Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Just as Dr. Andrews had predicted, Thomas woke up around noon with a terrible headache as well as a terrible thirst. He sat in bed in only his shirt as Jackson brought him cup after cup of coffee.
Jackson also sent one of the stable boys to chip some ice from one of the big blocks in the underground ice house.
The ice went to make a type of cold poultice Thomas favored for his head when he was suffering from the ill effects of too much drink.
Thomas had a dim memory of something happening with Harry in the library. He feared he had not behaved well. He finally got up his courage to ask Jackson.
“And Lady Drake. Is she well?”
Jackson was doing something in the corner with Thomas’ shaving gear. “Yes, my lord, I believe she is as well as can be expected. When I went to make your poultice, Whitson told me Dr. Andrews is very hopeful she will have full recovery of—”
Thomas cut him short with a bellow and flung himself off the bed and out of his room and down the passage on bare legs. He tore open the door to Harry’s bedchamber. The bed was empty.
“Where is she?” he shouted.
Smythe appeared in the door from the dressing room. She curtsied, staring at his bare legs. He seized her by the shoulders and repeated as if she were deaf, “Where is she?”
“My lord,” she tried to curtsy again, “she has gone to find a book—”
Thomas let go of Smythe and whirled and ran down the passage to the winding stairs that would take him to Harry’s aerie. He thundered up the stairs and banged on the door. He rattled the knob. The door was locked, and she did not come and open it for him.
Thomas then remembered with a fearful nausea that Harry had wanted some book and she had thought she might need to go to London to procure it.
Jackson was coming up the stairs with a pair of breeches over his arm, and he was moving at an extremely rapid pace for a sixty-year-old man who had spent the night in a chair in his master’s room.
“Where is my wife?” Thomas roared.
“My lord, I believe she is in the library—” Thomas elbowed Jackson aside. “My lord, your breeches—"
But Thomas couldn’t hear him.
Down these stairs, two flights, down the corridor, down another set of stairs. Damn, why was this house so large?
Thomas burst into the library, sweating, breathless.
A woman in a rose-pink dress stood high on the library ladder on the far side of the room.
“Harry,” he croaked.
She twisted around to appraise him from across the room.
“You look terrible, Tommy.”
He stood there panting. He put his hand to his face. Whiskers. He looked down. No breeches.
“I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m not dressed,” he said.
She was holding a fat book with her left hand, but she held out her right hand and said, “Yes. Stay there.”
He could see her right hand was bandaged. She turned her back to him in order to face the shelves and started going down the ladder. Despite her admonition, he started towards her.
She continued speaking, “I’m not sure they’ve really gotten all the glass up. You might cut your feet.”
She was using just two fingertips of her bandaged hand to hold on to the ladder.
She was sure Dr. Andrews would be upset if he knew she was using the hand, even this small bit of it.
Uncharacteristically, she really had not thought this through.
It must be lack of sleep. She had gone up the ladder using her left hand, and once the book she needed was retrieved, she had to hold it with her left hand.
She thought about throwing the book down to the floor, but she had far too much respect for books to do that.
She thought about leaving the book and retreating down the ladder using her left hand and calling for a footman to get the book for her, but she was in too much of a hurry.
When she was still eight feet off the ground, it happened. One of her new pink slippers slipped—was that why they were called slippers?—and she fell backwards, still clutching the book in her left hand.
Suddenly, she was in her husband’s arms. She was surprised and not in a good way.
Under other circumstances, she might have enjoyed being held against his chest. His jaw had such a good bristle right now.
And she had seen his legs from across the room.
She had never seen his naked legs. Her breath caught for a second.
But he had endangered himself. And not heeded her command.
“I told you to stay, Tommy.”
He was still panting. “But— You fell.”
“Yes, I did. But you couldn’t have known I would fall when you disobeyed me.” That smell. She wrinkled her nose. “I like the stubble, Tommy, but you stink. Put me down.”
He did as she said. She put the book on a nearby table. “Now lean over this table and show me the soles of your feet.”
Thomas put both his hands on the end of a table, leaned over it, and picked up one foot and then another, like a horse being shod.
Harry looked at the back of his thighs and considered running her left hand up under the shirt and feeling a buttock.
No, she needed to make sure he was all right first. And he might not like her touching him. He hadn’t liked it last night.
She peered down and brushed the bottoms of his feet with her left hand. She was relieved.
“No glass in your feet,” she told him and picked up the book and walked around the table and sat down.
Jackson cleared his throat. He was standing just outside the library door.
“Oh, Jackson,” Harry called out. “Good, you have his lordship’s breeches. And you’re wearing shoes? Then bring the breeches here and go back up and get Lord Drake something for his feet. Because of the broken glass. Excellent. And Tommy, put your breeches on and stay here where I know it’s safe.”
Jackson departed, and Harry allowed herself one more look before her husbands’ thighs disappeared under the leather of his breeches. She opened the book.
“Your hand—” Thomas started to say.
“Tommy, I need to read something.” She used her left hand to leaf through the volume. “Act two, scene three, the Scottish play.”
He looked over her shoulder at the book.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare?
What in God’s name did she need to read that for?
And why was she almost . . . mothering him?
He felt he was missing something here. He felt many things, all simultaneously.
Frightened, relieved, angry, glad. And very, very befuddled.
She smiled and slammed the book shut. “Well, if Dr. Andrews thinks this is medically accurate, it’s good news for you. But I’m not sure why it’s comic. And it certainly doesn’t seem particularly Scottish. Although you were drinking whisky last night, Tommy.”
“You called me Tommy.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I’ve called you Tommy six times this morning. It’s a nickname, right? Like Harry?”
“Y-y-yes,” he stuttered.
“Wait here until Jackson brings your shoes.”
She stood and turned to go, but he grabbed her left hand.
“Tell me about your other hand,” he growled, “or I swear I will walk across this library in my bare feet a thousand times over.”
“Very,” she raised her eyebrows, “dramatic. You should be the one reading Macbeth.”
Still holding her hand, he began stalking around the library, dragging her behind him.
“Where is the glass? Where is this glass you’re so worried about, hmm?”
Then he saw it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before.
Gouts of dried, dark blood over the carpet, extending onto the floor at the perimeter of the room.
Nearby, on another patch of carpet, close to the central table and to a pulled-out chair, small shards of crystal sparkled in the afternoon sun.
On the table sat an empty bottle and another glass still holding a finger of whisky.
She avoided his eyes. “I-I, uh, cut my hand on a broken glass, my lord. And broke the hand, too. But it’s all right.
Dr. Andrews reset the bones and sewed me up, and he thinks I will be able to use the hand once it’s healed.
He said, Even play the pianoforte again, and I said, But I didn’t play the pianoforte before.
That’s amusing, don’t you think?” She looked at his face.
He said nothing for several long seconds.
“Harry.” He could feel a rage building up. She averted her eyes again. “Harry. I don’t want your condescension. I know you think you are the brilliant one in this household, but you have no sense. I am your husband, and you will tell me what happened.”
He realized then that he was squeezing her good hand, crushing it. He let go of it. She stood there.
Jackson appeared, holding a pair of boots, and Thomas gestured him over. Jackson very carefully assisted Thomas into the boots.
“Please close the door to the library when you leave, Jackson.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And please tell Whitson or Mrs. Dewey the library needs cleaning. It should not be done now since Lady Drake and I are using this room at present, but it should have been done earlier.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The door closed behind him.
“Well?” Thomas asked.
“What part don’t you remember?” Her voice was flat.
“Why don’t you tell me all of it?”
So she did. She stood there and told him how she had waited for him in her bedchamber, and when he had not come after many hours, she had sought him out in the library. He had been drunk on whisky, she said. She felt perhaps he had not come to her room because she had not reciprocated.
“Reciprocated?” he said in a strained voice. “Reciprocated what?”
“I had not given you the pleasure you had given me, my lord.”
He gritted his teeth. It was true.
“I tried to, but I could not arouse you. I mean not you, but your member.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, cursing himself.
“You told me to stop, and you dropped your glass, and it broke. I started to pick up the pieces even though you told me to leave it, and you stepped on my hand while I was still holding pieces of the glass. You were drunk, as I said. It was an accident.”
He felt like death. But he had to hear it all. He prompted her. “And then?”
“And then you fell and were unconscious. I could not arouse you. You, as in you, not your member.”
“I understand.”
“And that is when I called Jackson, and he called some footmen who sent for Smythe and the doctor.”
“I see.”
“Whitson showed up, too, and managed everything splendidly.”
“Except the cleaning of the library.”
“Yes, that got rather forgotten. But the doctor came, and I got fixed, and that’s more important than the carpet, isn’t it?”
He lunged and crushed her to him.
“Be careful of my hand.”
He let her go and backed away.
She gazed past him, out the window, mind on something else entirely, he thought.
He cleared his throat. “I must ask . . .”
She turned her eyes on him.
“Why were you reading Shakespeare this morning?”
She hesitated before saying, “You’ll be angry. I think.”
He turned and walked over to the window and stared out at the grounds. His head pounded. He folded his arms across the chest.
“I’m already angry.” At myself, because I injured you.
“I asked Dr. Andrews if there were reasons why a man’s member might not engorge. I didn’t use those words, but he understood me. I didn’t mention you and thought I had been cleverly opaque about it all, but I can see now it would be impossible for him not to realize I was talking about you.”
“And the Shakespeare?” He tried to keep his voice even.
“He answered me by telling me to read Macbeth. Macduff says, What three things does drink especially provoke? And the Porter says, Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. And then the Porter goes on a bit more about it.”
Even as shame fought rage in his heart, Thomas marvelled at Harry’s memory for things she had read once.
She went on, “So now Alasdair has made me quite happy because I had been very worried—”
“Alasdair!” Rage won.
She called the doctor Alasdair.
He moved away from her and towards the door of the library.
Alasdair Andrews had made her happy. Had the Earl Drake ever made his wife happy?
He had given her pleasure, yes, and then, like an angry child who wanted a toy back, he had broken her hand.
No wonder she had sought solace from the doctor, a gentle man who fixed things.
His worst fear had come to fruition. He had become something loathsome. Someone who destroyed and ruined things, people.
She had done it to him. Better he had never married her. Better she had never come to Sommerleigh. She had sparked the monster in him.
He opened the library door.
“Where are you going, Lord Drake?” Her voice was tinged with panic. He took a perverse pleasure in that.
He didn’t look back. “To hell,” he snarled.