“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 8

But he was to learn that autumn that he had less time than he thought.

His aunt, the dowager, had watched the marriage she had been forced to arrange with a suspicion that only sharpened as it prospered. She had expected a fortune hunter and a scandal. She had got instead a lowborn nobody who had somehow charmed her cold nephew into laughing in the garden, who had taken over the mistress’s keys and the still room and the whole running of the house, and who—this above all offended the dowager’s sense of the fitness of things—was forever meddling in matters no lady should touch. Physic. The still room half the night. Village women coming to the kitchen door for her.

The dowager had marked, as the Duke had marked, that his astonishing recovery had gone step for step with his marriage. But where the Duke, loving his wife, had read the truth of it, the dowager, hating her, read something else.

She began to watch the Duchess. And one gray September morning in the still room, while the Duchess was gone to the village to sit with a laboring woman, the dowager took down from the shelf the great blue bottle of Sir Godfrey’s tincture. She drew the stopper. She dipped her finger and tasted.

Water. Near enough water. Faintly, ghostly bitter, but watered to nothing. A thing that could not have physicked a mouse.

The dowager stood in the cold still room and put it together in her own way—which was the wrong way, the deadly way. The nobody had watered the Duke’s medicine. For six months, the nobody had been giving her nephew water in place of the physic that alone stood between him and his father’s death. And he had grown well in spite of it—by God’s mercy, by the reprieve of a strong constitution. But let the reprieve end. Let the shadow come down as it had come down on his father. And there would be no physic in him to meet it. Nothing. Water only. And he would die.

The dowager did not go to her nephew, whom she believed bewitched. She sat down that same hour and wrote an express to Sir Godfrey Me in London. Come at once. There is villainy here. The Duke’s physic has been tampered with these six months, and I fear for his life. And she sent it off by the fastest rider.

Then she went to the Duke’s own rooms and took out a fresh, sealed bottle of the tincture that Sir Godfrey had left unopened—the full strength of it. And she resolved that from this night, her nephew should have his true medicine again, every drop of it, thrice daily in his wine.

She did not know that the bottle in her hand was the poison. She did not know that she was about to pour into her beloved nephew, in loving, righteous, murderous certainty, the very thing that had been killing him.

The Duke took the tincture from his aunt’s own hand that evening and did not think to question it. She brought it to him herself in the small saloon, poured out full strength into his after-dinner wine, and stood over him with such fond insistence that he drank it off to please her. The bitterness flooded his mouth—the old bitterness that he had not tasted in months. He set down the glass with a strange, cold prickle at the back of his neck. But the moment passed.

He thought of it in the morning, when he woke and could not get his breath.

It came on him gradually over that day and the next, exactly as he remembered it. The tightness in the chest. The breath that would not fill. The gray weariness that no rest would mend. He saw it in the shaving glass on the second morning, and his blood ran cold. The blue gathering at the corners of his mouth. His father’s blue. The shadow.

It had come back.

His aunt was tireless. She dosed him faithfully, thrice daily, in wine. Weeping over him. Murmuring that she had come in time, that she had discovered the wickedness before it was too late. He was too ill by the third day to make sense of her murmurs. He knew only that the more of her physic he took, the worse he grew. The blue crept up his lips. And the whole household went hushed and dark and began, in the way of great houses, to speak of him in the past tense.

The Duchess of Edshot came home on the third day at dusk, gray with weariness, having brought a breech child alive into the world against all the odds and saved the mother too. She came home to her own house, wanting only her husband and her bed. She found the great hall full of that hush. Mrs. Harrow white-faced on the stair.

And Glenna Viner knew, before a word was said, in the cold plunge of her physician’s instinct, exactly what she would find above.

“How long?”

“Three days, Your Grace. It came on sudden after you’d gone. The blueness, the breath. Sir Godfrey’s been sent for. The dowager has not left his side. She’s been giving him his physic faithful, every dose.”

“His physic. The blue tincture.”

“Full strength, Your Grace. The way it ought. The dowager found it had gone weak somehow in the still room, and she’s been most particular to give it to him proper.”

Glenna Viner understood the whole of it in an instant, standing on the stair with her gloves in her hand. And the tiredness fell off her like a dropped cloak. And something else came up in its place—not fear, though she was afraid; not grief, though her heart was breaking. The cold, clear, terrible focus of her father’s gift. The thing that does not falter when everything is at stake, because it cannot afford to.

She went into his room. And there he lay against the pillows, gasping, the blue thick at his lips, his strong hands plucking weakly at the coverlet as his father’s had plucked. And the dowager sat beside him with the great blue bottle and a wineglass, in the very act of raising his head to give him another dose.

“Stop,” said the Duchess of Edshot.