“He Won’t Survive the Night,” the Doctor Warned—So His Family Abandoned the Dying Duke of Fenmere, Unaware That the Stranger Who Refused to Leave Him Had Discovered His Carriage Crash Was No Accident.

PART 1

He would hear those hooves for the rest of his life.

Thaddius Vane, Duke of Fenmir, lay on a door laid across two trestles in a stranger’s kitchen with his thigh broken in two places, his sight going gray at the edges, and heard every syllable of his own abandonment, and could not move his jaw enough to stop it.

“Mortification has begun in the wound,” said Dr. Peele, “or will begin. I should not care to move him, and I could not answer for him if he stayed. Twelve hours. Fifteen at the outside.”

“I heard a man take three sentences to say he does not know,” said a woman’s voice, and there was the sound of a basin set down hard.

It came nearer. “You will get out of my light, all three of you.”

“Miss Hollis,” said Sir Talbot, in the tone of a man reading a label, “you will not speak to Lady Arabella in that manner.”

“I have not spoken to Lady Arabella at all. I have spoken to you.”

Lady Arabella came close to his ear then, her voice carrying in the particular whisper of a woman performing tenderness for a room. “Thaddius. We are going for help. A proper surgeon and a proper bed. You are not to be frightened.”

He knew even then, in the gray, that she did not mean to come back. It was in the way she said Heatheridge — twenty-two miles, and the wrong way from any surgeon.

“He cannot hear you,” said Peele.

“Then it does not signify what I say.” She stood, and her skirts went away across the brick floor.

“Miss Hollis,” Talbot said again, brisk now, cheerful, the business settled. “You will do what can be done. The estate will not forget it. If he lives, send to Fenmir.” A pause exactly long enough to be noticed. “If he dies, you had better send to the coroner at Heatheridge. And you had better have somebody in the house who is not your father — for when a gentleman dies in a lonely place with money on him, people are apt to ask what he was given, and by whom.”

“He has no money on him. It went in the dyke with the carriage.”

“Then that is another thing they will ask,” said Talbot pleasantly.

The door. The rain coming in cold across the brick. Boots. A horse fussing at the mounting block. Arabella laughing at something, thirty feet away on the drove — and then the whole of it going eastward at a trot, and a canter, and then nothing but the rain on the reeds.

“They will send back for him,” said an old man’s voice, slow, near the fire. “In the morning they will send a cart.”

“No,” said the same voice, after a moment’s listening. “Listen to the horses, girl. Men who mean to send back do not go off at that pace.”

Thaddius lay in the dark of his own eyelids and listened to his family leave him.

Then hands came onto him — small, hard, cold from the water — and somebody cut his breeches away from the thigh with a pair of shears, unhurried, snip and snip. A second pair of hands came onto the leg above the wound. Broad. Dry. They went over the bone the way a man reads a page.

“Be still,” said the old voice. “I am blind, sir, and I shall want a moment.”

That got his eyes open. A low kitchen, a brick floor, a fen-black sky in the window, a fire. A woman of perhaps six-and-twenty kneeling at his hip, her sleeves pinned back, brown hair coming loose from its pins, a face he would not have looked at twice in a ballroom and could not afterward stop looking at — and an expression of complete, impersonal attention, as though he were a job of work. Beside her on a stool, a big old man with a still, white-eyed face turned slightly away, his hands moving on the broken thigh.

“Two breaks,” the old man said. “One clean, one not. The lower has come out through the flesh, and the flesh has taken in the mud of that dyke, and that is our whole trouble, and it is trouble enough.”

“He said mortification,” said the younger woman.

“He said it because it is a word that ends a conversation. There is no mortification in this leg tonight. There is dirt in it, which is a different thing, and can be got at.”

“Then he is not dying.”

“I did not say that.” The old man sat back. “He may die of it. He will very likely die of it if the wound is left, and he will certainly die of it if he is put in a cart tonight and driven eleven miles. He will lose the leg entire if we are slow.”

“So we shall not be slow.” He turned his blind face to the ceiling and said, in exactly the voice of a man asking for the salt: “Get the door off the hinges in the back kitchen. Two candles at his hip, one at my left hand. The sailmaker’s needle out of the roll, and the waxed thread. Boil the shears a full five minutes by the clock. The brandy behind the flour, not the brandy in the cupboard. And my father’s tourniquet strap out of the chest. And bar that door. If those horses come back tonight, I do not want them in my kitchen.”

Thaddius found his voice at last. It came out of him like something dragged over gravel.

“Who are you?”

The old man’s face came round toward the sound. “Elias Hollis. Twenty-one years surgeon’s mate, and eleven years blind, and it is my door you are lying on. This is my daughter Maud, who keeps the gate here and does the seeing for both of us. And you, sir, are the Duke of Fenmir, whose bank that is out there, and whose drove that is, and whose fault it is that the near-side rail on that causeway has been rotten since Whitsun.”

“Now, sir,” Elias went on, “I am going to hurt you a great deal, and I am going to go on hurting you for the best part of an hour, and there is nothing at all to be done about that. You may swear at me as much as you like. I shall not mind it.”

Maud set the candles down. She turned his head — the only part of him that still answered — and looked at him with that same flat, complete attention, and said the first thing she ever said to him directly.

“Bite on this, Your Grace. You will want to.”

He bit on it.

The hour that followed had no shape to it afterward, only candles going and coming and the smell of hot brandy and scorched thread, and the old man’s unhurried voice saying hold and turn him a little and good, all the way through — and a woman’s forearm braced across his chest, her weight on it, and her counting out loud, steadily, from one to twenty and back again, over and over.

Somewhere in the second hundred, he understood that she was not counting for the old man at all. She was counting for him, so that there should be something in the room besides the pain.

She never once let the count go ragged.

“Do not take the leg,” he said, at some point.

“Nobody is taking anything,” said Maud Hollis. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.”

It was done a little after two. They splinted the thigh between two lengths of ash and strapped it, got four blankets over him, and Elias Hollis washed his hands in the basin for a long while with his blind face turned to the wall, and said nothing to anybody.

Thaddius slept and did not sleep. Once in the gray he woke to find the fire banked, the old man asleep in his chair, and the woman gone from the room entirely.

She came in at first light with the rain still on her, her skirt black with wet to the waist, carrying something heavy in a wet sack cradled in both arms. She did not put it down by the fire. She carried it past the trestles to the chest under the window, put it inside, shut the lid, and stood a moment with both hands flat on it.

Then she took off her boots, looked at the strapping by the window light, and said, “Your Grace, can you hear me this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Maud. “Then we shall try you with some milk.”

He did not ask her that morning, nor for fourteen weeks after, what was in the sack. It did not seem to him, at the time, to be a thing of any importance whatsoever.