Chains · Garden Heights

Part 5

for Chains · Part 5 · Chapters 25–30

8 Parts40 min

What Happens in Part 5

Isabel recovers from the brand, swears off spying, and finds every path to freedom closed to her.

Nursed BackBranded on the cheek at Madam's order, Isabel falls into a fever that nearly kills her. She survives because Curzon carried her to Lady Seymour — Master Lockton's elderly aunt — who nursed her with cool cloths, broth, and ointment. Still the Locktons' property, Isabel is sent back across the street to work. Her grief turns to fury: she wishes an ugly death on Colonel Regan and tells Curzon she is finished with spying.

At the PumpThe war grinds forward: smallpox and dysentery — a violent illness of the bowels — empty the rebel camps, and in late August the British row across to Long Island. At the Tea Water Pump, enslaved men and women argue over which army might free them. Curzon says Bellingham has promised him liberty for soldiering in his place; the others say the promise is worth nothing.

Not a BadgeOld Grandfather, who works the pump, refuses to take a side, reminds them this war is not their fight, and tells Isabel the mark on her face proves she is strong enough to survive what would kill others. In the house Madam waits gleefully for a British victory while Becky trades news over the washing — church bells melted into cannon, the state of the camps.

Turned AwaySent out to buy Madam's celebration supplies, Isabel hides in an empty house to plan: reach the British, be free by nightfall, earn wages, buy her sister back. She finds the rebel camp abandoned; the British officer she asks for work refuses her. Lockton emerges as the redcoats take the city, and Lady Seymour, saddled with Hessian officers — German troops hired by the British — sends for Isabel's help, as an orange light shows in the sky.

What We Will Learn

Section	What you will practice
Vocabulary	Fever, war, and hard choices: delirious, dysentery, vengeance, fortify, plunder…
Literary Elements	A symbol that gains a second meaning from an old man at a pump, situational irony in an army that advertises freedom, and a first-person narrator whose body becomes the story
Cross-Curricular	Sickness and medicine in 1776 — fever and infection before germ theory, smallpox in armies and cities, early inoculation, and what nursing meant

Chapter Summary

Ch.	What happens
Chapter 25	Fever — Isabel surfaces from days of delirium in Lady Seymour’s house, alive because Curzon carried her there and the old woman nursed her. Sent back to the Locktons, she curses Colonel Regan for breaking his word, and news arrives that smallpox and dysentery are wrecking the rebel camps as the British row toward Long Island.
Chapter 26	The Tea Water Pump — Fetching water, Isabel finds a crowd of enslaved men and women arguing over which army might free them. Curzon boasts of Bellingham’s promise and is told it is a lie. Grandfather quiets them all and tells Isabel her scar marks strength, not disgrace.
Chapter 27	Waiting for the Redcoats — Madam Lockton is giddy with the expectation of a British victory. Over the work, Becky passes along what she has seen and heard — church bells melted into cannon, the rebel encampments — while Isabel says little and worries about Curzon.
Chapter 28	An Empty House — Ordered out to buy supplies for a victory celebration, Isabel slips into a shuttered house instead and lets herself imagine reaching the British lines, being free by night, earning wages, and getting Ruth back.
Chapter 29	The Camp Left Behind — The fighting pauses. Isabel walks past a rebel camp emptied in a hurry, with supplies still lying about, and offers herself to a British officer as a worker. He refuses her and sends her home. Mr. Lockton comes out of hiding.
Chapter 30	Occupation — British troops take New York. Officers move through the streets claiming rooms, Madam preens, and Lady Seymour — now housing Hessian officers — asks for Isabel’s help. The part closes with fire beginning in the night.

Part 1

Vocabulary

Study 10 key words from Chapters 25–30, then answer each question.

🍳Knowledge Bank · Bad Air and Bad Blood

Science History · Humors and MiasmaWhen Isabel burns with fever, nobody in her world can name what is happening inside her, because germs will not be discovered for roughly another century. Eighteenth-century medicine ran on two much older explanations instead. The first was miasma — the belief that sickness rose as poisoned air from swamps, graveyards, garbage heaps, and crowded rooms, which is why doctors told the healthy to flee a sick city. The second was the theory of humors, inherited from ancient Greece, which held that the body contained four fluids and that illness meant one of them had grown too strong. Treatment followed the theory with terrible logic: if a patient had too much of something, take it out. Physicians opened a vein and drained blood, raised blisters on the skin, and gave drugs that emptied the stomach. Patients who survived usually recovered in spite of the treatment rather than because of it, and the reason was simple. The whole explanation was wrong.

Visual AidTwo wrong explanations, one piece of logic

Structure diagram of the medicine the Knowledge Bank describes: miasma and the four humors were different explanations, but both led to the same instruction — if a patient has too much of something, take some out — and so to bleeding, blistering and purging. The four humors are named as a group rather than listed, and the many other remedies of the period are left out. The drawing does not claim these treatments worked; it shows why careful people kept using them. Notice that the logic is sound and the premise is not: germs are roughly a century away.

Miasma theory, humoral medicine and the depletive treatments that followed from them, as set out in the Knowledge Bank and in standard histories of eighteenth-century medicine. Drawn for Garden Heights Academy.

deliriousadj.Ch.25

Wildly confused and seeing things, usually from a high fever

“For days Isabel is delirious, mistaking a stranger’s room for home.”

dysenteryn.Ch.25

A severe illness of the bowels, usually spread through dirty water

“Dysentery empties tents faster than any battle in the summer camps.”

vengeancen.Ch.25

Harm done to someone in return for a wrong

“Isabel wants vengeance on the officer who broke his promise.”

scornn.Ch.26

Open contempt; the feeling that something deserves no respect

“The men at the pump answer Curzon’s news with scorn.”

counseln.Ch.26

Serious advice offered by someone worth listening to

“Grandfather gives counsel instead of taking either army’s side.”

fortifyv.Ch.27

To strengthen a place so it can stand up to attack

“The rebels fortify the heights while the fleet gathers below.”

gloatv.Ch.27

To take mean pleasure in your own good fortune

“Madam Lockton begins to gloat before the redcoats even land.”

provisionsn.Ch.28

Stores of food and supplies gathered for later use

“Isabel is sent out for provisions to celebrate a victory.”

plunderv.Ch.29

To rob a place by force, especially during a war

“Soldiers plunder the camp the rebels abandoned in their hurry.”

quarterv.Ch.30

To give soldiers rooms to live in, usually in private homes

“British officers quarter themselves in the best houses in town.”

ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1According to the Knowledge Bank, a doctor who bled a delirious fever patient a second time was following the theory that ___.Ch.25

2‘Dysentery’ is a severe illness of the bowels.Ch.25

3‘Vengeance’ means ___.Ch.25

4To speak with ‘scorn’ is to speak with ___.Ch.26

5Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.26

Word choices:counselscornplundergloat- some words will not be used

Grandfather offers instead of picking a side.

The other men greet Curzon’s news with .

6To ‘fortify’ a place is to make it weaker.Ch.27

7Someone who is gloating is ___.Ch.27

8‘Provisions’ are ___.Ch.28

9Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.29

Word choices:plunderquarterdeliriousfortify- some words will not be used

Soldiers the supplies the rebels left behind.

British officers themselves in the finest houses.

10To ‘quarter’ soldiers is to give them places to live.Ch.30

Part 2

Comprehension

Show you understood what happens in Chapters 25–30.

⚕Knowledge Bank · The Enemy Inside the Camp

Military History · Camp DiseaseThe news that reaches Isabel about sickness in the rebel camps is not a novelist’s invention. Through the whole Revolutionary War, disease killed far more American soldiers than British muskets did; historians estimate that sickness accounted for something like nine of every ten military deaths. The reason was arithmetic. Armies gathered thousands of people into a few muddy acres, with latrines — camp toilets — dug too close to the drinking water, so dysentery, a violent bowel infection carried in filth, ran through the tents in days. Typhus — a fever spread by body lice — traveled in shared blankets. And smallpox, the most feared of all, arrived wherever crowds did. The American invasion of Canada in 1775 and 1776 collapsed partly because the army besieging Quebec was destroyed from inside by the pox rather than beaten in the field. Long before generals learned to win battles, they had to learn to manage sanitation.

A greatly magnified photograph of a pale six-legged insect on a black background, its abdomen ringed and swollen with bright red blood, each leg ending in a hooked claw — Photomicrograph of a male body louse from the Centers for Disease Control, magnified many times; the bright red in the abdomen is a blood meal. This is the carrier the Knowledge Bank names for typhus, the fever that traveled in shared blankets wherever people were packed together. Nothing here is life size — a living body louse is about as long as a sesame seed — and the insect does not itself make the disease: it moves bacteria between bodies. Look at the hooked claws, which grip cloth rather than skin. That is why the Knowledge Bank calls the disaster arithmetic: thousands of soldiers, few blankets, no washing.
Dorsal view of a male body louse (Pediculus humanus var. corporis); photograph by Janice Haney Carr, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Image Library #9217, 2006. Source: Wikimedia Commons, file "Body lice.jpg", public domain.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1The Knowledge Bank explains that the American attack on Quebec collapsed largely because ___.Ch.25

2Why does Isabel wish harm on Colonel Regan?Ch.25

3Isabel eagerly agrees to carry more messages for Curzon.Ch.25

4What does Grandfather tell Isabel about the mark on her face?Ch.26

5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events. Number 1 = what happens first.Chapters 25–30

Madam sends Isabel out to buy supplies for a celebration.
Isabel asks a British officer to take her on as a worker.
Isabel wakes from her fever in Lady Seymour’s house.
Grandfather speaks to the crowd at the Tea Water Pump.
Lady Seymour asks for Isabel’s help with the Hessian officers.

6The men at the Tea Water Pump believe Bellingham will really free Curzon.Ch.26

7What war news does Becky pass along in the kitchen?Ch.27

8What does Isabel do instead of shopping for Madam’s celebration?Ch.28

9Isabel finds the rebel camp deserted, with supplies left behind.Ch.29

10How does the British officer answer Isabel’s offer to work?Ch.29

Part 3

Literary Elements

Understanding HOW and WHY Laurie Halse Anderson tells the story across Chapters 25–30.

🔥Knowledge Bank · When a Story Gets a Fever

Literature · Illness and DeliriumWriters have reached for fever scenes for centuries, and not because sickness is dramatic. A fever hands a novelist three things at once. It suspends time, letting days pass in a paragraph so a character can arrive on the far side of an event changed. It loosens the rules of realistic narration, so the dead can speak and memory can push into the present without the writer cheating. And because a first-person narrator can only report what she perceives, delirium turns the telling itself unreliable — readers must reconstruct the room from fragments, exactly as the patient does. Notice how much work the fever does here for Laurie Halse Anderson (author). It marks a break between the girl who had a sister to protect and the one who does not; it puts Isabel in a stranger’s bed, where kindness can surprise her; and it lets an injury to the body stand for an injury to the whole self.

Symbol

The I burned into Isabel’s cheek was meant to label her as insolent property. In Part 5 Grandfather hands her a second reading of the same mark — proof of endurance — and that reading is the seed of a third one Isabel will claim much later in the novel.

Situational Irony

Isabel walks toward the army that has been advertising freedom to enslaved people — and the officer she reaches waves her away. The side promising liberty has none to spare for her.

First-Person Narration

Because Isabel tells her own story, her fever is not described from outside; readers are stuck inside the heat and confusion with her, learning what happened only as she pieces it together.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1According to the Knowledge Bank, a fever scene changes the telling of a first-person story because delirium ___.Ch.26

2Isabel approaches the army that advertised freedom and is turned away. This gap between expectation and result is ___.Ch.29

3Isabel tells the story of Chains in her own voice.Ch.25

4Why does Laurie Halse Anderson (author) let Grandfather reinterpret the scar rather than having Isabel do it alone?Ch.26

5In this novel the branded letter carries a single, fixed meaning.Ch.26

6Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.25

Word choices:symbolironysettingrhyme- some words will not be used

The branded letter works as a of more than one thing.

An army selling freedom that frees nobody is an of the plot.

7How does first-person narration shape the fever chapters?Ch.25

8Situational irony means a character says one thing and means another.Ch.29

9Part 5 sets Isabel’s private hopes against public war news. This arrangement mainly builds ___.Ch.28

10Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.25

Word choices:firstsituationalchorusmeter- some words will not be used

Isabel narrates the novel in the person.

An outcome that reverses expectation is irony.

Part 4

Think Deeper

Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.

🛍Knowledge Bank · Who Sat Up With the Sick

Public Health · NursingLady Seymour spooning broth into a half-conscious girl is not a small gesture; in 1776 it was essentially the entire treatment. There were no trained nurses, no nursing schools, and no profession to join — Florence Nightingale would not be born for another thirty-four years. Nursing meant watching: keeping a fire going, changing damp linens, spooning in broth and cider, cooling a forehead, and sitting through the nights when a fever decided the question one way or the other. That labor fell almost entirely to women, and in wealthy households it fell hardest on servants and on enslaved people, who nursed others through illnesses nobody nursed them through. The Continental Army hired matrons and nurses for its hospitals at low wages and struggled constantly to find them, because the work was exhausting and genuinely dangerous. Without medicines that worked, survival often came down to whether anyone was willing to stay.

Picture a girl waking up in a bed that is not hers, in a room she does not know, with one side of her face on fire. Isabel has been carried across the street half dead, and for days the only world she has is a fever — heat, strange voices, her mother’s face where her mother cannot possibly be. When she surfaces, an old woman is spooning broth into her and speaking to her as if she were a person. Everything in Part 5 grows out of that room. Isabel goes back to the Locktons with a letter burned into her cheek and no sister to protect anymore, and the city around her starts coming apart at the same speed she is putting herself back together. Soldiers sicken and die in their own camps without a shot being fired. Boats cross to Long Island. Rumors run from the water pump to the kitchen and back. And when the redcoats finally march into New York, Isabel walks straight toward them and asks for the one thing she wants — because somewhere out there is Ruth, and freedom is the only road that leads to her.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1Claim: “In Part 5 Isabel stops waiting for other people to decide her future and starts acting on her own.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence

2Things done to Isabel, or Choices Isabel makes? Tap each detail to send it left or right.Sort into two

◄ Things done to IsabelChoices Isabel makes ►

3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect

Curzon carried Isabel across the street to a door→

Colonel Regan took her information and gave nothing back→

Grandfather calls the mark on her face a sign of strength→

The British promise freedom to enslaved people who help them→

🧠Knowledge Bank question

4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument

According to the Knowledge Bank, nursing a fever patient in 1776 meant , which shows that survival often depended on .

Part 5

Standardized Test

Before Anyone Saw Germs · Reading & Vocabulary · SAT & TOEFL-style practice

Before Anyone Saw Germs

In 1776 nobody knew that germs existed. Doctors explained fever with two much older ideas: that sickness rose as foul air from swamps and crowded rooms, and that the body held four fluids called humors that had to stay in balance. Both ideas pointed toward the same treatments: draining blood, raising blisters on the skin, and forcing the stomach to empty. Their counsel followed the same logic: leave the city before the foul air reaches you. A patient burning with fever and delirious enough to talk to people who were not there might be bled again the next morning, to draw the sickness out.

Smallpox was the disease people feared most. It traveled through the air and through bedding, killed roughly three of every ten people who caught the common form, and left survivors scarred or blind. Because it was so contagious, a single case inside an army camp could put hundreds of soldiers on their backs in weeks. During the Revolutionary War far more soldiers died of illness than of enemy fire, and dysentery, a bowel infection spread through dirty water, killed thousands more in the same camps.

There was one real defense, and it frightened people. In inoculation, matter from a smallpox sore was scratched into a healthy arm to cause a mild case on purpose, giving lifelong protection. The method worked, but the fear was reasonable: patients were truly ill for weeks, about one in fifty died, and while they recovered they could infect anyone nearby, so some towns banned it. Nurses could offer the weak little beyond broth and cider meant to fortify them. George Washington ordered his whole army inoculated in 1777 anyway, judging the treatment less dangerous than the disease.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1What is the main idea of the passage?SAT · Central Ideas

2According to the passage, doctors in 1776 explained fever using ideas about ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

3The passage says smallpox killed about ___ of the people who caught the common form.TOEFL · Factual Information

4The passage suggests that army camps were especially dangerous because ___.SAT · Inference

5According to the passage, dysentery was spread mainly through ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

6Why does the author mention Washington’s order in 1777?SAT · Author’s Purpose

7The passage implies that towns banned inoculation because they feared ___.SAT · Inference

8In the passage, delirious most nearly means ___.SAT · Words in Context

9In the passage, counsel most nearly means ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary

10In the passage, fortify most nearly means ___.SAT · Words in Context

Part 6 · Optional

Creative Writing

A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.

About This Section

This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!

Writing Task — Part 5 “A Mark You Would Rewrite”

Grandfather tells Isabel that the letter burned into her cheek is not a badge of shame but proof of strength, and Isabel goes further — she decides it stands for her own name. Think of something that has been used to label a person unfairly: a nickname, a low grade, a mistake nobody lets them forget. Explain what the label was meant to say and how someone could rewrite its meaning without pretending it never happened. 6–10 sentences. End with the new meaning stated in one sentence.

You can start with: “Grandfather changes what Isabel’s scar means because...”

0 / 40 words minimum

🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)

No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.

Part 5 Complete!

You finished Chapters 25–30 of Chains.

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points out of 100

🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)

Move on to Part 6 →

Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Laurie Halse Anderson. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Laurie Halse Anderson’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.