Matilda Cook is a fourteen year old girl who owns a coffee house with her mother. Mother gets sick with yellow fever. Matilda and her grandfather close the coffee house and leave to go to a farm so they don't get sick but don't make it to the farm because once they reach the town, Grandpa gets sick and can't go in town. Matilda goes looking for food but it's really hot and she faints. Her grandpa finds her and takes her to a recovery place. It turns out she has yellow fever but survives, her grandpa doesn't have yellow fever, just some indigestion. She gets better and gets a ride to the coffee house with her grandpa. Mother and the cook, Eliza, aren't there. Matilda gets food from the garden even though it is half dead and spends the night. That night burglars get in and steal some things and kill her grandfather before Matilda even starts to chase them out with a sword. A death cart rolls by and she takes her grandpa to the burial grounds. After that she doesn't know where to go or what to do, so she roams the streets and finds a little girl named Nell whose parents died from the fever. Matilda finds Eliza in the street taking care of the sick. Matilda goes to live with Eliza, her brother, and his twin boys. The twins and Nell get sick so they take them to the coffee house. The children have yellow fever and Eliza and Matilda are running out of food. Matilda goes out to get water one night and falls asleep on the ground. She wakes up and a frost came overnight which means the end of the fever. She tells Eliza and all the children are well again! Eliza's brother comes to the coffee house to celebrate. Matilda decides to reopen the coffee house. Finally her mother comes home from the farm that Matilda and her grandpa never made it to. Mother is an old, crippled lady because the fever did that to her. Together Matilda, Mother, and Eliza run the coffee house for a long time. SO 8/11/08