Chapter Nine
Montague glared. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Walsingham pleasantly as he snapped his doctor’s case shut. “You need to stop glaring as though I am about to chop your leg off.”
A scowl covered Montague’s forehead. “I am not—”
“You most certainly are, and I will tell you, Your Grace, if I had to chop that leg off of yours, I would certainly not appreciate the looks you are giving me,” the doctor said. “It would not be my fault, after all.”
Montague grunted in response, not deigning to form actual words.
Well, it was infuriating! The doctor’s weekly visit was starting to become tortuous. No progress being made, no solutions, no promises as to why the damned thing wasn’t working.
And then he, Montague, would have to spend the rest of the week hobbling about like an invalid!
“You are scowling.”
“You’re damned right I’m scowling!” Montague exploded as the doctor sat on the sofa and examined him. “I am tired of this cane, stumbling about the place, I want to be—”
“Fighting again, yes, I know,” said Doctor Walsingham with a raised eyebrow. “And do you think getting angry at me will in any way change that?”
Montague opened his mouth, considered the words too spicy even for a gentleman doctor to hear, then closed it again.
Blast it all to hell, it was maddening! How long had it been now—seven months? How complicated was a leg anyway?
“But, as you mention it, there is something you could do to speed up your recovery, which you have not yet done.”
Montague’s scowl immediately disappeared. “Then why in God’s name haven’t you mentioned it before?”
Doctor Walsingham’s gaze flickered around the room. “You were not sufficiently recovered to take on this particular piece of advice. And if I may say, Your Grace, I am starting to grow worried about you. Remaining cooped up in here…it has done you little good.”
Precisely what the doctor could be speaking of, Montague could not fathom. He looked around the room himself and tried to see what the learned man saw.
A little untidiness, perhaps. His clothes certainly should have been folded and put in the trunk when the footmen returned them freshly laundered, but what did that matter?
And that bottle of wine, yes, he should probably throw it away now that it was empty.
And that pie dish…well, he had been hungry!
It was cheaper and quicker sometimes to simply send out a footman to a pie seller outside the college than walk the four hundred and seventy-two steps…
Montague swallowed. Fine. The place was a tip. But he did not appreciate having it pointed out by a mere doctor!
“This thing I can do to aid my recovery,” he said, turning to Doctor Walsingham with an imperious look. “What is it?”
If he had been paying more attention to the man’s expression, he would have seen a flicker of a smile—just a flicker—before Doctor Walsingham looked serious.
“I recommend, and this comes from my extensive experience as a doctor, so do not immediately discount it out of hand,” he said. Montague’s heart sank. “A long walk.”
The duke waited for the rest of the stricture, but eventually… “A long walk?”
It was difficult not to sound incredulous, but Doctor Walsingham did not notice.
The doctor nodded. “At least once a day.”
Montague scowled, trying to keep anger from his voice but failing miserably. “Has it escaped your notice, man, that I am not actually able to walk?”
“You can walk sufficiently well. With your cane, you are merely stiff, not incapable,” came the calm reply. “At least an hour every day—”
“An hour?” Montague could not help but interrupt as he stared in astonishment. “You do realize there are days when I find it impossible to make the four hundred and—”
“Yes, yes, we have gone over that, and I say you can manage such a distance, and what is more, you should.” Perhaps it was Montague’s imagination, but there was just a hint of frustration in the doctor’s own voice.
“Perhaps if you were not so fixated on that cane of yours, you would realize you have almost complete movement in your leg!”
“But pain still.”
Montague had not intended to be so petulant, but it was difficult not to point out the real challenge in his recovery. Who could ignore pain, after all? Ignore it day after day?
“The pain will fade.”
Montague snorted. He’d heard that before. “It is agony the moment I take a first step. Agony.”
And there were things worse than pain. The pity. The stares. The way people made a huge performance about moving out of his way, their gazes locked on his cane.
Oh, God, the pity. How could the man demand of him a walk of at least an hour? How many people would he pass? How many stares? How much muttered sympathy not from the heart but from relief they were not in his place?
“Your endurance will grow, I assure you, Your Grace,” Doctor Walsingham said quietly as he rose and bowed. “I thought it was your intention to return to France?”
Montague bristled. “It is!”
Even if the idea of leaving Oxford was becoming less and less delightful. Even if someone’s eyes, dancing with delight, and her lips, sweet and warm, had made him think less and less of the war as days went on.
His stomach lurched. Dammit. He was supposed to be thinking of his duty, not a woman he would like to kiss again. Had almost kissed her mere days ago on that bench.
And what would that make him? No better than the uncouth lout who had attempted to press himself on her moments before he had arrived.
The doctor sighed. “If you do not take my advice, I have little else I can recommend.”
“What, no potions or lotions you can sell at four times the rate?” Montague snapped.
The doctor gave a wan smile as he opened the door. “I am not that sort of doctor.”
The door closed behind him and Montague sighed. No. He was not the sort of doctor to cheat his patients, worse luck. He would have to actually consider the man’s advice.
Pox on the man.
How irritating that he had to date been proven right, Montague thought in the silence.
It was most infuriating, in truth, for anyone save himself to be right.
It would be so much easier if he could just wake one morning and discover his leg returned to how it was.
But that scar tissue would never melt away.
And that was why, not twenty minutes later, the duke found himself stomping down the stairs to the outer quad in a temper most terrible.
“Where’s your pretty friend?” asked the porter cheekily as Montague passed through the gate into Oxford proper.
“None of your business, you cur,” he snapped.
Not the most politic response. That would do the rounds with the servants at Wessex College before nightfall.
But he had been pushed to it. Not just by the man’s question, but by the fact that he had managed, in the twenty intervening minutes between the doctor leaving and his own departure, to think of Miss Sarah Lockwood…
What. Five times?
Maybe six, he thought as he limped down the pavement, carriages rattling by him at what felt like great speeds.
Thinking of Sarah—of Miss Lockwood, was something he needed to do much less of. Had she not made it clear that she had no interest in him?
“No, don’t come.”
She had not even wanted him to attend the damned poetry recital, Montague thought bleakly, shooting pains stabbing up his leg, which he did his best to ignore. Christ, it had to be at least ten minutes, didn’t it?
He halted, leaning against the wall in part to stay out of the way of other pedestrians and partly to give his leg a rest. He pulled out his pocket watch.
It had been three minutes.
Montague cursed under his breath and evidently offended a lady walking by him who muttered something about, “Uncouth hooligans!”
Now that was a description he had never received.
He was half tempted to shout after her she had just insulted a duke, and one who would not be penniless in a few months, but Montague managed to catch himself.
Partly because it would achieve nothing. Partly because he had assiduously ensured few people knew of the relative poverty the duchy had managed to fall into.
But mainly because as he looked up, an entirely different woman caught his eye.
Sarah Lockwood.
Montague’s breath caught in his throat. Not the Sarah he knew: shy Sarah, poetry writing Sarah, who wished to learn fencing but was instantly embarrassed in his presence.
No, this was Sarah in her element.
She stood just outside a haberdashery with two young ladies, both alike in age and dress. Montague stared as he watched the three of them giggle. One of them had evidently said something most amusing for Sarah’s cheeks were flushed. She raised a hand to hide her smile.
A slow, stupid grin crept over his face. Dear God, was he so far gone that just a look at her was enough to overcome him?
But then he had never seen Sarah with others. Not unless she had been jeered at in the Wessex College dining hall, or preyed on by louts in the Christ Church Garden Meadows. Otherwise, it had always been the two of them. Only now did he realize just what an honor and privilege that had been.
She was remarkably beautiful. And fashionable too, now he came to think.
Montague rarely paid any attention to ladies’ fashion—it all changed so quickly, it was impossible to keep up—but the way her bonnet was angled, the reticule tucked into the crook of her arm, her curves heightened by the cut of the gown…
Montague swallowed. Oh, hell.
Her adoration of poetry was unusual, but it hid none of her refinements, or her beauty.
He was in danger here.
Though he knew he should step away, Montague found himself stepping forward. He had to be closer. Perhaps she would be delighted to be addressed by a duke before her friends, he could not help but think, as a warm rush tingled to his toes.
It was therefore a great surprise when one of Sarah’s companions looked up. Immediately, her merriment vanished. “Go away.”