A Wicked Pursuit

by Isabella Bradford

  “Oh, my lord,” she murmured with a mixture of pleasure and dismay.

  “No, not merely a prize,” he said, smiling as saw her discomfiture. “An angel. A lucky angel. Where’s Tewkes?”

  “Here, my lord,” Tewkes said, instantly appearing beside her.

  “Tewkes, I wish to reward this young woman,” he said. “She has saved my life. Give her five guineas directly.”

  Tewkes’s eyes widened with astonishment. “To her, my lord?”

  “Yes, you rascal,” he said. “Five guineas, and don’t let old Wetherby interfere and say she doesn’t deserve it.”

  Gus caught her breath with dismay. “Five guineas! Oh, my lord, you cannot—”

  “I can, and I will,” he said, clearly pleased by her reaction, even though he’d misunderstood it entirely. “You deserve it. You’re worth ten of Sir Randolph and his leeches and mumbo jumbo.”

  “No, my lord,” she said firmly. She could overlook being mistaken for a servant, but having him offer her five guineas for doing what amounted to her duty was unforgivable. Five guineas was more than any female servant earned in a year, and for him to toss gold about to the house’s servants like this could send the entire staff into an uproar of envy, jealousy, and general unhappiness. “You cannot, and I cannot—”

  “My lord!” Mrs. Patton bustled into the room, carrying a tray with a decanter and a spouted invalid’s cup. “It is a welcome sign that you are feeling sufficiently improved to speak, but pray do not exhaust yourself with unnecessary conversation.”

  “It was hardly unnecessary, Mrs. Patton,” Gus said, self-consciously slipping her hand free of the earl’s. “His lordship and I were discussing important matters.”

  “Indeed we were,” he said, his gaze never leaving Gus’s face. “Most important.”

  Gus would not have thought it possible for a man who was as grievously injured as the earl to look as if he was trying very hard not to laugh. But so it was: and swiftly she forced herself to look away from him, and back at Mrs. Patton.

  “Forgive me, my lord,” Mrs. Patton said briskly. “But no conversation with a lady can be as important as his lordship’s health.”

  “‘A lady’?” he repeated. “A lady who?”

  “Why, Miss Augusta, of course,” Mrs. Patton said, pouring the wine from the decanter into the cup. “There is no other lady here at present. Now, here, my lord, you must drink this, on Sir Randolph’s orders. To be taken as soon as you awakened.”

  She came around to the other side of the bed, tucking another pillow beneath his head to help him sit to drink. He, in turn, ignored Mrs. Patton completely, his gaze intent on Gus, who felt her cheeks grow hot for what seemed like the hundredth time this afternoon in his company.

  “You’re Miss Wetherby’s sister,” he said, incredulous. “You’re not a servant at all.”

  “I never pretended I was,” she said defensively. “Not once.”

  “I must insist, my lord,” Mrs. Patton said, holding the cup before him.

  He didn’t let her put the spout to his lips to sip, but instead grabbed the cup from her hand and emptied it from the side, in a single long gulp.

  “Oh, my lord,” Mrs. Patton said, shocked, as she took back the glass. “That was rash. That was canary, with twenty drops of laudanum. For you to ingest it in such haste—”

  “I am often rash,” he said, even as he sank back against the pillows, breathing hard from that small exertion. “Did you enjoy your little ruse, Miss Augusta? Did it please you to make a fool of me?”

  “I never made a fool of you,” Gus said, striving to remain calm even as she defended herself. No matter how irrational he was being, he remained a very unwell man, one who should not be unnecessarily excited. “There was no harm intended, my lord, nor any done. If you are feeling foolish, then it was of your own doing, not mine.”

  He was already fighting against the laudanum, his eyes closing and his words slowing and slurring. “You should have told me, Miss Augusta. Told me who—who you are.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” she said, “but I do not see how it would have mattered under the circumstances.”

  “Miss Augusta, please,” Mrs. Patton said sternly. “It is much better for his lordship that we let the draft take its course.”

  To Gus, he looked as if the laudanum had already taken effect. His eyes had closed and his features had relaxed, his head sinking more deeply into the pillows. She doubted he’d even heard what she’d last said.

  But he had.

  “It—it matters,” he said, no more than a rough whisper. “Because it—it was you.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Harry didn’t need the high-flown advice of Sir Randolph or even the more modest Dr. Leslie to know when the fever they’d feared finally began to take hold later that night. Not even the laudanum could spare him from the fire that consumed his body, or the sweating and restlessness and confusion that followed. Worst of all were the dreams, dreams that plagued him with a relentless fury each time he closed his eyes.

  They all began the same way. He was once again riding in the misty woods looking for Julia, following her teasing laughter. That was the best part of the dream, and unfortunately the part that passed the fastest.

  Because before he could stop it, he was being thrown from his horse again, unable to save himself as he flew through the air. Sometimes he fell on the hard, leaf-covered ground. More often he landed in an unexpected place, like the patterned carpet of the dining room at White’s, with all his fellow club members clustered to stare down at him, or the floor in the center of the House of Lords. In one of the dreams—or the nightmares, really, for that was what they were—he was hurled into the muddy track at Epsom, with a score of horses and jockeys thundering down upon him, and in another he was tossed into the lion cage at the Tower of London, a place he hadn’t visited since he was a boy.

  In every dream, he was trapped, doomed, unable to move or save himself because of his broken leg. Yet in every dream, too, there was another constant, and that was Miss Augusta, the gray-eyed sister her family called Gus. Each time when he’d despaired of rescue and the pain had become almost unbearable, she appeared to join him exactly as she had in reality. She came, and she took his hand. She murmured ordinary things to him in an extraordinary voice, and promised she would not leave him alone.

  But in his nightmares, she did not stay. She vanished like the mist itself, leaving his hand to close, empty, over where hers had been. Each time as he struggled to reclaim her, he woke, covered in sweat and gasping as he fought against the tangled sheets and pillows and the leather splint bound around his leg.

  “Be easy, my lord, be easy,” murmured Sir Randolph as he pressed him back down onto the bed. He was wearing a blue apron over his waistcoat, an apron marked with fresh blood.

  “Damn you, what have you done?” Harry demanded hoarsely, trying to shove the other man’s hands aside. He’d overheard them speak cavalierly of amputation when they’d thought he was asleep. Surgeons were always ready with the knife, ready to cut a man in the name of healing. He’d an old acquaintance from school, an officer, who’d lost his leg fighting in the American colonies, and he’d seemed half a man ever since, hobbled like a graybeard. “If you’ve maimed me—”

  “You’ve been bled, my lord, that is all,” Sir Randolph said with maddening calm. He held Harry’s arm before him so he could see the fresh wound from the knife and the bloodstained linen wrapped over it. “We wish to bring the fever down.”

  “That is all, that is all,” Harry repeated darkly. “What of my leg, eh? What have you done to it?”

  “Your leg remains in a perilous state, my lord,” Sir Randolph said, “though it is my every intention to preserve it, despite the increase of morbid matter around the break, which has brought on your fever. It is my belief that a course of bleeding will serve to correct the humors and restore you to health.”

  “Mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo,” Harry muttered, shif
ting restlessly. The motion made his leg throb with pain, trapped as it was in the vise-like splint combined with the fracture-box: a good sign, for at least it meant his leg was still there, and the doctor wasn’t lying.

  “I assure you, my lord, that what sounds like nonsense to you is the very key to your restoration,” Sir Randolph said. “You must trust me to do what is best for you.”

  “Then open a window, Peterson, so I might breathe,” Harry said, impatiently shoving at the sheets and counterpane. “It’s hot as blazes in this room.”

  “That is the fever, my lord,” Sir Randolph said as the nurse pulled the covers back over him. “The air from an open window could be fatal to you in your present state.”

  Exhausted and frustrated, Harry stared up at the bed’s pleated canopy overhead, watching it spin before his eyes like a Catherine wheel. It made his head ache, yet he couldn’t force himself to look away.

  Where the devil was Miss Augusta, anyway? She could make this infernal bed stop spinning. Why wasn’t she here?

  “Here, my lord, this will help ease your discomfort,” Mrs. Patton said, pressing a warm, damp cloth over his eyes.

  “The hell it will.” He reached up and snatched the cloth away. “Where’s Miss Augusta?”

  Sir Randolph and the nurse exchanged glances in a way that did nothing to reassure Harry.

  “Miss Augusta is not here, my lord,” Sir Randolph said carefully. “I’ve told you before that this is not the proper place for an unmarried lady—”

  “When have you told me?” Harry demanded.

  “Several times, my lord,” Sir Randolph said. “While this is the fourth day since your fall, the delirium of the fever may have disturbed your, ah, judgment.”

  Four days, thought Harry with increasing despair. That shocked him. It was bad enough that he felt weak as a puling baby and as helpless as one, too. His leg throbbed and his head ached and his entire body felt on fire. Could his life truly be in the danger that Peterson and the others claimed?

  “Send for her,” he said wearily. “Now.”

  “Perhaps it is rather Miss Wetherby you wish to see, my lord?” Sir Randolph asked delicately, as if Harry were too stupid to know the difference between the sisters.

  “No,” he said bluntly. The last thing he wished was for Julia to see him in this ruinous state. It wouldn’t matter to Augusta, and he wouldn’t care even if it did. She was his lucky angel, her touch like soothing magic, and if he ever needed luck, good luck, it was now. “Miss Augusta.”

  Again there was that ominous exchange of glances among Sir Randolph, his assistant, and Mrs. Patton. Did they think he was blind as well as ill?

  “My lord,” Sir Randolph began again. “I do not believe it is appropriate for—”

  “Now,” Harry ordered, mustering what little strength he still possessed to sound like his customary, forceful self.

  Sir Randolph hesitated, his lips pressed tightly together to show his disapproval. Then he nodded.

  “Very well, my lord,” he said, gesturing to a footman near the door. “I shall respectfully request that Miss Augusta join us, although I cannot guarantee that she will come.”

  Harry sank back against the pillows and closed his eyes. She’d come to him. He didn’t doubt that for an instant. If it had been up to her alone, he felt certain she would have been here all along. All those nightmares where she’d left him—they were because Peterson and the others had kept her away.

  He must have drifted off again, because he awoke to the sound of her voice, and then she was sitting in the chair beside his bed, exactly where she belonged.

  “Good day, my lord,” she said, leaning close with a rustling shush of silk. “How are you?”

  She had newly returned from somewhere, and it gratified him to realize she’d come directly to him. She wore a silk gown splashed with flowers beneath a gauzy white perline, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with silk flowers. It was all pretty and fresh and somehow rather innocent, and while she didn’t dress with the same provocative French flair that her sister did, he would never have mistaken her for a servant if she’d dressed like this in the first place.

  He ignored her question regarding his health, which he thought was patently obvious. Instead he asked one of his own, and one he wished the answer to. “Where have you been?”

  She hesitated just long enough for him to know for certain that she hadn’t stayed away from choice, but had been excluded.

  “I’ve been to church, my lord,” she said, pulling off her kidskin gloves. “We all have. It’s Sunday.”

  She smelled of new-cut grass and sunshine and green meadows, and at once he’d a pleasing image of her walking purposefully across a field in her flowered gown, her Book of Common Prayer clasped in her hand.

  “Did you pray for me, Miss Augusta?” he asked, unable to keep from teasing her, no matter how ill he might be. “For my wicked old soul?”

  “You were included in the minister’s list of those who were ill or infirm and in need of the congregation’s prayers, yes,” she said, deftly avoiding any reference to his wickedness. She lay her palm across his forehead, her hand refreshingly cool. “Oh, my, you are very warm.”

  “It is as I said, Miss Augusta,” Sir Randolph intoned. “The fever has taken his lordship firmly into its grip, and we are taking the most aggressive course to combat it.”

  “You’ve carved his lordship’s arms to bits with bleeding, I see,” she said, more tartly than Harry would have expected. “It’s a wonder he has any blood left in him to be feverish.”

  “Miss Augusta,” Sir Randolph said sternly. “I assure you that I am treating his lordship according to the latest and most considered beliefs of the learned medical profession.”

  “I’ve no doubt that you are, Sir Randolph,” she said, smiling sweetly as she turned back to Harry.

  “Are you thirsty, my lord?” she asked softly. “Your lips are so dry.”

  Automatically Harry licked his lips, which were in fact parched and cracked, most likely from the fever, and tried to swallow. “I am wickedly thirsty, yes.”

  “If you are thirsty, then you must drink,” she said firmly, rising to go for the water herself.

  “I must object, Miss Augusta,” Sir Randolph said sternly. “It is my belief that the sure way to deplete a fever is through vigorous bleeding and withholding excessive liquids, the better to draw away the morbid humors. The canary in which the laudanum is mixed is more than sufficient to supply his lordship’s base needs, and more fortifying than mere water as well.”

  “Yet surely a patient’s comfort must be paramount to his recovery, Sir Randolph, mustn’t it?” she asked, pouring a glass of water from the pitcher on the near table. “The ancient monks who built their abbey here chose this spot for the purity of the water rising from a deep spring, and our water continues to this day to be famously restorative. I cannot help but think that his lordship might benefit from it as well.”

  Harry agreed. The more she spoke of this miraculous water, the more thirsty he became, and he longingly watched the water splashing into the glass in her hand.

  But Sir Randolph was not happy with her, not at all. “Miss Augusta,” he began irritably. “Miss Augusta, I must ask you not to interfere with the treatment of my patient, and I—”

  “Damnation, Peterson, I am dry as the Sahara,” Harry interrupted, “and I want the water.”

  Sir Randolph shook his head. “My lord, I cannot condone this, not when you are in such a delicate and perilous state.”

  “I can,” Harry said. “And I will have the water.”

  “My lord,” Sir Randolph said. “I have undertaken your care because of the acquaintance I have for His Grace your father, and if anything should go awry because of—”

  “I’ll answer for my father,” Harry said, “and explain to him, too, if necessary. Miss Augusta, the water.”

  Sir Randolph nodded curtly, admitting defeat, or at least admitting that the Duke of Breconridge would b
e more inclined to take the word of his son than that of his physician.

  Gus didn’t gloat, but simply brought the glass around the bed to Harry. He struggled to sit up, mortified that he was too weak to do so. Without hesitation she slipped her arm around his shoulders to help him upright, then tipped the glass against his lips.

  “There, my lord,” she murmured. “Slowly, now. I won’t have you drown and prove me wrong.”

  She didn’t need to caution him. As thirsty as he was, he meant to take his time so that he had could have her close like this, her arm so gentle around his shoulders that he could almost pretend it was an embrace rather than a necessary support. Beneath the slanting brim of her flowered hat, her round face was solemn, concentrating on his swallowing.

  The sheer foolishness of that hat with its jaunty pink silk blossoms cheered him enormously, a bit of frivolity in his present grim circumstances. He could see her freckles, too, scattered across her full cheeks and over the bridge of her nose like dappled sunshine. He’d never thought of grown women having freckles; he supposed other ladies must cover them with powder, yet apparently Miss Augusta didn’t bother, or care. He was glad she didn’t.

  He held her gaze after he was done, long enough that her cheeks pinked and she quickly looked away.

  “That’s enough for now,” she said, beginning to lower him back against the pillows.

  “Excuse me, Miss Augusta,” Mrs. Patton said with the usual medical sternness, “but it’s time for his lordship’s draft.”

  She stepped forward with the now-familiar invalid’s dose of canary ready in her hand. She’d thoroughly ruined canary for him forever. It wasn’t just the association with pain and laudanum, but her officious manner as she loomed over him, like some overbearing female raptor in an apron swooping down upon him. Having her appear now in place of Miss Augusta was worse still, and he realized he’d had enough. He’d spoken up against Sir Randolph. Now it was Mrs. Patton’s turn.

  “Give the glass to Miss Augusta,” he said. “I’d rather take it from her.”