Chapter 22
“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”
― David Hume
The moment his name tumbled off her lips, fear sparked along Peregrine’s spine.
Something was wrong. Charity’s voice was breathy and faint, and even as he whirled to her, her eyes were rolling back in her head. He leapt towards her, but before he crossed the room, she had fallen against the back of the sofa, her head lolling.
“No! Charity!” he shouted. He cupped her face in his hands, but she was boneless and unaware of his words.
His touch. “No, no, no…” he whispered, his heart stuttering painfully.
Perry attempted to rouse her by patting her cheeks and jostling her lightly.
But those efforts were in vain, even when he grew rougher, his hands shaking as he tried to stimulate her to some response.
Peregrine tried to convince himself she had only fainted, but her skin was clammy and too cool. “Don’t do this to me, Charity,” he ordered her, his voice trembling as he tried to keep himself from falling to pieces. “Wake. Wake, damn you!”
Some sudden illness? It was possible. But Charity had collapsed less than an hour after his mother left the property, and that was surely no coincidence. A terrible suspicion began to build within the pit of his belly, and he had to cover his mouth briefly, wrestling with the urge to be sick.
“Quinn!” Peregrine bellowed at the top of his lungs once he swallowed back the contents of his stomach.
Quickly lifting her feet up onto the couch, he laid Charity out flat.
Outside the study door, the household exploded into action at his shout of alarm, and footfalls rang down the stairs and hallways.
He barely registered the thunder of boots on the stairs; his world was narrowing down to the slight wheeze of her breath. Cursing, he sat her up again, tearing the back of her dress and stays open so that nothing could impair her breathing more than it already was.
Quinn came at a run as Perry began to examine Charity. His mother was surely somehow responsible for this, but he did not understand how.
Peregrine checked her skin, her fingernails, her mouth, and her eyes, looking for unusual signs. The colour of her nails was still normal. Charity, however, was pale to the point of being grey, and her pupils were constricted into pinpricks, not widening when he shielded them from the light.
Peregrine quietly panicked for a few seconds, trying to consider his options and what had happened. Please not this, he begged God and Fate. He could not fail her, too. He would have nothing left in this world worth fighting for.
His butler’s presence finally penetrated the haze of his thoughts. “Quinn, did my wife eat or drink anything today that I did not partake of?” he rasped as the man stood stock still beside him, looking down at Charity’s still form.
His butler took a few seconds to consider what Perry was really asking. “No, Lord Fitzroy,” he answered. “She had no appetite this morning. You drank from the same teapot.”
“Get the red box from the shelf in my mother’s dispensary. Please.”
“Should I send for a physician?” Quinn asked him.
“The box first. Hurry,” Peregrine urged him. “Bring it with some water. I’ll take her upstairs.”
The dispensary was a small, cool room below stairs that his mother had kept locked.
It had been one of the few places that Peregrine had insisted be left alone by Quinn and the housemaids.
Many of the plants around the estate and the substances kept in the dispensary were dangerous to the unwary.
The red box held the only treatments that most of those poisons had.
Even then, it wasn’t much—purgatives and binding substances, for the most part. Haste, prayer, and minor miracles were still required to save someone’s life if they consumed the toxic plants in Marian’s gardens.
Thorne knocked hard on the doorframe of the open study door, stopping dead when he saw Charity’s torn dress and her limbs dangling loosely from the cradle of Peregrine’s arms. “Saints preserve us,” the knight breathed. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Peregrine said through gritted teeth, carrying her out into the hallway. “Help me. I need the assistance of my sister’s maid. And get Hodges. Please.”
Sir Nathaniel hurried off, and Peregrine struggled to keep her from slipping from his grip as he made his way up the stairs with her in his arms. The utter limpness of Charity’s body terrified him; even when she had swooned after escaping Bellrose, the tone of her arms and legs had not been so lax.
It was a bad sign. Her prostration suggested that it might be something attacking the muscles and nerves of her body. Something like aconite, which could paralyse her heart or the mechanisms of breathing.
He carried her directly to the mattress in her bedroom, laying her down again and pressing his ear to her chest. A sob of relief escaped him as he heard a steady rhythm, even though it was much slower than it ought to be in repose. Likewise, her breath was slow, but regular.
While he waited for Quinn to return with the box and water, he pressed his trembling palms together, lips resting against his forefingers in silent supplication as he prayed to anyone who might be listening, to give Charity the strength to stay alive and keep fighting whatever toxin ran in her veins until her body could defeat it.
If it could.
Please, please, please, his thoughts whispered, hoping against hope that he was wrong. That this wasn’t poison.
His sister’s maid helped him remove the remains of Charity’s dress and put her into a loose robe. They helped arrange her comfortably in bed, propped up on pillows to keep her respiration easy. Thorne sent Hodges looking for a physician and any other woman with herbal lore in the area.
It was the thinnest of hopes. When it came to poisons, Peregrine doubted any in the area knew even half as much as he did. But he would turn up his nose at no quarter right now.
When Quinn returned from his mother’s locked room with the box, Perry found the bottle of fine black powder marked Carbo Ligni Purificata.
The maid helped him measure out and mix the slurry that could bind itself to many poisons that had been ingested, just in case he and Quinn had been mistaken about what she had eaten.
“Come on, Sparkles,” he murmured to her as he leaned her back against his chest, feeding her the charcoal in careful sips to keep her from choking and inhaling it.
As he stroked her throat to encourage her to swallow each one, he observed how weak each was.
Abruptly she sputtered, the black fluid dripping from the corner of her mouth, and he could feed her no more.
Peregrine rifled through the few notes on symptoms and poisons tucked into the box, looking for answers he might have forgotten. But there was nothing.
He was at a loss.
He looked up from Charity’s shoulder to see his butler and Thorne standing there. What more could they do?
Thorne seemed to understand he needed steadying. “As long as she’s alive, there’s hope, yes?” he murmured to Peregrine, standing beside him as they looked down at Charity, pale and still against her pillows.
“I do not know what this is. Or even if she’ll survive it.”
Now that he had stopped moving—stopped acting—doubt and despair began to gnaw at his guts. Was there hope? His mother had somehow poisoned Charity. To prove that he was helpless. So that he would grasp without doubt that he would never be clever enough or ruthless enough to stop her.
And as added insult to injury, she had poisoned Charity right beside the grave of his hound. The poor beast that had served as his mother’s lesson about the foolishness of allowing himself to care for something.
He should have strangled the life out of the woman who had done so much evil. Peregrine had held her by the neck, and he had let her go. Now his hands itched to right that wrong. He should go right now to the Pulteney and deal with her once and for all.
But… if he harmed his mother now, he would never get any answers. Marian would happily take any hope for Charity with her, to hell.
He couldn’t do anything. Not for his wife, or against his mother. He had never felt so powerless to act in all his life.
Peregrine then went a bit mad. Or so he gathered later.
There was a horrible blankness, and when he came back to himself, he found himself standing among the ruins of some of the bedroom furniture and shattered vases and objects d’art. All items were ones his mother had chosen for the room.
His throat was raw and his bleeding hands were lacerated with splinters of glass. Thorne, Owens and Jack were holding him pinned against the dented wall. Thorne had planted himself squarely in front of his face, holding his head while his footmen immobilised his wrists and shoulders.
“Fitzroy,” Thorne murmured, his blue eyes fixed upon Peregrine’s. “Are you back to yourself?”
Not hardly. Peregrine was unmoored. If he simply released himself to the wind, his spirit might be blown loose from his cage of bones, floating away.
“She poisoned Charity,” Perry repeated aloud in despair, numb in the face of his greatest fear. “And I don’t know how to save my wife.”
Thorne’s eyes were full of grief and guilt as he waved off the footmen and circled his palm around the back of Perry’s neck. The weight was the only thing fixing him to the earth.
“Steady on, Fitzroy,” the man’s baritone voice ordered him. “She’s still alive. Do not borrow more trouble before it comes to claim us.”
Shivering, Peregrine finally nodded. Thorne was right; he needed to cling to this thought. While his wife lived, she needed him. He let them wash the blood and glass from his hands and held still while Thorne bandaged the cuts.
“Did your mother do anything else to Charity?” Thorne asked him while studying a deep gash. “Are there plants that are poisonous to the touch?”
Peregrine inhaled swiftly and rose from his chair. He hurried to his wife’s side to pull back the sleeves on Charity’s gown as he remembered his mother holding Charity’s wrists. The faintest blue tinge of developing bruises circled both wrists.
There were indeed several plants poisonous to the touch—aconite was among them. But his mother’s hands had been bare. Any poison on her skin should, in theory, have sickened her, too.
Unless…
He recalled the hazy thought that had flitted through his brain before he had lost his wits.
That his mother couldn’t die—because she still held the answers he needed.
Perhaps Charity’s poison had an antidote.
Or some other treatment. He knew of no such sureties for the poisons he was familiar with, but just because he was not familiar with any did not mean they did not exist.
His mother had told him where to find her, as if she had known Peregrine would have been willing to strike a bargain. Eventually.
If you decide you wish to talk to me again later today, you will find me at the Pulteney.
“I have to see my mother,” he said dully, the anger rising in him.