“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

 PART 4

Days at Edshot settled into a pattern of distance. The Duke rose early and rode out over the frozen fields, driving himself harder than he should have gone. He shut himself in the estate room with his steward and his ledgers, setting his affairs in such order that no cousin could unpick them after he was gone. He dined with her at the two ends of the long table, in the silence he had decreed.

And all the while, though he did not know it, his wife was fighting for his life.

She began with the physic. There was a great deal of it. His London man, Sir Godfrey Me, a knight of medicine with a coach and four and a manner like a bishop, sent down from town every fortnight a fresh consignment of bottles and boluses and papers of powder. There was a blue tincture to be taken thrice daily in wine. There was a gray powder against the breathlessness. There was a course of bleeding once a month, and a paste to be rubbed on the chest at night that smelled to Glenna’s trained nose unmistakably of mercury.

She had watched a man die of that paste once. Her father had been called too late and had stood over the bed and told the family gently that it was not the disease that had wasted the poor gentleman to a shadow—but the cure. And the family had turned him out of the house for saying so, because it is a hard thing to be told you have paid a great physician to poison someone you love. The color of that dying man’s skin was the color of her husband’s skin beneath the eyes in the candlelight.

She could prove nothing. She could accuse no one. She could only work in the dark.

She made herself useful in the still room first, which no one thought strange in a new-married lady. Mrs. Harrow was glad of the help. And little by little, so gently that no one marked the change, Glenna began to alter the Duke’s regimen from beneath.

The blue tincture in his evening wine grew weaker, week by week, until it was near enough water. Foxglove was in it already—her father had taught her that the herb sat on a knife’s edge, the same small measure that steadied a laboring heart tipping over, in a heavier hand, into the very poison it was meant to cure. Sir Godfrey’s compounding, mixed heavy with antimony besides, had long since crossed that edge. So in place of the tincture, in the dish of broth she began to send up to him herself of an evening, she put foxglove of her own—the true old country remedy, in the small, exact grains her father had measured a hundred times, given not by a great man’s careless guess, but by the careful reading of the pulse it was meant to steady.

She let the mercury paste go dry and unused in its pot, and rubbed his chest on the nights she was with him with a salve of her own that smelled of camphor and did no harm. She could not stop the bleedings—those were done by the surgeon from the town before witnesses. But she could feed him after, the iron-rich things her father swore restored a man. The liver and the dark greens and the small beer, dressed up as a duchess’s whims.

It was slow. It was the work of weeks and then of months. There were nights she wept in her own room from the fear of it—the sheer, unpardonable presumption of it, the knowledge that if she erred by a grain in either direction, she might do the very murder she was laboring to prevent.

But her father had been the best in the West of England. And he had made her nearly as good. And her hands were steady even when her heart was not.

By the time the crocuses came up along the south front of Edshot—golden and purple through the last of the snow—the Duke of Edshot had ridden out one morning and come back at noon and realized, with a start that stopped him at the foot of the great stair, that he was not tired.

He stood there with his hand on the marble newel and took stock of himself as though of a stranger. His breath came easy. His hand, when he held it up before his face, did not shake. He had ridden ten miles and eaten a good dinner, and he wanted—God help him—to ride ten more.

He looked at his own reflection in the tall pier glass at the stair’s turn, and the man who looked back was not the blue-lipped ghost who had floated on the black window in January. There was color in his face. His eyes were clear.

“It will pass,” he told himself. “It is a reprieve, no more. My father had good weeks too, before the end. The shadow lifts, and one is fooled, and then it comes down all at once.”

But he stood at the foot of the stair a long moment in the thin light of a March noon. And up above him on the landing, unseen, the Duchess of Edshot stood at the tall window with a bowl of hyacinths in her two steady hands and watched her husband discover that he was alive.

She pressed her lips together hard and did not let herself smile and did not let herself weep. And she carried the flowers away down the back stair before he could turn and see her face and read in it the secret she had sworn to keep.