Chapter Two #2
She did not. She had not wanted to wait for one, nor was she certain one would be granted. She pushed her wire spectacles up her nose and lied through her teeth. “Yes, of course.”
“Excellent. And who is it you have come to see?” he asked, accepting her gloves.
“Lord Theodore Arlington,” she answered.
It seemed to her the porter hesitated in the act of hanging her garment on the peg. Then he offered her a kind smile. “Please follow me.”
He led her on a slow march up the wide, front stairs as anticipation sang through her veins. She was finally going to see him. Would he be happy that she’d come? Would he open his arms to her? Tears pricked the backs of her eyes.
As they neared the landing, she noted the heavy scent of lavender in the air.
It brought to mind one of the scientific articles she and her friends had read discussing the efficacy of the herb in calming the senses.
Would that it worked on her, now. Her palms were sweating.
Her breath was choppy. Her eyes felt too large for their sockets.
She blinked and drew in a deep breath. When she finally saw Teddy she did not want to appear crazed.
Finally they crested the last step. The porter continued on, pausing before a closed wooden door. He opened it and stepped aside for her to enter. “If you’ll wait here?”
She glanced into what appeared to be a large drawing room. The first trickle of unease made her hesitate. She sent the porter her most brilliant smile. “Will you be bringing Lord Arlington to meet me, here?”
The porter’s smile dimmed a fraction. “In truth, madam, the doctor did not inform me of any appointments scheduled for Lord Arlington. I was…er…under the impression he was not to receive any visitors for the foreseeable future.”
Georgina kept her smile firmly in place. “Whyever not?”
The porter began to look harried. “If you’ll wait inside, ma’am. I will fetch the doctor. He will explain everything.”
Georgina considered her options. Her chances of seeing Teddy today were deteriorating rapidly. If she awaited the doctor, she suspected she would soon find herself politely escorted out.
Still, with no real choice in the matter, she crossed the threshold. She had taken no more than two steps when the door closed behind her.
She spun around, retraced her steps, and pressed her ear to the cold wooden door.
She could hear nothing but the sound of her own rushing blood.
In a split-second decision, she grasped the brass lever and opened the door wide enough to poke her head into the corridor.
Glancing right and left, she spotted the porter reaching the end of the passageway and turning right.
Assuming he did intend to fetch the doctor, he was likely en route to the man’s office.
That might mean the patients’ rooms were located in the opposite direction.
She considered briefly. She’d traveled a long way to get here, had spent a fortune changing out horses en route, and, with Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s cryptic description of Teddy’s “damaged” condition ringing in her head, her next course of action made itself glaringly clear.
Praying they did not decide to lock her up for lunacy, herself, she fisted her skirts in her free hand—in the other she clutched the reticule she’d brought with her at the last moment—and made a run for it.
Reaching the end of the corridor, she turned left, then braked hard, eyeing the wide passageway. Hope filled her at the sight of the doors lining the dark paneled walls on either side. Surely these were bedchambers. Teddy must be inside one of them.
She set off at a brisk pace, rather than a run, not wanting to draw undue attention should a staff member, or a patient for that matter, notice her roaming unescorted.
The door to the first chamber she passed stood ajar and she glanced inside to find it occupied with an elderly man, seated before the window and staring out. She leapt past the opening and continued on.
The next door she came to was closed. Biting her lip, she opened it a fraction and peered inside. A man lay on the bed in the room’s center, snoring. Unable to rule out the possibility the man was Teddy, she crept inside.
It was not him, but a gray-haired older gentleman. She tiptoed back to the door and into the corridor.
Then she heard the unmistakable sound of voices, raised in argument. Before her eyes, chamber doors opened and heads emerged, all glancing toward one chamber in particular, the apparent location of the ruckus.
Abruptly, one of the voices sounded achingly familiar.
“Damn it, I said no more tea and no more medicine.”
A crash of some sort followed. Then she caught a series of grunts and snarls, accompanied by scuffing feet and, she feared, flesh hitting flesh.
Appalled, Georgina bolted toward the chamber and passed through the open door just as she heard from behind her, “That’s her, doctor. I swear, I bid her wait.”
She slammed the door shut and sought to lock it, only no lock existed. Groaning in frustration, she settled for bracing her slippered feet and pressing her back against the solid wooden door, for all the good it would do her.
Only then did she take in the state of the chamber she’d entered—and the man inside it.
Teddy, at long last. She drank in the sight of him—unshaven, cheeks ashen, hair too long, body too lean, and…
a blackened eye? She choked on a sob, despite her stern admonition to herself not overwhelm him with her emotions when at last she saw him.
In the end, it did not matter. Neither he nor the two brawny looking men attempting to control him paid her any attention.
Teddy issued a hard kick behind him. His hessians made contact with an armchair, tumbling it onto its side to join an overturned cart that had once, evidently, delivered a tea service that was now in scattered bits across thick, patterned carpet now stained brown.
The door lever rattled and turned and despite her efforts to stay it, swung open, pushing her ignominiously to the wall.
She remained there, hidden, and harboring hope her presence might be forgotten as the new arrivals—the porter and, most likely, the doctor he’d gone to fetch—took in the mayhem.
“Lord Arlington, this again?” Both the speaker’s displeasure and air of authority were plain.
“I don’t want any more bloody potions. I made myself quite clear on that, yesterday.” Teddy spoke through clenched teeth. “Now instruct these apes to take their hands off me and get the hell out of here.”
Georgina chanced a glance from behind the door.
Teddy faced off with a man who stood two heads beneath him, hands clasped behind his back.
The orderlies, or apes as Teddy described them, now stood on either side of him, each grasping an arm and looking thoroughly vexed.
“We’ve been over this, Lord Arlington. The medicine is for your own good, prescribed by your own family physician. It will calm you, something you need in order to heal—and will keep you from attempting to harm yourself again.”
Teddy’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I told you.” He articulated each word. “I have never tried to harm myself.”
“Never? Are you certain?”
His jaw hardened. “I am certain I have not since returning to London. You know very well I cannot remember events before that, doctor, but, if I were to place a wager, I would bet all I had that I had not ever attempted to cause myself bodily harm.”
“Then how do you explain charging headlong into the third-floor balcony railing and plummeting to the grounds below? A fall which, only by the grace of God, you survived.”
“I never ran at it. The railing broke.”
“The three-inch stone railing gave way? You see how unlikely that is, don’t you?”
Teddy hung his head in defeat. “Please. I don’t want it and I don’t need it.”
Georgina’s heart hurt, seeing him like this, and at the thought of him trying to kill himself. And what did he mean, he wasn’t able to remember previous events?
The porter whispered into the doctor’s ear.
His thick brows arched upward. “Ah, yes. Your lady visitor.”
“Come again?” Teddy demanded.
The porter grasped the door lever and yanked the door away from the wall, exposing Georgina. Her cheeks flooded with heat as all five men stared at her.
She had eyes only for one. She sent him a tremulous smile. “Hello, Teddy.”
As he gazed at her, his mouth curved in a grim smile that held absolutely no warmth. “Hello madam, whoever you are.”