noticing it these past few days — the way her eyes adjusted faster than they should, pulling detail out of low light before her brain had consciously registered that she was looking at anything.
She should be logging this, she knew.
Dr. Thanakit had told her to document symptoms carefully. Dr. Caulfield had said the same. She’d been putting it off, the same way she used to put off making a doctor’s appointment, half hoping that it will get better by itself, half dreading it will not.
She got her phone off the desk and opened a new note.
Symptom log. May 4, 2025. 3:04 AM.
She paused. When had it actually started? She’d told Dr.Thanakit ten days ago, but was that right?
She thought back further. The drive down from Boston — she’d been tired, but that was twelve hours in a car. The first days at the house, craving coffee more than food. She’d assumed travel. Then the hotel room, the blackout curtains. She’d assumed the headaches were dehydration.
Onset unclear. Possible early fatigue 3-4 weeks prior, attributed to travel stress. First distinct symptom: photophobia, approximately April 25. Progressive.
She stared at the screen. Three weeks. Maybe more.
Scotopic sensitivity: increased. Functional at approximately 1/10 normal illumination. Standing in dark bathroom, streetlamp sufficient. Duration: at least 4 days.
Clinical language. It helped.
The kettle clicked off. She poured the water over the single-serve bag she’d been rationing and carried the cup back to the desk.
The room was quiet in the particular way of 3 AM in a mid-range hotel — the HVAC cycling off, the ice machine two doors down gone still for the night, no traffic. Quiet enough that she could hear the slight give of the floorboard under the desk chair, the cotton gloves sliding against mylar as she opened the archival box.
She spread everything out in front of her.
Thomas’s first letter in April of ‘61, then Eleanor’s reply, then the months of correspondence that had wound through the whole first year of the war. She’d been living inside this timeline for weeks. She knew which letters came next before she picked them up.
She laid Thomas’s April letters on the left side. April 17th, the one he might never have sent. April 22nd, Eleanor’s response. She smoothed the mylar sleeve flat with two fingers.
Your observation regarding our Methodist Church’s division as a harbinger of national fracture struck me deeply.
Forty-seven words to say: I’ve been thinking about what you wrote.
Another paragraph and a half of scripture and sermon citations to say: I’ll find ways to keep writing to you even if they stop our letters.
And somewhere in the middle of all that careful, coded language — I find comfort in imagining you facing eastward in your own morning devotions, the same light touching both our faces — a woman writing to a man she loved.
Amelia had read that sentence maybe eighty times over the past weeks. She always slowed down for it.
Marcus used to say she communicated like she was submitting a grant proposal, economical, dry, functional. He hadn’t been wrong. They’d said everything clearly between them, honest and transparent all the way to the end.
It hadn’t helped.
She picked up Eleanor’s winter letters next. November, December, the careful domestic reports that had nothing domestic in them — descriptions of ward rounds that were really descriptions of something she was watching change in herself, observations about light sensitivity and altered appetite framed as medical curiosity about her patients.
She’d been writing to Thomas about her own symptoms without knowing it. Had been sending him the documentation of her own unraveling, postmarked with love, signed with her full name.
I find myself noting with scientific interest the ways in which prolonged exposure to suffering changes one’s perceptions.
Amelia set that one down gently.
Then James Merriweather’s notes.
She didn’t like these. She’d held them twice before and neither time had been comfortable, and she understood now that her discomfort wasn’t squeamishness about the content — she’d read worse in medical archives, had spent a career elbow-deep in mortality records. But this.
This detachment, this handwriting: controlled, meticulous, giving nothing away. Pages documenting the end of Eleanor’s life with the steady penmanship of a man who had chosen documentation over feeling, or had perhaps turned documentation into feeling.
I should send the nurses to wash Miss Caldwell’s body and prepare it for the family’s viewing.
The room will need airing out.
She’d died then, in 1862.
She’d sold a house in Richmond in 1867.
Amelia worked through the rest of the spring letters, the summer letters, the autumn. She’d read all of these before, but handling them now, in the darkness, with Eleanor’s final journal entry still clear in her mind —
Her thoughts turned to Dr. Caulfield question in the lab.
Eli. She had called him.
Six years of collaboration by Caulfield’s account, the easy familiarity of Eli? Through the speakers, the softness of it. The way she’d read his silence about the test result from across an ocean.
What are you seeing? Not ‘Are you seeing something?’.
He withheld things. Amelia knew this. He’d said so himself, essentially, in the truck. I’m not telling you everything. Even then. And she’d accepted it. She had trusted him.
Eleanor had trusted James Merriweather completely.
Amelia looked at the documents spread across the coverlet. James’s notes face-down at the bottom. Thomas’s on the left, Eleanor’s on the right. She’d put them in order without thinking about it.
She opened the laptop around four-fifteen. Another hot drink to warm her hands.
The WHO briefing was six hours old. Edinburgh cluster: 4,847 confirmed, 1,103 suspected. Secondary clusters in Leeds, Manchester, Dublin. A conference transmission event in Lyon — seventeen researchers, nine countries, two days in the same room in April. Cambridge had shuttered two departments. The Sorbonne, thirty days.
She found a preprint from Imperial College, not yet reviewed, flagged with the standard caveats. Someone had tried to model transmission vectors. She recognized the shape of the graph without needing to read the axis labels. She’d seen that curve before, in different handwriting, about different diseases, in different wars. The shape didn’t change. Only the dates.
She closed the laptop.
Outside, sometime around five, the streetlamp cut off.
She hadn’t been watching for it, but she felt it — the slight shift in the room, the thin orange line under the curtain vanishing. The darkness wasn’t darker exactly. But it had a different quality. More absolute. She sat with it for a moment.
The sky outside the curtain gap had gone from black to something that wasn’t quite grey yet. The hour between. Her mother used to call it the dog watch — the hour when the night had given up and the day hadn’t started. She’d always hated being awake for it as a child. Too late to go back to sleep, too early to get up and start the day.
She gathered the documents carefully.. James’s notes went back first. Then Eleanor’s letters and journals in sequence. Then Thomas’s. She tied the faded blue ribbon back around his bundle, 160 years old, and still holding strong.
She put everything back in the box. Closed the lid.
Her shoulders ached. Her eyes felt granular behind the lids from too many hours in low light. She was cold again — the warmth that had kept her up had receded sometime in the last hour, quietly, without her really noticing.
She pulled back the coverlet and lay down without undressing. She pulled her phone off the nightstand and opened Caulfield’s contact. Looked at it for a moment.
Then she typed: Dr. Caulfield — sorry for the early hour. I need to ask you something outside the research context. How long have you known Elijah Merriweather — and do you actually trust him?
She read it twice. Deleted actually. Put it back. Sent it before the part of her brain that handled professional communication could wake up and object.
The message showed delivered.
She set the phone face-down on the pillow beside her.
She didn’t realize she’d slept until the buzzing started.
Her hand found the phone without her being fully there yet. Her thumb unlocked the screen.
She looked at the notification expecting Caulfield’s name. It was Elijah’s instead.
Breakfast? I know a place that should still be open. Good coffee.
We should talk before your results come in.
Through the curtain gap, the light had gone from grey to pale gold.
The chat with Dr. Caulfield mocked her from the screen.
She set the phone face-down on the pillow and turned her back on it, determined to catch another hour or two of sleep.
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to be continued…
© 2025 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.