“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 6

The fever came to the village of Edshot in the first warm week of May. It began at the far end, in the cramped cottages by the mill where the poorest of his people lived crowded, and it ran through them like fire through dry gorse—a putrid fever with a rash and a raving heat, the kind that empties a poor street in a fortnight, and that the great physicians would not cross a threshold to attend.

The Duke heard of it from his steward over the ledgers in the flat tones of a man discussing a thing that would cost money in dead tenants. He heard of it a second time that same evening when his wife came to him in the estate room with her bonnet already tied and her plainest gown on, a basket over her arm.

“There is sickness in the mill cottages,” she said. “I am going down.”

“You are not going down to a putrid fever. I forbid it.”

“Varden. It is catching. It kills. There is a woman down there with three children and a fourth coming and a husband already raving. There is no one within twelve miles who will go to them but me. I know how to nurse a putrid fever. I have done it before. Let me go.”

He looked at her a long moment. The fear of the fever taking her, carrying her off, was so large in him that for a moment he could not speak.

“Then I am coming with you,” he said.

The Duke of Edshot went down into the mill cottages in the May dusk with a basket on his arm like a farmer’s boy and passed—he would come to think—one of the finest nights of his life. He had never been inside such a place. He had owned these cottages eleven years and had never once ducked his head under one of their low lintels.

He ducked it now into a single close room that held a whole family and their sickness. Earth floor and a smoking fire and a raving man on a straw pallet and a great-bellied woman gone gray with terror and three frightened children in the corner. And he stood there useless, a duke in a fine coat, while his wife sat down her basket and took off her bonnet and became before his eyes something he had never seen.

She was not the composed stranger of the dinner table, nor the careful, watchful woman who guarded her locked door. She was swift and sure and entirely without fear, and the whole terrified room turned to her as to a rock in a flood.

She had the windows open in a minute. “The bad air must go out. It feeds the fever.” She had the fire mended and a kettle on, and she was down on her knees by the raving man, her hand on his burning forehead, her fingers at his pulse, reading him the way she read everything. She stripped the fouled straw and had it burned. She washed the sick man with vinegar and cool water. She settled the terrified wife and gathered the three children to her, looking them over one by one for the first flush of the sickness.

And the Duke of Edshot fetched and carried at his wife’s command all the long night. He carried water from the mill race. He held the candle where she bid him hold it close and steady while she looked into the sick man’s throat and eyes. He built the fire and boiled the linen. And once, he held the raving man down by the shoulders with his own two hands—the fine white hands that had signed contracts and turned the pages of ledgers—while she got a draught into him and felt the fever heat of a poor tenant’s body burning under his palms.

He did whatever she told him, exactly as she told him, and asked no questions. And somewhere in the small hours, he stopped being the Duke of Edshot, doing a strange charity, and became only a man working through the night beside a woman he loved.

The raving man’s fever broke toward dawn. Glenna sat back on her heels and let out a long breath. She looked up and found him watching her across the guttering candle, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

“He will live,” she said. “He’ll be weak a fortnight, but he’ll live.”

She pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Thank you,” she said low. “For coming. For holding the candle steady. Most men’s hands shake, holding a candle over a raving man. Yours did not.”

“I had a good example before me,” he said, “of hands that do not shake.”

He was looking at her hands—the swift, competent hands, blistered a little from the boiling linen, that had pushed death out of a poor man’s door while the great physicians slept in their feather beds twelve miles off.

“Glenna.” He stopped. The question was very near his lips. Where did you learn this? Who taught you? What are you? And because he knew obscurely that if he asked it here, worn out and unguarded in the gray dawn, she might answer—and he was not, he found, quite ready. He wanted to be worthy of the answer first.

So he did not ask.

He said only, “I have owned these cottages eleven years and never crossed a threshold. You have shown me my own house, madam, and I find I did not know the half of it.”

“You know it now,” she said.

“I am beginning to.”

He helped her to her feet and did not let go of her blistered hand at once. “Come home. You have been on your feet all night, and you must rest.”

She laughed, tired and soft in the dawn, with a saved man sleeping behind them, and let him keep her hand.

“What has become of the cold Duke of Edshot who wanted no companion and no conversation and no wife but a means to an end?”

“He has been very ill,” said the Duke, “and someone has been physicking him without his leave all the spring. I do not perfectly understand the cure, but I find I do not want it to stop.”