“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 7

His aunt told him the news that would unravel everything.

Sir Godfrey Me came down from London in July for his quarterly inspection of his noble patient. He examined the Duke, took his pulse, looked at his eyes and his tongue, and grew by degrees extremely puzzled.

“Extraordinary. Most extraordinary. The pulse full and regular, the color excellent. You have continued the tincture? The blue tincture, thrice daily in wine?”

“Faithfully,” the Duke heard himself answer. “My wife oversees it herself.”

“Ah. A most devoted lady. You see, Your Grace, the value of a diligent nurse.”

And then, packing his instruments, Sir Godfrey added idly the thing that changed everything.

“Viner—did you say the lady was before her marriage? Not one of the Devonshire Viners? The physician, Edmund Viner?”

The Duke went very still. “What of him?”

“Oh, a sad business. Before your time. Viner was reckoned the cleverest diagnostician in the West of England once. Had a great flux of theories about our methods—the bleeding, the mercury, the antimony. Held that we were killing where we meant to cure, and was not shy to say so. Ruined himself with it in the end. There was a scandal. A great lady died. He was struck off and disgraced and died a poor man. He had a daughter, I recall. To whom he taught his theories—which was a scandal in itself, physic being no fit study for a woman. But that was long ago. Why do you ask, Your Grace?”

“No reason,” said the Duke of Edshot in a voice that came from very far away. “A name I had heard. It is nothing.”

Sir Godfrey Me climbed into his coach and rolled away down the long avenue, well pleased with himself, having no notion that he had just handed the Duke of Edshot, whole and complete and terrible, the secret his wife had guarded with her life.

The Duke of Edshot did not sleep that night, nor the next. He walked the long gallery in the dark, up and down beneath the painted eyes of four hundred years of Edshot dead, and put it together piece by piece. The whole of it.

Edmund Viner. Cleverest diagnostician in the West. Who had held that the great men were killing where they meant to cure. Struck off. Disgraced. Dead a poor man. A daughter taught his theories.

And that daughter, three years destitute, answering the discreet inquiry of a nameless duke who was dosing himself to death on the blue tincture and the mercury paste—exactly, precisely, the two poisons her ruined father had died crying out against.

She had known. She must have known the moment she walked into that cold drawing room in January. She had looked at him—at the corners of his mouth where the blue gathered, at the color under his eyes—and she had asked, Are you dying? In a voice he had thought merely direct. He understood now it was the voice of a physician taking a case.

She had known he was not dying of his father’s disease at all. She had known the great men were killing him. And she had said nothing, because who would have believed her? A ruined man’s disgraced daughter, a woman, against Sir Godfrey Me and his coach and four. She would have been turned out of the house within the hour, and he would have gone back to his poisons and died on schedule.

So she had married him instead. She had signed his cold bargain and come into his cold house, and having no other way to save his life, had saved it by stealth. Watered his tincture. Buried his mercury. Fed him her father’s true remedies. Held her tongue. Asked for nothing.

And she had been ready to take her settlement and her house when the child was weaned and go away and let him live out the life she had given him back—never knowing she had given it.

Why? That was the thing he walked the gallery over. Why would a woman do such a thing? Not for the settlement. Not for gratitude or credit. A woman did not risk her life—for it was her life—night after night for six months on the life of a cold stranger who had bought her like a broodmare. Unless she loved him. Had loved him already. Before the bargain. Before the house. Before any of it.

He stopped beneath the portrait of his own father. Thirty-three years old, painted five years before the shadow took him. Strong. Laughing.

The Duke of Edshot put his hand against the frame of his father’s portrait and bowed his head. And something broke in him at last that had been twenty years breaking, and he wept silently, standing up in the dark gallery. As a man weeps who has not done it since he was nineteen and has forgotten how, and finds it hurts like a wound reopening, and heals like one too.

He did not go to her in the morning and tell her he knew. Some caution held his tongue. Some fear that if he laid it all out too fast, he would frighten her—that a secret held six months at the risk of a life was not a thing to be torn open across the marmalade. He would go carefully. He would earn it. He would court his own wife slowly, so that when he told her he knew, she would believe it was not gratitude speaking, but love.