Honoria laid on her back, mummified by her sheets, her lids only half-open now.
Titus thought he might be sick. She’d become so colorless, he might have thought her dead already, but for the slight, rapid rise and fall of her chest.
The doctor shooed them all aside and took only minutes of examination to render the grave verdict. “Baron and Lady Cresthaven, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, have any of you previously suffered from typhoid fever?”
Honoria’s mother, an older copy of her dark-haired daughters, recoiled from her bedside. “Certainly not, Doctor. That is an affliction of the impoverished and squalid.”
If the doctor had any opinions on her reaction, he kept them to himself. “If that is the case, then I’m going to have to ask you to leave this room. Indeed, it would be safer if you took your remaining children and staff elsewhere until…”
“Until Honoria recovers?” the Baron prompted through his wealth of a mustache.
The doctor gazed down at Honoria with a soft expression bordering on grief.
Titus wanted to scream. To kick at the priceless vase beside him and glory in the destruction, if only to see something as shattered as his heart might be.
“I knew she shouldn’t have been allowed to attend Lady Carmichaels’s philanthropic event,” the Baroness shrilled. “I’ve always maintained nothing good can come of venturing below Clairview Street.”
“Is there anyone else in your house feeling ill, Lady Cresthaven?” the doctor asked as he opened his arms in a gesture meant to shuffle them all toward the door.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she answered as she hurried from her daughter’s side as if swept up in Alcott’s net.
“Two maids,” Mrs. Mcgillicutty said around her mistress. “They took to their beds ill last night.”
The doctor heaved a long-suffering sigh as they approached the threshold. “Contrary to popular belief, typhoid contamination can happen to the food and drink of anyone at any time. It is true and regrettable that more of this contamination is rampant in the poorer communities, where sanitation is woefully inadequate, but this is a pathogen that does not discriminate based on status.”
“Quite so,” the Baron agreed in the imperious tone he used when he felt threatened or out of his depth. “We’ll leave for the Savoy immediately. Charlotte, get your things.”
“I’ll need someone to draw your daughter a cool bath and help me lift her into it,” the doctor said, his droll intonation never changing. “If you’d inquire through the household about anyone who has been inflicted with typhoid fever in the past—”
“I have done, Doctor.” Titus stepped out of the shadows, startling both of the Goodes. “It took my parents and my sister.”
Before that moment, Titus hadn’t known someone could appear both relieved and grim, but Alcott managed it.
“Absolutely not!” Charlotte Goode was not a large woman, but her staff often complained her voice could reach an octave that could shatter glass and offend dogs. “I’m not having my eldest, the jewel of our family, handled by the boy who shovels our coal and horse manure. This is most distressing; Honoria was invited to the Princess’s garden party next week as the Viscount Clairmont’s special guest!”
Titus lowered his eyes. Not out of respect for the woman, but so she wouldn’t see the flames of his rage licking into his eyes.
At this, the doctor actually stomped his foot against the floor, silencing everyone. “Madam, your daughter barely has a chance of lasting the week, and the longer you and your family reside beneath this roof, the more danger your other children are in. Do I make myself clear?”
The Baron, famously pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness, took his wife by the shoulders and steered her away. “We’re going,” he said.
Without a backward glance at his firstborn.
Tied with a Bow
Doctor Alcott took all of two seconds to dismiss the frantic bustle of the Baron’s household, and yanked Titus into Honoria’s bedroom before shutting them in. “Where is the bathroom?”
Titus pointed to a door through which the adjoining bathroom also shared a door with the nursery on the other side.
“Does the tub have a tap directly to it, or is it necessary to haul water from the kitchens?”
“It’s a pump tap, sir, but I’ve only just started the boiler and that only pipes hot water to the kitchens and the first floor.”
“That’s sufficient.” The doctor divested himself of his suit coat and abandoned it to a chair before undoing the links on his cuffs. “Now I need you to fill the bath with cool water, not cold, do you understand? We need to combat that fever, but if the water is freezing, it’ll cause her to shiver and raise her temperature.”
“I’ll go to the kitchens and have them boil a pan just to make sure it inn’t icy.”
The man reached into his medical bag and extracted an opaque lump. “First, young man, you will take this antiseptic soap and scrub your hands until even the dirt from beneath your fingernails is gone.”
“Yes, sir.”
It took a veritable eternity for the water to boil, but it seemed he needed every moment of that to scrub the perpetual filth from his hands. Once his skin was pink and raw with nary a speck, he filled two buckets as full as he could carry and hauled the boiling-hot water up the stairs.
The Baron and his wife swept by him on their way down. “We mustn’t let on it’s typhoid,” he was saying as his wife plunged her hands into an ermine muff.
“You’re right, of course,” the Baroness agreed. “What assumptions would people make about our household? Perhaps influenza would be more apropos?”
“Yes, capital suggestion.”
Titus firmly squelched the impulse to dump the scalding water over the Goodes’ collective heads, and raced to the bathroom, his arms aching from the load. He instantly threw the lock against the nursery as he heard the high-pitched, fearful questions the young twins barraged their governess with on the other side of the door. He plugged the tub’s drain and turned the tap. Cringing at the frigidity of the water, he balanced the temperature as best he could.
That done, he returned to Honoria’s room in time to see the doctor, clad only in his trousers and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, bending over a nude Honoria with his hands upon her stomach, spanning above her belly button.
Even in her catatonic state, she produced a whimper of distress that fell silent when the doctor’s hands moved lower, his fingers digging into the flesh above her hip bone, on the line where her pale skin met a whorl of ebony hair.
An instantaneous primal rage surged through Titus at the sight. With an animalistic sound he’d never made before, Titus lunged around the bed and shoved the doctor away from her.
Alcott stumbled into the nightstand, upsetting a music box and her favorite hairbrush.
Titus threw the bedclothes back over Nora, snarling at the doctor as he placed his body as a shield against the much larger man. “You keep your fucking filthy hands from her.”
Rather than becoming guilty or defensive, the doctor’s shock flared into irritation, and then, as he examined Titus, it melted into comprehension. He adjusted his spectacles and advanced a few steps. “Listen to me, lad. I am a man, yes, and she is a lady. But in this room, I am only a doctor. To me, this is the body of a dying human. I must examine her.”
Titus narrowed his eyes in suspicion, wondering if this man took him for a dupe. “You don’t have to touch her… there. Not so close to—”
Alcott interrupted him crisply. “Though I am convinced of my initial diagnosis, I would do her a disservice if I didn’t rule out all other possibilities. Internally, many maladies can produce these symptoms, and therefore palpating the stomach will often help me make certain she is not in other danger. You have an organ, the appendix, right here.” He indicated low to the right of his torso, almost to his groin. “If it becomes swollen or perforated, it will spread fever and infection through the blood. If this were the case with Miss Goode, a
n immediate operation would be required, or she’d be dead before noon.”
Noon? Titus swallowed around a dry lump, peering over his shoulder at her lovely face made waxen by a sheen of sweat.
“Your protection of her is commendable. But it is my duty to keep this girl alive,” the doctor prodded, venturing even closer now. “That obligation takes precedence in my thoughts and my deeds, over anything so banal as modesty, as it must in yours now while you help me get her into the bath. Do you think you are capable of that?”
Titus nodded, even as a fist of dread and pain knotted in his stomach.
The doctor reached out and patted his shoulder. “Good. Now help me get the sheet beneath her and we’ll use it as a sort of sling.”
She fought them as they lowered her—sheet and all—into the bath, before suddenly settling into it with a sigh of surrender. After a few fraught moments, her breath seemed to come easier. The wrinkles of pain in her forehead smoothed out a little as her onyx lashes relaxed down over her flushed cheeks.
Alcott, his movements crisp and efficient, abandoned the room, only to return to administer a tincture she seemed to have trouble swallowing.
“What’s that?” Titus queried, eyeing the bottle with interest.
“Thymol. Better known as thyme camphor. It has anti-pathogenic properties that will attack the bacteria in her stomach, giving her greater chance of survival.”
“The doctor gave us all naphthalene,” Titus remembered. “It helped with the fever, but…then they all got so much worse.” The memory thrummed a chord of despondency in his chest with such a pulsating ache, he had to press his hand to his sternum to quiet it.
Alcott snorted derisively, his skin mottling beneath his beard. “Naphthalene is more a poison than a medicine, and while it’s less expensive and more readily available, it is also little better than shoving mothballs into your family’s mouth and calling it a cure. I’d very much like a word with this so-called physician.”
Would that Titus had known before. He could have perhaps asked for this…thymol. “I don’t know why I didn’t get so sick as them. I did everything I could for their fevers. Yarrow tea and cold ginger. I couldn’t lift them into a bath, I was a boy then, but I kept cold compresses on their heads and camphor and mustard on their chests.”
Alcott’s features arranged themselves with such compassion, Titus couldn’t look at him without a prick of tears threatening behind his eyes. “You did admirably, lad. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, death wins the battle and we doctors are defeated.”
To assuage both his curiosity and his inescapable anxiety, Titus questioned the doctor about bacteria, pathogens, medications, dosages, appendixes—and any other organs that might arbitrarily perforate—until Alcott deemed that Honoria had spent long enough in the water.
It was difficult to maintain the sort of clinical distance Doctor Alcott seemed capable of as they maneuvered her back to the bed, and dried and dressed her in a clean night rail. Titus did his best to avoid looking where he ought not to, touching her bare skin as little as possible.
But he knew his fingertips wouldn’t forget the feel of her, even though it dishonored them both to remember.
The doctor left her in Titus’s care while he went to administer thymol and instruction to the maids, both of whom were afflicted with the same malady but not advanced with high fevers or this worrisome torpor.
Once alone, Titus retrieved the hairbrush and, with trembling hands and exacting thoroughness, undid the matted mess that had become her braid. He smoothed the damp strands and fanned them over the pillow as he gently worked out the tangles. The texture was like silk against his rough skin, and he allowed himself to indulge in the pleasure of the drying strands sifting in the divots between his fingers. Then, he plaited it as he sometimes did the horses’ tails when they had to be moved en masse to the country.
He even tied the end with a ribbon of burgundy, thinking she might approve.
His efforts, of course, were nothing so masterful as Honoria’s maid’s, but he was examining the finished product with something like satisfaction when the appearance of Doctor Alcott at his side gave him a start.
The doctor, a man of maybe forty years, was looking down at him from eyes still pink with exhaustion, as if he’d not slept before being roused so early. “We’ll leave her to slumber until her next dose of thymol. Here, I’ll draw the drapes against the morning.”
“No.” Titus stood, reaching out a staying hand for the doctor. “She prefers the windows and drapes open. She likes the breeze from the garden, even in the winter.”
The doctor nodded approvingly. “It’s my opinion fresh air is best for an ailing patient.” He moved to put a hand on her forehead and take her pulse, seeming encouraged by the results. That finished, he turned to Titus, assessing him with eyes much too shrewd and piercing for a boy used to living his life largely unseen.
“She means something to you, boy?”
She meant everything to him. But of course, he could not say that.
“Titus.”
“Pardon?”
“My name is Titus Conleith.”
The doctor gave a curt nod. “Irish?”
“My father was, but my mum was from Yorkshire, where they worked the factories. We were sent here when my dad was elevated to a foreman in a steel company. But the well was bad, and typhoid took them all three months later.”
Alcott made a sound that might have been sympathetic. “And how’d you come to be employed in the household of a Baron?”
Titus shrugged, increasingly uncomfortable beneath the older man’s interrogation. “I saved old Mr. Fick, the stable master, from being crushed by a runaway carriage one time. He gave me the job here to keep me from having to go back to the workhouse, as his joints are getting too rheumatic to do what he used to. Besides, no orphanage would take in a boy old enough to make trouble.”
“I see. Have you any schooling?”
Titus eyed him warily. “I have some numbers and letters. What’s it to you?”
“You’ve a good mind for what I do. A good stomach for it, as well. I’ve a surgery off Basil Street, in Knightsbridge. Do you know where that is?”
“Aye.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, looking suddenly regimental. “If Mr. Fick can spare you a few nights a week, I want you to visit me there. We can talk about your future.”
“I will,” Titus vowed, something sparking inside of him that his worry for Honoria wouldn’t allow to ignite into full hope.
The three days he sat at her side were both the best and worst of his life.
He told her tales about the horses’ antics as he melted chips of ice into her mouth. He monitored her for spikes of fever and kept her cool with damp cloths and linens packed with ice. The doctor even let him dose her with the thymol and look after most of her necessities when the maids took a turn for the worse.
He begged her to live.
All the while, he crooned the Irish tune his father used to sing to his mother on the nights when they drank a bit too much ale and danced a reel like young lovers, across their dingy old floor.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair,
Her lips are like some roses fair,
She’s the sweetest smile and the gentlest hands,
I love the ground whereon she stands.
He barely ate or slept until the fourth night, after she’d swallowed several spoonsful of beef bone broth, the deep sounds of her easier breaths lulling him to nap in the chair by her bed. Alcott had roused him with the good news that her fever had broken, and had then ordered him to wash and change clothing and sleep in the guest room nearby.
A commotion woke him thirteen hours later. Without thinking, Titus lurched out of bed and scrambled down the hall. Skidding to a halt, he narrowly avoided crashing into the Baron’s back.
Every soul in the Goode family gathered around Honoria’s bed, blocking her from view. Prudence, Felicity, and Mercy all ch
attered at the same time, and it was the happy sound of their cadence that told him he had nothing to fear.
Titus squelched a spurt of possession, stopping just short of shoving in and around them to see what was going on. This moment didn’t belong to them, it belonged to him.
She belonged to him.
“Young Mr. Conleith, there you are.” Doctor Alcott, a tall man, stood at the head of the bed next to his patient, who was still blocked from Titus’s view. “Miss Goode, you and your family owe this young lad a debt of gratitude. It is largely due to his tireless efforts that you survived.”
They all turned to look at him, clearing the visual pathway to her.
With an ecstatic elation, Titus drank in the sight of Honoria sitting up on her own. She was still ashen and wan, her eyes heavy-lidded and her lips without color.
And yet, the most beautiful sight he’d laid his eyes upon.
Her fingers worried at the burgundy ribbon in her hair, stroking it as if drawing comfort from it.
Was it his imagination, or did a dash of peach color her cheeks at the sight of him?
He already knew he was red as a beet, swamped in the blush now creeping up his collar.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Every word he knew crowded in his throat, choking off a reply.
“Yes,” the Baron chuffed, taking his shoulder and firmly steering him backwards. “Expect our gratitude in remuneration, boy. I’ll call for you to come to my office tomorrow to discuss the details. There’s a good lad.”
The door shut in his face, and he stared at it for an incomprehensible moment. From the other side, the Baroness’s voice grated as she asked the doctor if Honoria might be well enough to attend the garden party at the palace three days hence.
Titus dropped his head against the door and closed his eyes.
She’d looked right at him. Had seen him for the first time. Did she remember any of the previous days? Had she heard anything he’d said to her? Sung to her?
She’d thanked him.
And he’d said nothing. His one chance to actually speak to her and he’d choked.
Courting Trouble Page 2