There's Something About Lady Mary

by Sophie Barnes

  Mary wiped away her tears with the handkerchief he offered her and nodded so slightly that he barely noticed her response. Then, taking her by the arm, he guided her back up the winding stairs and down the hallway toward her room, all the while alarmingly aware of how cold she felt beneath his touch.

  “Is everything all right?” a voice asked from behind them just as they reached Mary’s door. They both turned to find Michael standing in the doorway of his bedroom.

  “There has been an incident,” Ryan told him gravely as he met Mary’s red-rimmed eyes. “Give me a few minutes to get Mary settled back into bed, and I will meet you in the library to tell you what happened.”

  Michael nodded, ignoring the impropriety of a genteel young lady being escorted unchaperoned to her bedchamber by a man whose eyes had held a roguish gleam for the past few days. Instead, he merely closed his bedroom door behind him and started off in the direction of the stairs. “I will get the claret ready,” he muttered, disappearing into the darkness and thus out of sight.

  “Now then,” Ryan said as he eased Mary’s robe off her shoulders and lifted her onto her bed, tucking the blankets around her. He brushed a few strands of stray hair from her face and gently lifted her chin so he could meet her gaze. “What exactly happened? I heard a horse ride off. Who was it? Who frightened you like this?”

  Mary shrank back against her pillows and clutched his hand in hers. She closed her eyes briefly, only to find her mind flooded by visions of a dark figure mocking her with his venomous glare. “The Messenger,” she whispered, meeting Ryan’s eyes with a dead stare. She saw the flicker of overwhelming anger in them and caught her breath, quite unwillingly.

  Swallowing hard, she forced herself to go on while Ryan listened quietly to her every word. “He took the journals,” she told him in a small voice at the end. “Every last one of them. Those books meant the world to me, Ryan.”

  “I know,” he said as he wiped a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb. His eyes filled with regret. “But he did not take them all, Mary; we still have one left.”

  Mary stared at Ryan in puzzlement while she waited for him to explain. The box was gone; the journals had all been in there.

  “Earlier today, while you were speaking with your uncle in the library, I took the liberty of borrowing the last volume of your father’s journals, hoping to perhaps discover something more in it. It is still on my bedside table.”

  Mary closed her eyes against the fresh onset of tears and breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you,” she said, gently squeezing his hand.

  “In a way, it is the most important one,” he added. “It is the one that lists the hospital where one of the many fatal surgeries took place. It is also the one that lists all of the initials. If we can work out what they stand for, we might be able to find the people who took the journals.”

  “You don’t think that this is the doing of just one man?”

  “I don’t know, but I do think that the Messenger is just that: a messenger.” Not to mention a cold-blooded killer. “I believe there is someone else behind him pulling the strings and telling him when to jump. I intend to find out who that somebody might be.”

  Mary nodded thoughtfully. “And I thought my uncle might have had a part in this,” she said. “I treated him quite badly, I’m afraid, but the man I saw this evening—I couldn’t see much of him—I could tell that he was no more than thirty years of age.”

  “I had the same impression when I met him in London,” Ryan told her. “But you still ought to tread lightly. There is no harm in being cautious.” He ran his hand carefully along her cheek. He couldn’t read her expression in the dim light, but he knew that she’d had a terrible fright, and he was prepared to do bloody murder because of it. If something had happened to her. . .His jaw tightened at the very thought of it.

  “You are right,” Mary agreed as he lowered his head, kissing her briefly on the forehead. “Please be sure you put the journal somewhere safe before going downstairs to meet Trenton. I would hate for something to happen to it.”

  “You have my word,” he told her softly as he tucked the blankets around her once more and headed toward the door. He turned for a moment to look at her, his hand resting on the handle. “I will be back to check on you before I go to bed.” But Mary didn’t offer a reply; she was already fast asleep.

  “You say that somebody came into Lady Steepleton’s room while she was sleeping and stole her father’s medical journals?” Michael asked in shock. His forehead was creased in an angry frown as he paced about the library, the brandy in his glass sloshing from side to side.

  Ryan sipped his claret. “That is correct.”

  “And she confronted this man alone?” Michael asked in even greater disbelief.

  “She had a pistol,” Ryan explained. He would have laughed at the absurdity of it all if it weren’t so damn serious. “Your wife gave it to her, I believe.”

  “Of course she did,” Michael muttered as he took a large gulp of his drink. “That woman has probably handed out weapons to half the women in England. A pity that Lady Steepleton did not have the opportunity to use it, or the man would be hanging from the stable rafters by now and receiving a good whipping.”

  “I agree,” Ryan told him. “But I intend to find the instigator behind all of this and put an end to it once and for all.”

  “If you need help, Ryan, I hope you know that you can count on me.” There was fire in Michael’s eyes. A young lady had been accosted in his home: Ryan knew that it was enough to make him lust for revenge.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you,” Ryan told him sincerely before emptying his glass.

  “You know,” Michael said after a moment’s silence, “you might do well not to trust anybody. I checked the doors myself before going to bed; they were all firmly locked. And our intruder did not make use of a window.”

  “Are you suggesting that—”

  “I am merely stating the facts,” Michael told him, placing his empty glass on the sideboard. “For whatever reason, the front door was opened after we had all retired. If anything, it certainly makes you wonder.”

  “I hear that there was quite a stir last night,” Mr. Croyden remarked as he sat down to breakfast the following morning and proceeded to fork a large slice of ham onto his plate.

  “Yes!” Cassandra exclaimed. “It is all very exciting.”

  “That will do, Cassie,” Isabella chided her daughter. “Mary could have been seriously injured.”

  “But she was not, Mama,” Cassandra countered. “She is perfectly fine, a bit pale perhaps but. . .oh, I wish something like that would happen to me. My life is perfectly dull, you know.”

  Isabella gave her daughter an admonishing look. “I think perhaps you ought to worry more about your shawl, my dear; the tip of it is trailing in your coffee.”

  With an exasperated grimace, Cassandra began dabbing at the stain that was rapidly spreading its way along the edge of her silk wrap.

  “I hope you know that we are all eager to support you in whatever way possible, Lady Steepleton,” Lord Willowbrook said as he caught Mary’s eye from across the table. “To think that this villain had the audacity to enter your bedchamber while you were sleeping. . .Well, I certainly hope that he is apprehended as soon as possible.”

  “Here, here,” Bryce chimed in. “I would like to see the bastard swing for this.”

  “Well,” Percy remarked, “I am not sure if that is likely to happen, old chap. After all, he did not hurt anyone. However, I am confident that Ryan will do his best to sort out this mess. Is that not so, Ryan?”

  Ryan glanced across at Percy in annoyance. He knew that he’d made an unforgivable mistake and that the Messenger should never have been able to gain access to Mary’s bedroom. But he hadn’t thought that they might actually be followed all the way to Whickham Hall. “Considering that there are no fewer than two agents from the Foreign Office under this very roof, not to mention the foreign secretary him
self, I must agree with your assessment of the situation, Percy. It certainly is quite a mess.”

  “Hm, I suppose you are right,” Percy conceded with a tight smile. “None of us expected this to happen. We were not at all prepared.”

  “And the journals?” Mr. Croyden asked, adding some cheese and a couple of sausages to his ham. “Were all of them taken?”

  “I am afraid so,” Mary lied. She still had the one that Ryan had taken to his room, but nobody was going to know about that except for the two of them.

  “Well”—Mr. Croyden sighed with a large measure of regret—“I don’t suppose there is much to be done then.”

  “Not to worry,” Mary reassured him. “We do not need the journals in order to help you. If you like, I can even have a word with the surgeon you decide on using and explain the procedure to him.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Croyden muttered. “That is very kind of you.”

  “Well, it is the least I can do after everything that has happened. I am sorry I did not trust you when you asked to look at the journals yourself, If I ever find them, you will be the first to know.”

  Her uncle nodded in appreciation. “I would be most grateful for that. I know my brother and I were not particularly close in later years, but he was my older brother, and I. . .well. . .I hope you understand how important those journals are to me.”

  “I believe I do,” Mary said as she met his gaze. “Because I feel precisely the same way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  “Any luck?” Mary asked as she watched Ryan leaf through yet another volume of Westminster Hospital’s medical records. They’d already spent the last few hours going over each of the fat books that now lay stacked on one side of the table, a compilation of every surgical procedure the hospital had performed over the past decade.

  “Not yet,” Ryan replied as he turned the page. The top right corner stuck, so he carefully pried it loose with his fingers. “And we have already gone back seven years. Maybe we should just start from the beginning; we must have missed it.”

  “No,” Mary told him stubbornly. “Let us continue until we have gone as far back as 1806. Then we can start over.”

  Ryan sighed as he continued scanning the text. Most of it appeared to have been scrawled in a hurry with little attention to graceful handwriting. That was part of the reason it was taking so long: most of the notes were almost impossible to discern.

  Ryan turned the pages a few more times, his sense of hope diminishing a little more with each time. But then, suddenly, there it was, the entry he’d been searching for. “I found it,” he gasped.

  Mary rushed to his side, looking over his shoulder at the book that was laid out on the table in front of Ryan. She peered down at the text: “1808: Eliza Blackburn arrived at the hospital,” she remarked. “She was pregnant, just as my father’s entry says. Apparently, she was concerned about the welfare of her baby, said she had not felt it move in a couple of days. A physician examined her. . .let me see. . .”

  “Dr. Nigel Clemens,” Ryan muttered. “I know him quite well; in fact, I spoke with him just recently at the Glendale ball.”

  “So did I,” Mary told him. “Lord Woodbridge introduced us. I was with your father at the time, after our. . .well. . .after our falling out.” She placed her hand on Ryan’s shoulder as her thoughts returned to the evening they’d spent at Glendale House. “Your father seemed to be well acquainted with him,” she said before returning her attention to the text. “According to this, Clemens dismissed Eliza after examining her, recommending that she return home and get plenty of rest. She died a week later. . .from puerperal fever.”

  Ryan looked at Mary in bewilderment. “How is that even possible?” he asked. “I thought puerperal fever was contracted only after the onset of labor.”

  “Hm. . .go back one page,” Mary told him. “Who did Clemens treat before he treated Eliza?”

  “A Georgina Hilton. . .she arrived at the hospital earlier in the day. She was in labor, and Clemens helped her deliver her baby. She too developed puerperal fever and died a few days later.”

  “And before that?” Mary asked with growing excitement.

  “Before that it seems he carried out a postmortem on a woman who’d died the previous evening from. . .puerperal fever.”

  “I knew it!” Mary exclaimed. “No wonder my father was compelled to make a note of it: Clemens caused the death of both of these women. He probably failed to wash his hands after handling the corpse, and—”

  “Hold on,” Ryan told her. “How would the fact that he performed a postmortem have anything to do with the deaths of Georgina and Eliza?”

  Mary stared at him for a moment. “They really don’t teach you much in medical school, do they?” she said. “Remind me to lend you my copy of William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine. There is a whole chapter in there on the importance of cleanliness, especially after handling the sick or that which may convey infection. My father was a huge advocate for his work and continuously tried to make the rest of the medical community see the truth in it.”

  Mary sighed as she slumped back down onto her chair. “They mostly chose to disregard his advice, though, claiming that Buchan’s work was for housewives who were willing to believe anything. If I am not mistaken, one colleague of his argued that if washing your hands between each patient was so vital, then the medical schools would place more emphasis on it. And since they do not, then it really could not be of much importance at all.”

  Ryan frowned as he pushed the medical records aside and opened John Croyden’s journal once more. He studied a few of the entries before looking up at Mary. “I think I have an idea as to what this is all about,” he told her. Mary looked at him expectantly. “It seems to me that your father was conducting an investigation. He was cataloguing malpractice cases, and judging by this, some of these physicians have a lot to answer for. He paused. “If a good lawyer were to take them to court, some of them might very well hang for murder—the level of negligence is simply astounding.”

  Mary’s mouth fell open. She stared at Ryan as she considered the implication of what he’d just said. It made perfect sense.

  “That would certainly explain the threats,” she told him quietly. “If some of the physicians my father was investigating found out about this. . .of course they would want to stop him from making his findings public.”

  Ryan nodded. “They want to destroy the evidence, Mary, all the records your father spent so many years compiling.”

  “But why would my father take on such a huge task on his own? To what end? So he could blackmail these people, threaten them in some way or cause a scandal? My father was not the sort of man who would do something like that.”

  “Perhaps not, but from what you have told me, he was the sort of man who would want to improve the survival rate of anyone in need of medical attention. So then, don’t you think he just wanted to draw attention to the physicians and surgeons who were doing a careless job? He may simply have been hoping to have their licenses revoked.” Ryan paused for a moment before continuing. “There are roughly ten men listed in here. If all the evidence against them were to be brought to light all at once, it might be enough to bring about a scandal that results in significant changes not only in patient care but in medical learning altogether.”

  “Then there is only one thing for us to do,” Mary told him resolutely. “We have to figure out who the rest of these men are, and then we have to take our findings to the Mayfair Chronicle.”

  “Have you completely lost your mind, Mary? You will be stirring up a hornet’s nest if you do that. Let us not forget that these men killed your father. They have pretty much threatened to do the same to you. I am sorry, but I cannot allow you to do this. You have to let this go.”

  “You cannot allow this?” Mary asked harshly, accepting the fight that Ryan offered her.

  “Can’t you see? You will be putting yourself in terrible danger—hell, you are already
in terrible danger!”

  “Exactly,” she shot back. “And if I do not find these men, if I do not see justice served, I will always be looking over my shoulder, wondering if I am safe—if our children are safe.” She pouted her lips and gave him a sulky look.

  “Oh, bloody hell!” Ryan exclaimed. “Why the blazes did you have to bring our unborn children into this?”

  “Because I cannot let this go. I am sorry, Ryan, but this is of enormous importance, not only to me, but to all the people who will one day end up under the knife of one of these butchers. Why, there are physicians and surgeons out there ordinary citizens trust with their lives, but who, it seems, are doing more harm than good. It is a doctor’s duty to ensure that everything in his power is being done to help his patient; there is no room for arrogance or for denying that a mistake has been made. A surgeon’s mistake is inexcusable. Refusing to fix it is unforgivable, and I will not stand silently by while these men continue to kill off their patients because they are too damn stubborn to listen to reason.

  “Besides,” Mary added with a crooked smile, “if you do not help me, you know that I will try to work this out on my own, and to be honest, I am really not that good with a pistol, regardless of all the efforts your sister made to teach me.”

  He studied her for a moment as if he hoped to read her mind. “You are right,” he finally told her. “As much as I hate to admit it, you are absolutely right: something has to be done, and there is no way that you are doing it on your own. But you have to promise me that you will be careful. Do not tell anyone about this, Mary; it could cost you your life.”

  “I understand,” she said quietly as she reached for his hand. She gave it a light squeeze. “Thank you for helping.”

  “I will help you in any way that I can, Mary. After all, I. . .”

  He was just about to open his heart to her but thought better of it. A more appropriate time would present itself once all of this was over. For now, they had a lot of work to do. “You have my word,” he told her instead, before turning his attention back to the open journal in front of him. He wondered if she’d noticed that he’d been about to tell her something else, but she seemed too caught up in the situation at hand to have given it much thought. And since he very much doubted that she reciprocated his feelings, he’d just stopped from making a complete idiot of himself. After all, her reasons for marrying him were purely practical: she’d made that abundantly clear when he’d proposed.