Matilda "Mattie" Cook is a fourteen-year-old girl living above a coffeehouse in Philadelphia with her mother, grandfather (a former military man), a parrot named King George, and an orange cat named Silas. Eliza, a free black woman, is the coffeehouse cook. A typical teenager, Mattie is always in the middle of daydreams, beginning to notice boys and getting into all kinds of arguments with her single mother, Lucille. (Sounds like some things never change.)
What happens to the main characters?What do they learn from their experiences?One day, the coffeehouse's serving girl, Polly, doesn't show up for work. Turns out she came down with a case of the fever, and the next thing you know, she's being buried. Scary, right? Matilda sure thinks so. More and more cases of the fever start popping up, and rumors of an epidemic spread through the coffeehouse and across the city. Around this time, we're also introduced to the ever-so-dreamy Nathaniel Benson, a painter's apprentice, who Matilda runs into at the marketplace. The two have been friends for a long time, but Matilda is starting to see the chap in a whole new, hearts-and-flowers kind of light.Chapeter 2
Anyhow, Matilda's very own mother, Lucille, is the next person to fall ill. One doctor after another visits the coffeehouse and, soon enough, they start draining her blood in an effort to cure her.
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Matilda does her best to provide food for herself and her grandfather, scavenging what she can from the small garden. One night, though, robbers enter the coffeehouse through an open window and attack Mattie, who's sleeping downstairs. Grandfather intervenes and gets injured in a scuffle with one of the robbers. He dies with Matilda at his side. It's all very, very sad, and Mattie, completely alone now, takes it pretty darn