Chapter 12
Twelve
When Thomas returned to the house, the doctor was waiting in the library. Whitson had brought him some tea.
“Lady Drake respectfully requests to have a word with my lord before I speak to ye,” Dr. Andrews said.
“I don’t doubt it. Although I think respectfully is a polite fiction on your part.”
Thomas went to his room and splashed some water on his chest and changed his shirt before rapping on Harry’s bedchamber door.
“The doctor was meticulous and thorough,” Harry said. She was lying in bed, wearing a nightdress unruffled by lace, thin wrists poking out, her hands folded in front of her. Except for the dark circles around her eyes, her skin almost matched the white lawn of her nightdress.
“Good.”
“It should be observed, my lord, despite our agreement about the nature of this marriage, within a day of our wedding, you have managed to force the examination of my body. I might not have been penetrated, but I was thoroughly prodded and palpated. By a man.”
Smythe chose that moment to step out of the bedchamber and into the passage. She closed the door behind her.
“I . . . I, uh . . . I am sorry if the doctor—” Thomas felt he had very definitely been put on the back foot here.
Unfairly. Was he not in the right to insist on her good health?
In a way, it was sacrificing of him to try to keep her alive.
She had told him she would die and leave him free.
He was working against his own best interests, wasn’t he?
“The doctor did nothing wrong. In fact, Dr. Andrews is quite magnificent and much more skilled and knowledgeable, I believe, than the fashionable London physicians Mama Katie employs. I am happy to have him attend me in the future. He knows the calculus.”
“He does?”
“Yes, he studied it during his medical training. He said the beauty of the calculus helped him survive the dissecting rooms.”
“I see. Well, I am glad he meets with your approval.” Thomas was, strangely, not glad.
“Yes, we had a good talk. And I have agreed to the utility of many of his treatments. He was quite persuasive.”
Thomas wondered how the doctor might have persuaded her.
Harry went on, “To spare Dr. Andrews discomfort, knowing you will be paying his bill with my money, which is no longer my money, I have told him that he can tell you the results of his examination of me.”
Thomas was lost. Why would information about his wife be withheld from him?
“You see, Lord Drake,” and Harry looked directly in his eyes, “I now know I have been right, all along. Bodies are of no real importance since this one will never belong to me. It belonged to my father, I suppose, and then my stepmother, and it now belongs to you. I have just one thing that is really mine.”
She lay down flat and rolled so as to face away from him.
“She’s a canny lass,” Dr. Andrews said and then bit his lip as if he regretted his words. “I mean to say Lady Drake is extraordinary, my lord.”
Thomas was in no mood to discuss Harry’s lack of ordinariness with Dr. Andrews. And for the first time, he noticed Dr. Andrews was as tall as he was, if slimmer in his build. A full head of wavy, auburn hair. That damn charming burr. Dimples when he smiled, as he was doing now. Women liked dimples.
“She says her other physicians, the ones in London, told her she was to die soon,” Thomas said.
“She told me that, too. And, aye, she might, if she disnae have a change in her ways. Her habits will be the cause of her demise.”
“What does she need, Doctor?”
“Simple things. She needs to eat good food. She needs sunshine. She needs to walk and strengthen her legs and lungs, but she also needs rest.”
“Rest? Should I take away her books?”
“Good God, man!” The doctor was shocked. “Do ye want to kill her?”
“No, no, I see what you mean,” Thomas said hastily. “So she could get better, stronger?”
“Aye.” Dr. Andrews smiled. Thomas smiled, too, and clapped him on the shoulder and went to pour them two glasses of whisky.
Dr. Andrews took his glass. “Ah, the illicit milk of the motherland.” He hesitated with his glass at his lips. “But I must tell ye, my lord,” he said and gulped the whisky.
“Yes?”
“’Tis bad news, my lord.”
Thomas refilled his glass. What could be bad news? Hadn’t the doctor just said Harry might get better?
“I was glad to find ye had been careful with yer wife on the wedding night, and she remains whole. In my opinion, my lord, she should nae bear a child at this time. That could be fatal to her, as she is now.”
Thomas felt a rise of blood to his head.
“You looked down there?” Thomas took a step towards the doctor. “At my wife’s nether regions?”
The doctor stammered a bit but held his ground. “Ye told me to examine everything. Her lady’s maid was present the entire time, my lord.”
“And what did Harry—Lady Drake—do, when you . . . ?”
“She said she didnae mind and could her maid pass her a book.”
In fact, Dr. Alasdair Andrews had been surprised by the nonchalance with which Lady Drake had pulled up her nightdress and spread her legs wide.
It had put him in mind of the many whores he had treated during his training in Edinburgh—their complete lack of concern for who might see their pudenda as he lanced their pustules.
Based on Lady Drake’s detachment, Dr. Andrews felt sure he would find she had been ravished many times before. However, he discovered no evidence of that. She was merely a malnourished innocent with the mind of a prodigy.
Dr. Andrews drew down her nightdress and told Harry she should try to avoid pregnancy.
“I know,” she said. “No kissing and no children. And no fu—of the other thing.” She looked at her maid, who raised her eyebrows at Lady Drake.
“Aye,” Dr. Andrews said and then went on to feel Lady Drake’s extremely large skull, really the only large thing about her besides her eyes.
However, in the library, Dr. Andrews was now dealing with a husband who was not at all nonchalant about a display of genitalia.
The earl took a deep breath and let it out. “Just so.” He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s her body, isn't it?”
“Ah—aye,” Dr. Andrews stammered, afraid of being lunged at again.
But Lord Drake just laughed and poured the doctor more whisky. He did not seem at all concerned to hear that his wife should not bear children.
Dr. Andrews shook his head. The empire was surely doomed when the aristocracy had so little concern for successful reproduction. No wonder England had lost the colonies of America.