Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Do not close your eyes.” Rowan’s voice came out rougher than he intended, but Emmeline only stirred weakly against his shoulder as he carried her into her chamber, her head fallen against him, cheeks white as sheets.
He had never known fear could have a taste, but it was metal on his tongue, so sharp it made every breath feel like punishment.
“Emmeline,” he said again, lowering her carefully onto the bed. “Look at me.”
Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused at first, then finding him with an effort that seemed to cost her. Her lips parted, but no sound came.
“I am here,” he said, and the words felt useless—obscene in their smallness. “You are in your chamber. You fainted.”
“I…” Her face twisted suddenly. “Rowan.”
He understood a heartbeat before she turned.
He caught the basin from the washstand and brought it to her just as she retched. The sound tore through him. He moved without thought, one hand gathering her hair back from her face, the other steadying her shoulder as her whole body trembled with the violence of it.
“It is all right,” he murmured, though nothing felt all right. “Easy. I have you.”
She vomited again, weakly this time, and the humiliation in the small, broken sound she made afterward struck him nearly as hard as the fear.
“Do not,” he said, as though she had spoken. “Do not be ashamed.”
Her fingers curled in the counterpane. She looked too fragile there, all soft, night-pale skin and trembling lashes, and the sight of it did something terrible to his chest. This was the woman he had left in tears.
This was his wife, sick and shaking beneath his hand, and all his clever walls had become useless things.
A maid rushed in with Juliet close behind her.
“Cool water,” Rowan said without looking away from Emmeline. “Cloths. Send another servant for Arbuthnot. If he is not at home, wake every physician within three streets until one comes.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Juliet stood frozen at the foot of the bed, her face white. Behind her, Aaron appeared in the doorway, barefoot now, his little face ravaged with terror.
“Is she dying?” he asked.
Emmeline’s eyes closed as though the words hurt her.
“No,” Rowan said at once, too sharply, because the word dying had struck through him like a musket ball. He softened his voice with effort. “No, Aaron. She is unwell. That is all.”
Aaron did not move. “But Mama was unwell too.”
Juliet made a small, wounded sound and moved quickly to him, kneeling before him. “Come with me, darling.”
“I want to stay.”
“I know,” Juliet whispered, cupping his cheek. “But your father must help her now, and we shall only be just outside. We will wait together. You may bring Biscuit, and he may be very brave with us.”
Aaron looked past her to the bed, his eyes shining. “Will she know I am waiting?”
Rowan swallowed against something vicious in his throat. “Yes.”
Emmeline’s fingers moved faintly against the counterpane. Aaron saw it and began to cry silently.
Thankfully, Juliet drew him away before Rowan could break entirely from the sight.
For the next hours, time narrowed to the heat of Emmeline’s skin beneath his palm and the soft, damp weight of cloths he changed again and again.
She drifted in and out of awareness, sometimes whispering his name, sometimes turning her face away as though even in illness she remembered there was hurt between them.
Each time she shifted, he felt it like judgment.
He rubbed slow circles between her shoulders when nausea took her again. He held water to her lips when she could bear it. He sat beside her and watched her chest rise and fall, hoping, praying to whoever might hear him, that she would get better.
Once, her hand found his wrist.
It was only a weak touch, fingers closing around him as if seeking anchor. His body reacted so violently that he had to bow his head and close his eyes.
He remembered those fingers clutching his shoulders in the dark, her breath breaking against his mouth, her body arching beneath his with trust so complete it had frightened him even then.
He had thought desire was the dangerous thing. He had thought wanting her body was the surrender.
He had been a fool.
This helpless devotion was worse. This need to put himself between her and suffering, when there was no enemy to fight and nothing to command except servants, physicians, water and cloth.
“Please,” he whispered, so low no one could have heard. “Do not leave me with what I said.”
At last, near dawn, Emmeline slept. Rowan remained where he was, one hand still covering hers.
The door opened with the smallest creak, and Aaron slipped in. Rowan looked up. The boy froze as though caught trespassing, one hand on the doorframe, Biscuit pressed against his legs.
“She is asleep,” Rowan said quietly.
Aaron nodded. He took two steps inside, then stopped. “Can I see?”
Rowan rose carefully and went to him, guiding him back into the corridor before the boy could look too long at Emmeline’s drained face and build nightmares from it.
In the hall, Aaron’s composure failed.
“Is she going to die like Mama?”
The question was so small that Rowan felt something in him rip open.
He crouched in front of his son. For once, he did not think of dignity or authority. Emmeline had taught him better than that. He took Aaron by both shoulders, careful but firm.
“No,” he said. “She will not.”
“You d-do not know.”
The stammer returned, faint but there, pulled from him by fear. Rowan hated himself for every time he had thought of it as something to be managed rather than understood.
“The physician is coming,” Rowan said. “He will examine her, and we will do whatever he tells us. She is strong.”
Aaron’s mouth trembled. “I love her.”
“I know.”
“No,” Aaron insisted, urgent now, and the stammer vanished beneath the force of feeling. “I really love her. She listens when I speak, even if I take too long. She let Biscuit stay. She reads voices in stories. And Father, you smiled more after she came.”
Rowan went still.
Aaron did not seem to notice. He was looking toward the chamber door, his eyes wet and fierce. “The house was better. You were better. I was not scared all the time. I do not want it to go back.”
Rowan heard the words quietly at first, and then their meaning broke open inside him.
He looked at his son and realized, with a shock that left him almost breathless, that Aaron had spoken nearly all of it clearly.
No stumbling or shrinking. Emmeline had done that, with warmth and patience and that impossible softness Rowan had mistaken for fragility when it had been strength all along.
She had changed his son for the better. She had changed his house. She had changed him. And he had punished her for showing mercy in a way he had never been taught.
Rowan drew Aaron close, and the boy came into his arms stiffly at first, then all at once. Small hands gripped his shirt. Rowan held him, stunned by how little he had understood the weight of this child’s fear until Emmeline had taught him how to see it.
“She will not leave us,” Rowan said, though he did not know how he would keep that promise. “I swear it.”
Footsteps sounded below before Aaron could answer.
A few minutes later, a servant came up. “Your Grace, Lord Calham is here.”
Rowan’s arms tightened once around Aaron before he released him. “Take Biscuit to your aunt. Wait with her.”
Aaron wiped his face and nodded.
Rowan descended with exhaustion heavy in every limb.
Frederick stood in the entrance hall with flowers in one hand, his cravat tied with unusual care, and his face drawn with worry. He looked absurdly formal for dawn, and worse, he looked stripped of all the careless ease Rowan had known for nearly twenty years.
“Juliet sent word,” Frederick said, lifting the flowers a little, though the gesture died halfway, awkward in a way he never was. His gaze flicked once toward the stairs. “I brought these for Emmeline. I thought… I do not know what I thought.”
Rowan stared at him.
Old anger stirred at the sight of him standing in his house, carrying flowers for the woman whose distress he had helped cause. But the anger had no strength beside the cold, enormous terror lodged inside Rowan’s chest.
“Come to the parlor,” Rowan said.
Frederick’s brows lifted slightly, as though he had expected to be ordered from the house instead. Then he nodded once and followed.
Inside, with the door closed, Frederick set the flowers carefully on a side table. His hand lingered on the stems for a moment too long before he turned, and when he looked at Rowan properly, there was no smile ready, no cleverness waiting behind his eyes.
“How is she?” he asked, his voice lower now.
“Asleep,” Rowan said. “The physician is coming.”
Frederick exhaled, his shoulders dropping with a relief that seemed to leave him unsteady. “Good.” He dragged a hand over his mouth and nodded again, more to himself than to Rowan. “That is good.”
Silence stretched between them and, for once, Frederick did not try to fill it.
Then he looked up, his expression tight with something Rowan had rarely seen on him without irony: shame.
“I am sorry,” Frederick said quietly.
Rowan’s jaw flexed. “For which part?”
Frederick accepted the blow without flinching, though his mouth tightened. “All of it.”
Rowan said nothing.
“I should have told you,” Frederick continued.
He stood very still now, his hands at his sides, fingers curling once before he forced them open again.
“I believed I was protecting her. But I also lied to you. I watched you search. I watched Aaron ask after her. I let you look me in the face and trust me while I kept the truth.” His throat worked.
“I made you suffer, and for that, Rowan, I am sorry.”
Rowan had no wish to forgive him yet. Perhaps not entirely. But he was too exhausted and too frightened for Emmeline to pretend this wound was the only one that mattered.