“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 9

The dowager turned. Her face, when she saw who it was, twisted with a hatred she had kept hidden all these months.

“You dare come here. You dare show your face. Get out of his room. You have done enough. I know what you are. I know what you have done.”

“Put down the glass,” said Glenna. She did not raise her voice. She was already crossing the room. “That tincture is killing him. It has been killing him from the beginning. Put it down.”

“Do you hear her?” the dowager cried. “His own physic. Sir Godfrey’s own prescription. She calls it poison. She who watered it these six months to murder him by inches!”

Glenna reached the bed. She took his gasping face between her two cool hands—the way she had on their wedding night—and turned it to her. She looked into his fogged and frightened eyes and said, low and clear and only to him:

“Varden. Listen to me. I am going to tell you a thing, and you must choose whether to believe me, and there is not much time. You are not dying of your father’s disease. You are being poisoned. The blue tincture is foxglove and antimony wrongly compounded—too much of a remedy that only heals in a careful hand. And the paste on your chest is mercury. Together they have been killing you since before I ever came to this house. I have kept you alive these six months by taking them away and giving you the true remedy in their place. And your aunt has undone it in three days, out of love and ignorance. If you take one more dose of that bottle, you will be dead by morning. That is the truth. My father died crying it out, and no one believed him. I am asking you to believe me.”

The dowager was on her feet, shrieking for the servants, shrieking that the Duchess was a murderess, that she had confessed it. The door was filling with white, frightened faces. And into that uproar, cloaked and travel-stained, having driven through the night, strode Sir Godfrey Me.

“What in the name of heaven?” said the great physician.

The dowager flew to him and clung to his arm, pouring out her accusation. The watered physic. The confession. The lowborn murderess.

Sir Godfrey drew himself up in all the majesty of his coach and his fifty years at the head of the profession. He looked down his nose at the plain woman standing over the Duke’s bed, with her hands still cradling the dying man’s face.

“Madam. Stand away from my patient. Whatever you are, you are no physician. And you will answer to the law for this. Stand away.”

And the Duke of Edshot—gasping and blue at the lips, with barely the breath left to speak—chose.

He had been choosing, in a way, since January. Choosing to let her near. Choosing to laugh. Choosing to hope. But he made the whole of the choice now, in the one instant that mattered. And he made it not on faith, but on knowledge. Because he alone in that room knew what Sir Godfrey’s parting words in July had told him. Knew whose daughter she was, and what she had done, and why.

He lifted one hand. It cost him everything. And he closed it, weakly but unmistakably, around his wife’s wrist, holding her hands to his face where they were. And he turned his head against Sir Godfrey and the dowager and the whole weight of the world’s certainty.

“My wife physics me. No one else. Take your bottle, Sir Godfrey, and your paste, and get out of my house.”

The silence was absolute.

“Your Grace,” Sir Godfrey began, “you are not in your right—”

“I am dying,” said the Duke. “And I find, dying, that I believe her and not you. Edmund Viner was right. You have killed God knows how many with your blue bottle, and you would have killed me but for her. Get out.”

His eyes found Glenna. And for one moment, there was nothing in his gasping, ruined face but a trust so complete it stopped her breath.

“Do what you must,” he said. “I know what you are. I have known since July. Do it. I am not afraid.”

She wept then. One moment only. The tears running down while her hands stayed steady. And then she did it.

She swept the blue bottle from the dowager’s hands. It smashed on the hearth. She called for hot water and vinegar and had the mercury paste scrubbed from his chest. She flung open the windows to the cold September night. She purged the poison as her father had taught her. She gave him charcoal and white of egg against what was already in him. And through the long night, she gave him in careful drops the true foxglove, the honest remedy in the honest measure, reading his laboring pulse under her fingers minute by minute and turning it by main knowledge and main love back from the edge.

Sir Godfrey Me watched from the doorway for an hour, meaning to gather evidence for the inquest he was sure would follow. And then, being after all a better observer than he was a physician, he stopped meaning it. He watched the blue go out of the Duke’s lips under this woman’s hands. Watched the plucking hands go still, and the breath come easier, and the ruined face find toward dawn a little color. He watched a dead man come back.

And Sir Godfrey Me, who was vain and complacent and had killed more than he would ever know with his blue bottle, was not in the end wicked. He said at last, into the gray light, to no one: “God forgive us. The old man was right.”

He was gone before the Duke woke. He did not stay for thanks, having earned none. He took his coach and four back to London and never sent another bottle to Edshot.