Imogen would have done so the first time he’d uttered her name, if the very marrow hadn’t frozen in her bones.
Gwen, always the helpful friend, gave her an encouraging push—or rather a shove—into Dr. Fowler’s path.
“Ah, Nurse Pritchard, there you are.” Dr. Fowler’s balding pate shone beneath the gaslights, perspiration the only sign of distress in the usually imperturbable man. As if the daunting chief physician at St. Margaret’s weren’t enough to incite a bout of trembling, the queen trailing in his wake threatened Imogen with a bout of the vapors.
Certain of her imminent and utter devastation, Imogen attempted a perfect curtsy, though her unsteady legs only executed an adequate one. “Your Majesty. Dr. Fowler.”
“I noted in your file this morning that you claim to have previously been afflicted with typhus.” Dr. Fowler looked down his beakish nose at her, his eyes flashing with unspoken warnings.
“I have, sir.” She glanced down at the floor, unable to meet anyone’s eyes for very long, lest they read her shameful secrets hidden there.
“Typhus tends to spread in an institution such as this, and it would not do to risk an epidemic. As you’re the only staff nurse that has overcome the disease, you are now immune to it. Therefore I’m assigning you as the Duke of Trenwyth’s personal nurse.”
So many emotions, from gladness to panic, crowded into Imogen’s throat, preventing a reply.
“She seems like a very correct and demure person, Dr. Fowler.” Queen Victoria regarded Imogen from clear, round eyes, her shrewd assessment as cutting as her words were kind.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Imogen managed not to stammer.
“It is of the utmost importance, Nurse Pritchard, that Trenwyth receive only the best of care. He is a hero of the empire, and we mandate that he survive. Are we understood?” The queen enunciated every one of her syllables with solemnity and abject clarity.
Bugger. Imogen swallowed the unladylike curse and nodded, again robbed of her ability to speak. Little more than half of those afflicted with typhus survived the disease. Would she be blamed if Trenwyth succumbed?
“I’ll do my utmost not to fail you, Your Majesty.”
“One hopes that’s enough,” the queen clipped.
“Dr. Longhurst is in with His Grace; give them a quarter hour to finish washing and dressing him before you enter.” Dr. Fowler’s uncompromisingly stern voice always gave her a case of the fidgets, and Imogen clutched her skirts to avoid them now.
“Of course, sir.” Should she curtsy again?
“Above all things, we must be proper,” the queen agreed. “Come, Dr. Fowler, we will discuss a few details of a delicate nature in your office.” By the time she’d finished talking, she was halfway to the stairs.
“Just so, Your Majesty.” Casting Imogen a voluminous look, he hurried after her, barking at the staff to resume their duties.
As they dispersed, Imogen exchanged a look of sheer amazement with Gwen, deciding to use her quarter hour wisely. Hurrying three doors down from her nurse’s station, she turned the latch and slipped inside, panting as though she’d sprinted a league.
“Ah, my dear Miss Pritchard!” Everyone in the world should hear their name enunciated with such warm and earnest enthusiasm, Imogen decided. It did wonders for the soul.
“Lord Anstruther.” She greeted him, with mirroring pleasure as she bustled into the paradoxically opulent gloom of his private quarters. The frail, septuagenarian earl all but disappeared into the bed beneath a pile of blankets. His head and thin shoulders, swathed in a dark silk dressing gown, were scooped into a sitting position by a mountain of pillows. “How do you fare this morning?” Imogen queried with a sad smile, reminded of what a merciless brigand time was to them all. “Describe how you feel so I may record it on your chart.”
“Like a steam engine has taken residence in my chest, but never you mind that.” He lifted a hand to wave in front of him, and Imogen made a note of how blue the paper-thin skin of his fingers had become. “I assume you’ve brought me your copy of the reclining bacchante sculpture?” He made a grand show of tilting his head this way and that, as though to spy something hidden behind her.
Bugger, she’d promised that she’d sketch Jean-Louis Durand’s scandalous sculpture for the earl on Saturday, when it was her habit to visit the Grand Gallery. They had it on loan for a very short time before it was returned to its French salon. A fellow artist, Anstruther had lamented to her that he was too unwell to visit the unveiling, and Imogen had said she’d do her best to immortalize it for him in all its indecent detail. Instead, she’d been forced to put in an extra shift at the Bare Kitten.
“No, my lord, and I do apologize. I was unable to find my way to the gallery.” She was equally unable to stand his disappointment, so she busied herself with his assessment so she didn’t have to look into his soft brown eyes. “I came to inform you that I won’t be in to see you for a while, as I’m going to be nursing someone with typhus, and I dare not bring that misery to your room.”
“Typhus, you say?” His brows were two silver-white bushes separated by surprise and inquiry.
Imogen leaned down to take his pulse, but covered the gesture with an air of conspiracy. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but His Grace, the Duke of Trenwyth, is here in this hospital.”
“Trenwyth? You mean they found that scamp? Little Collin Talmage?” His thin face split into a wrinkled grin.
She tried to keep the skepticism from her features. No one with eyes in their heads could call Trenwyth little.
“I’ve been worried about the boy,” the old man confessed. “Lived next to Trenwyth Hall my entire life. I knew his grandfather, by Jove, I even knew his great-grandfather. Outlived them all, and what do you think of that?” He curled his mustache between two fingers before he broke into a fit of coughs that concerned Imogen a great deal. “Typhus, you say? Aren’t you putting yourself in a great deal of danger on his behalf?”
She shook her head. “I’ve already had it.”
“Still … Bring me Dr. Fowler, I’ll demand he find someone else.”
Imogen made a gesture of helplessness, touched by his concern for her. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take it up with the queen, as she only just left.”
“The queen, you say? Well, doesn’t that just take the bright spot out of my week?” He visibly deflated, then seemed to come to a decision. “Why don’t you visit me anyway? There’s no cure for old age, or for what I’ve contracted. What’s typhus when there’s art to be discussed?”
Imogen’s heart tugged at the note of loneliness in his voice. “Dear Lord Anstruther, you know I would never put any of my patients in danger, least of all my favorite.” She attempted to charm him.
He snorted. “You’ll take one look at Trenwyth and change your mind about that, my dear, typhus or no. Handsome as the devil and afflicted with a similar set of morals, that’s Trenwyth.”
Struck by sudden curiosity, Imogen lowered herself to the edge of his bed. “You knew—know him well?”
“Watched the Talmage children grow, Sarah and I did.” Sarah, his wife, had been gone a long fifteen years, and still the man pined for her. “She was particularly fond of Collin,” he recalled. “Lad would pop over for a peppermint whenever she was in the garden and tarry round her skirts, that is, until he started chasing skirts of his own. A bit starving for female affection, if you ask me. Mother was a cold fish, God rest her soul.”
Imogen smiled. “He was a good boy, then?”
“Cole? Good? Not at all! But my Sarah always did have a soft spot for us rakes and ne’er-do-wells.” His eyes sparkled at her. “We never did have children, I suppose she enjoyed her time with the boy. Even wept a bit when he went into Her Majesty’s Service. She was mighty proud of him.”
“They say he contracted the disease in the Indies,” Imogen prompted, drinking in every detail.
True to his nature, Anstruther took the bait. “My valet, Cheever, got his h
ands on an American paper,” he bragged. “Januarius MacGahan wrote that he witnessed a man fitting Trenwyth’s description fighting like the very devil during the April Uprising in Bulgaria. Claims to have seen him dragged off by the Ottomans, he did.”
“But … the Ottomans deny that the April Uprising even happened,” Imogen speculated. “Surely they would have killed Trenwyth if he was witness to it, wouldn’t they?”
“Perhaps not if he’s a royal.” He shrugged. “Maybe they were paid his weight in gold for ransom.” The excitement and the conversation had the earl dissolving into a fit of coughs. The cancer was now in his lungs and there was naught to be done but make him comfortable. Only God knew when it would take him.
Checking her watch, Imogen stood. “I’ll send Gwen in with a compress and your tonic,” she said, hoping her bright tone would smother the grief already welling in her chest. “I vow to bring you my rendering just as soon as … as I can.
“Give us a kiss then.” He offered his cheek, and she complied. His skin was cool, dry, and thin beneath her lips.
“And take good care our boy Trenwyth,” Anstruther admonished. “Does the realm no good to lose that entire family. They are among the few noble families that deserved that designation.”
“As are you, my lord.”
* * *
Imogen stood in front of the closed door to Trenwyth’s room paralyzed by indecision. Dr. Longhurst’s voice filtered through the wall as he labored over the duke, likely assisted by a male orderly, and Imogen thanked her stars that she had more time to stall.
She burned to see Trenwyth for herself. And she dreaded it.
A delicately pretty, fair-haired nurse bustled past her with an armful of linen that, by the smell, had more on them than merely blood. If the girl was going to the laundry, she’d be passing right by Gwen’s station. Imogen struggled to remember her name, as the nurse had only recently been hired. She knew they’d been introduced, but this nurse worked on the third floor in the more crowded wards. Her name started with an M, didn’t it? Maggie, Mary …
“Molly,” she remembered aloud. “Your name is Molly, am I right?”
Startled, the girl whirled in surprise, and dropped the linens. “Look what you made me do!” Her brashness, as much as her accent, pegged her as being born no farther south than Yorkshire. She knelt to carefully gather up the linens, her face scrunched in a grimace of disgust. “If these stain the carpets, I’ll be sure that you clean them, not I. Though why they put carpets in a hospital where blood is the least despicable of the substances that might stain them, I’ll never guess. Some idiot toff wot thinks he knows something likely demanded it beneath his lofty feet. And don’t we always have to cow to what they say?”
Imogen blinked, taken aback by the woman’s vitriolic outburst.
“I—I do apologize, let me help.” She started for the bundle, but was shooed away.
“Stay where you are,” Molly demanded. “I’ll not be getting typhus along with a reprimand should the Dragon come by.”
Imogen softened a bit for the girl, who must have had a run-in with Brenda Gibby, the head nurse of the fourth floor. In truth, Imogen feared the woman dubbed “the Dragon” more than she did Ezio del Toro, and that fear was mighty.
“I haven’t been in His Grace’s room yet, you’re not in any danger of contracting—”
“I can’t lollygag about, I’ve work to do, your work now that you’ll be locked up in there,” Molly quipped shortly, eyeing her with wary gray mistrust as she stood with her bundle. “You weren’t about to add to it, were you?”
Imogen gave her a conciliatory look. “I was going to ask if you’d send Nurse Gwen Fitzgibbon to Lord Anstruther’s room on your way to the laundry. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the North Wing and back in time.”
“Might as well,” Molly said acerbically after a moment, and Imogen was almost surprised she agreed. “Those other of us always used to envy you fourth-floor girls, you know, working up here with your betters. But now that I’ve a taste of what it’s like, I’ll never complain again.”
Imogen very much doubted that, as complaining seemed to be a particular talent of Molly’s. Though it was nice to hear that someone appreciated the stressors that came with treating the rich and demanding, not to mention living up to the impossibly high standards of conduct expected of the fourth floor.
It was, in a word, exhausting.
As Molly departed without another acid remark, Imogen turned back to the closed door, on the other side of which was a man she’d dreamed about every night for the better part of a year.
Collin Talmage. Or, as she still referred to him in her private thoughts, Cole.
She raised her hand to tap softly on the door when it was wrenched open, nearly startling her to death.
“Dr. Longhurst.” Imogen gasped at the young doctor, who did likewise, as though she’d surprised him in equal measure. She’d heard Dr. Fowler say that Albert Longhurst was the most brilliant medical mind of the century, and she heartily believed it. Imogen pitied him, though, as it seemed that Dr. Longhurst often lived within that brilliant mind, and rarely glanced out to detect the rest of the world. A young, enthusiastic man, he spoke in quick, clipped sentences, eschewing rhetoric in the extreme. At times, he left out entire words altogether.
“Nurse Pritchard. You shouldn’t be here. It’s typhus.” A lock of hair the color of hot chocolate curled against his forehead and kept falling into eyes the color of oak leaves in the late summer. Imogen very much doubted that Dr. Longhurst remembered to go to the barber very often, though his disheveled appearance didn’t decrease his attractiveness.
“Because I’ve already survived typhus, Dr. Fowler assigned me as His Grace’s personal nurse.”
“Oh.” His eyes brightened, and he swiped at his hair as though only just noticing that he’d forgotten to groom this morning. “Very well, then. Do come in.” He drew the door open wider and stepped out of her path. “You know William? He’s also survived typhus, and will be helping you care for Lord Trenwyth.”
“Of course, hello.”
“Nurse Pritchard.” William, a young, sandy-haired lad, nodded to her. “I’ll step out now, but just tug on this bellpull ’ere if you need me, and I’ll be back faster than you can say ‘bob’s yer uncle.’”
“Thank you.” Imogen barely heard a word the cockney lad said, let alone noted his departure, so intent was she on the sleeping man almost as white as the sheets tucked around his prone form.
Cole.
The spare yet expensive room disappeared as she ventured closer, afraid to blink lest the shallow rise and fall of his chest cease. “How … how is he?” She didn’t even fight to keep the catch from her voice.
“Rather dim-witted, I’m afraid, but strong as an ox and willing to help.”
It took her a moment to process that Longhurst had misunderstood her meaning. “No, not William. I mean Trenwyth.”
“Ah.” He trailed her to the bedside. “I’ll admit the prognosis isn’t good. His fever refuses to break. Tried everything.” He sighed, as though Trenwyth’s fever were being purposely recalcitrant and tiresome to his patience. “Were the duke as strong as he should be, a man in his prime, I’d give him a better chance. But malnourished as he is, and with the rest of his injuries…” He let the sentence die, as it contained words unnecessary to utter.
Imogen stared down at Trenwyth’s face as he slept in a kind of fitful, feverish torpor. Beneath thin blankets, his limbs twitched restlessly and his eyes rolled behind their lids.
She devoured the sight of him, absorbing the features she knew, and acquainting herself with the alarming changes. The grooves in his forehead and branching from his eyes had deepened more than they should in a year. His pallor accentuated the hollows beneath his strong cheekbones, turning them gaunt to the point of skeletal. But she recognized his face, his dear, familiar, beautiful face, and thanked God that he’d made it home.
To her.
I
nformation processed slowly through the depths of her emotion and she latched on to the last thing Dr. Longhurst had said.
“The rest of his injuries?” She echoed his words in a query.
Instead of informing her of his clinical assessment, Longhurst grasped the edge of the coverlet and threw it wide, allowing her to see for herself.
“Dear. God.” Her voice broke on the exclamation.
“God had nothing to do with what happened to this man.” Even Dr. Longhurst, a colleague she knew to be rational and sensible to the point of stoic, injected an extra note of emotion into his voice at the ghastly sight of Trenwyth’s body.
“W-why?” Imogen whispered.
More bruises covered Trenwyth’s long form than unmarked flesh. His hipbones jutted against the thin white linen of the undergarment draped to grant him a modicum of modesty. He was malnourished, emaciated, and had obviously been tortured. His skin, once a hue of gold to rival the sunlit barley fields in August, now reminded her of the pale wax she had to peel from the top of an unopened bottle of Ravencroft Scotch. Though his cuts and abrasions had already been stitched and wrapped, the angriest bruises suggested he’d spent a great deal of time bound by coarse rope, indenting at his neck, his ankles and wris—.
Imogen closed her eyes, assaulted by a wave of anger, compassion, and disbelief.
His left hand, it was … gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You’re not going to cry, are you?” Panic edged into Dr. Longhurst’s voice.
“No.” Imogen sniffed, fearing that at any moment she might be proved a liar. It was all she could do to tear her horrified gaze from the rounded, bandage-wrapped wrist. “But … how did this happen? Who did this to him?”
Trenwyth shivered, though a sheen of sweat glossed his skin, and Imogen helped Dr. Longhurst to cover him as he murmured strange and nonsensical things.
“Know what I believe?” Longhurst asked in his abbreviated way, looking about them as though to assure their privacy. “The Ottoman Turks. Now help me open the windows. There’s new evidence that fresh, clean air is beneficial to those with fevers this high, and all of our antipyretic efforts have been thwarted.”
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