Chapter One
“Have a care, man!” Montague Lancaster, Duke of Caelfall, snarled.
As expected, the doctor did not even flinch. He was accustomed to the snarls and gruffness he was subjected to, Montague thought darkly. He knew what to expect when attending to miserable men.
Sighing heavily, he watched the doctor who was in turn carefully examining the wound on Montague’s leg.
It should have healed by now, Montague was sure. He was no doctor, to be sure, but a leg simply did not take this long to heal. How long had it been now? Five months? Almost six?
He groaned under his breath at the pain of holding his thigh at this uncomfortable angle. And that he had to be reduced to this! By a stray bullet, that had been all!
“Yes, I can see the problem,” Doctor Walsingham said quietly.
Montague glared, but managed to restrain his bitter tongue. It would do no good to antagonize the doctor.
He had, after all, been far better than the quacks he’d found in London.
Mercury? He’d sooner drink liquid gold from the sun than pour that poison down his throat!
“Well?” snapped Montague, unable to hold it in any longer as the doctor leaned back. Pulling his breeches up, the duke continued. “What is the problem?”
Doctor Walsingham blinked slowly, like an owl, and leaned back on the sofa. “It’s not healed properly.”
Not healed—
Montague was forced to physically bite his own tongue. The cheek of the man! Was this what he paid him for, hundreds of pounds by this point, merely to be told the leg that gave him agony, the wound quite clearly scalding red, the thigh which had never been the same again…was not healed?
Prickles of irritation as searing hot as the injury itself crept across Montague’s skin as he beheld the calm, smiling doctor.
Was this what they taught them in these schools now, this university nonsense that promised a doctor would be able to help the ills of the world?
Why, if he was not a gentleman—and sometimes he rather wished he wasn’t—he would have a few choice things to say.
“Yes, not healed properly at all,” said Doctor Walsingham blithely. “You can see by the subcutaneous scarring that there is…”
Montague tried to pay attention. He really did. It was his leg, after all.
But the trouble was, he had heard it all. All the impressive medical terms in the world spouted by the most impressive of doctors could not change the fact he could not properly walk.
His acrimonious eye drifted away from the doctor, still declaiming what was wrong with him—it appeared to be a very long list—and toward the door.
Where it had been left.
His gaze fell on the cane. Oh, hateful thing. Montague had attempted to live without it for the first month upon returning to England from France, but it had been impossible. His leg simply could not take the weight.
Far better to be shamed by walking with a cane than to topple over in front of a crowd. Again.
Montague’s cheeks burned at the remembrance of the memory and he tried hurriedly to push it from his mind. He was not about to permit that to happen again.
“…and that’s why we see such extensive scarring,” finished the doctor with a cheerful nod toward the duke’s leg. “How precisely did it happen again?”
And for a moment, most against his will, Montague was back there again.
Smoke. Shouts. The sense the world had been rocked, the very ground under him shaking—and he needed to run, but couldn’t. There was agony in his leg, and if he did not move—
“Bullet,” said Montague stiffly, blinking away the cannon smoke drifting across his eyes. “France.”
Doctor Walsingham nodded sagely. “You were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
Lucky? Montague stared at the ignorant doctor, trying to find the words to encapsulate just how foolish the man sounded.
Lucky to have been in such a battle? To have sustained such an injury?
The doctor’s eyebrow rose. “You did come back, Your Grace.”
There was just a tinge of reproach in the man’s words. Enough to spark guilt through Montague’s veins, as though surviving was some sort of injustice to the world.
He sighed heavily. “Well, I suppose so.”
An awkward moment of silence fell between them, and Montague, for one, was not going to fill it. He was a duke, and there were some expectations that came with the upbringing of a man of his breeding.
One of them was that it was not up to him to make everyone else feel comfortable. That was their job.
Doctor Walsingham waited, then cleared his throat. “Now, you must start thinking about the future.”
Montague blinked. “The future?”
Why would he need to do that? The future was obvious; there was only one potential future ahead of him, and he was barreling toward it as quick as he could. Once the damned leg was healed.
“The future,” the doctor repeated gently, as though to a small child. “Have you thought about what you will do once you consider yourself better?”
Montague fairly bristled at the suggestion. “What do you mean consider myself better? I cannot walk, man!”
“You can walk, and with the cane you are able to—”
“When I say I cannot walk, I say so advisedly!” Montague snapped. The cheek of the man! Disagreeing with a duke! “You think you know better than I?”
There was a strange twinkling in the doctor’s eye. “I am the medical man in the room, Your Grace.”
One of the things about Doctor Walsingham that Montague did not like, he decided, was that he only ever used the respectful “Your Grace” whenever the blaggard disagreed with him.
The cheek!
“The cane is a nuisance and I would sooner be without it,” Montague said gruffly.
Now the twinkling looked knowing, by God. “You mean you would rather not be seen with it.”
“I do not have to take such insubordin—”
“I am not a man in your army, Your Grace,” Doctor Walsingham said quietly. “Nor am I your servant. I am your doctor.”
Irritation flared in Montague’s chest, growing to a rage. “Yes, you are! I pay you significantly for the privilege, sir, and I call it a privilege for it is! There are plenty of doctors out there, here in Oxford or in London, who would greatly appreciate the chance to tend to—”
“Then why do you not inquire of them?” said Doctor Walsingham with a sigh, rising to his feet. “I have patients, believe it or not, who actually want my advice.”
He moved toward the door.
Montague swallowed. Oh, damn and blast it, he had not expected the man to actually pay heed to his words.
That was the trouble with having a temper, and a dour mood to boot. Why did everyone have to listen when he did not wish them to, then entirely ignore his wishes when he was in earnest?
It was their responsibility to tell the difference!
“Wait.”
Doctor Walsingham has no right to look so delighted, Montague thought darkly. No right at all.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?”
Montague sighed and gestured to the sofa from which the doctor had so recently departed. “Sit. I’ll listen, and I may even obey, heaven knows.”
There was a quirk of a smile on the doctor’s lips as he settled once more onto the sofa. “You know, there are few men who would pay a doctor—”
“Pay him well.”
“Indeed—to leave his practice in London and travel to Oxford to care for him,” Doctor Walsingham continued with a tinge of curiosity. “Why, if I may be so bold, are we here, and not in town?”
Montague hesitated.
Doctors had oaths, didn’t they? Special Hippocratic thingy, the promise they’d try not to kill their patients and keep their secrets to boot. It would not hurt to confide in the doctor, would it?
Lord knows he hadn’t confided in anyone for so long, he was mightily out of the habit. But who could a duke rely on? Who could be the confidant of a duke other than another duke?
There was Dulverton. Headstrong man, foolish. Quick to rush into a problem. He could trust the man as far as he could throw him—and that wasn’t far, in this state.
Montague shuffled uncomfortably in his armchair.
Not precisely his armchair. The Provost of Wessex College had been very good about accepting one of his old graduates back, had even given him a corner room on the edge of a quad, windows on two sides. Very pleasant.
The furniture in his room, Montague thought as he cast his gaze over it, was not terribly poor. Nothing to what he had become accustomed to at Caelfall Place, of course, in Mayfair, but that was by the by. Nothing was.
A bed, large, which was pleasant as he was a tall man.
Two trunks for his possessions, a screen to cover the bedchamber portion of the room, and a little furniture.
Two armchairs, a sofa, two console tables, a large fire.
There were paintings on the walls, and now Montague came to look at them.
Strange. He had not noticed them in all the months he had stayed here.
“Your Grace?”
Montague started. He had almost forgotten the doctor was still there. “What?” he barked.
Doctor Walsingham cleared his throat. “I asked why it was you were staying here, in a room in a college in Oxford, rather than in your London residence. Your fine residence, I believe.”
It was all Montague could do to keep a straight face. Ah yes, it was fine. That was what his steward had put on the advertisement to let out the place.
The tenants were good, all things considered. They paid their rent on time, at least, and his steward had remarked that they took relatively good care of the place, considering they were not noble.
Montague glanced at the doctor. He could probably trust him, but there was no point risking it.
He would not spill the secret that the Duchy of Caelfall had been almost bankrupt two years ago. Besides, the final debts would be paid, God willing, by Michaelmas.
He was not going to turn out his tenants for a few months and leave the estate still in the red.
“What business is it of yours if I decide to stay here rather than in London?” Montague snapped.
Doctor Walsingham raised an eyebrow. “It is my business because while you remain here, I remain here also. I merely wished to know—”