A Fearless Healer for the Earl

Chapter 1

“It all happened so fast,” a young dockworker said as he placed an injured man on the gurney in the makeshift surgery, a cloth wrapped around his left hand. “Bite down hard, Johnny!” He said as he stuck a piece of wood between the man’s teeth.

“What happened?” Eleanor Frayne asked as she moved to the back of the shabby room, wrapping an apron over her frock.

“A coil of rope came down the wrong way, his hand with it. I gotta get back to the docks before the foreman has my head,” he said with a shrug as he made his way out.

At least he brought him to the gurney, she thought. The last injured dockworker was left at the threshold.

“I cannot feel my fingertips!” Johnny groaned as he spit out the wood.

“Hold still,” she ordered with a quiet authority. “Or I’ll make you hold still.”

The man nodded once and bit down on the stick as Nell began her work. She probed the digits on the left hand.

“Only two are broken,” she said as she set the bones with deft movements and quickly reinforced them with splints.

After a few moments, she had already wrapped the hand with fresh bandaging.

“This is how you keep the fingers splinted apart so they will set straight,she explained. “You won’t be able to lift with that hand again until the new moon.”

“Will it really take that long?”

“Yes, no matter what your foreman says about it. Here, have some tincture,” she said as she placed a few drops on the man’s tongue. “For the pain.”

“Thank you. How can I repay you, Miss…err…I am sorry, I do not know your name. Just your reputation.”

“Nell is fine, and whatever you can spare. No more.”

He nodded and paid her four pence and half a wedge of cheese, which she accepted with a grateful smile.

The going rate for men who work the Plymouth docks and have little else to give. He’s lucky the whole hand was not broken.

She had seen worse. The conditions the men faced in their line of work were treacherous at best, which made her work just as trying. She had seen worse that same morning, in fact, and would likely see worse again before the tide turned.

She began washing her hands in the basin, the water turning from pink to muted grey, when the bell over her door rang.

I suppose the day is not done after all.

She looked over her shoulder to find a lady standing in the doorway as though she had been set down there by mistake. She was a beautiful woman, not much past Nell’s own five-and-twenty.

She was dressed in a manner of dress that made the whole room seem shabbier by comparison.

She wore a pelisse the color of rich claret, kid gloves without a single tear in them, and a bonnet whose ribbon alone had likely cost more than Nell’s rent for the quarter.

She did not touch anything. She stood very close to the door, as if she meant to be able to leave quickly.

“Miss Frayne,” she said as she took a step forward and turned her face up, looking at Nell for the first time.

Nell dried her hands slowly on her apron, giving herself a moment. She knew the face, it just took a breath longer to place it. This would be the fourth time Lady Honoria Vane had come to her.

The first had been just under two years ago, in the worst of a January storm, when a girl half-dead with fever over a badly set arm had turned out, once Nell got the sleeve cut away, to be no girl at all but a lady with a maid too frightened to speak above a whisper.

She had foolishly gone out on a horse in weather that no sensible person rode in, and for some reason, she was left her to manage the fall on her own. Nell had not asked why.

She had cleaned the wound, set the bone, and sent her home before dawn with a sling and instructions to keep off horses in the wet. Lady Vane had paid three times the going rate and said nothing beyond a stiff, sharp, “Thank you”.

The second visit came some months after that.

Lady Vane showed up at the door with a bruise blooming high along one cheekbone that no fall down a staircase had ever made, whatever excuse she had offered at the door.

Nell had packed it in cold linen. She asked no questions. She prided herself on her discretion.

It took a bit gentler work and a splash of sherry before Lady Vane spoke. Even then, it was mostly small talk about the weather, though enough slipped through for Nell to piece together the truth. With her husband gone, her footing at home had turned dangerously fragile.

It was the third visit that had settled matters between them for good.

Nell was picked up late one evening by a hired carriage, the driver stating Lady Honoria Vane required her help with some urgency.

It stopped on a quiet streetcorner, and Lady Vane entered with her maid.

She sat down across from Nell, who realized quickly that Lady Vane was not her patient.

The maid was a slight, frightened rail of a girl who could not have been past eighteen, if that. As Nell began to work, she realized the girl was weeping with relief rather than pain.

By the time Nell finished quickly, happy to put an end to the grief the girl had suffered after the man used her poorly.

Lady Vane had sat the whole time in the corner without a word, and it was Lady Vane, not the girl, who pressed three times Nell's fee into her palm that night and closed her fingers over it herself.

Nell had not wanted to take it. Not that time. Not for this. There had been a queer sort of understanding between them that night. Not friendship, but something running alongside it. A debt that went in both directions.

“Lady Vane,” Nell said with a small curtsy. “I hope you are well.” She gestured at the single chair that wasn’t holding a basin of instruments, and Lady Honoria Vane sat down in the shabby, empty chair.

“I fear that I need your help again, Miss Nell,” she began as she folded her hands delicately in her lap and began to twiddle her thumbs, which was most unusual for a woman so elegant.

Nell opened her mouth to speak, afraid of what could have transpired since she last assisted Lady Vane, or what she may want, and then shut it.

“Oh, it’s not…it’s not that kind of trouble. I am in good health, thanks to you. It is…something else.”

Nell said nothing then. She had learned from her father it was the most efficient way to get a person to keep talking, which Lady Vane did.

“I am alone in the world, you see…I have no one, no real friends, no trusted servants.”

“I can empathize with that,” Nell agreed.

“I am alone as only a young widow with no family of her own can be. My husband has been two years in his grave now. His family never wanted me, not from the very first moment they laid eyes on me. And with no children to...to soften their impatience, there is nothing left to slow their wish to be rid of me. They settled a sum on me.”

Nell nodded then, and Lady Vane continued.

“Not kindness, don’t mistake it for that. It is the price of never having to lay eyes on me again. And they bargained me. Oh, I still can’t say it without it stinging! They bargained me into a marriage that was no choosing of mine.”

“To whom have you been promised, my lady?” Nell asked, unable to keep her curiosity at bay.

“The Earl of Ashcroft,” she said, a wrinkle of something resembling disgust crossing her nose. “You have not heard of him, I am sure of it. No one has in ages. He buried himself in Cornwall four years back and hasn’t come to town since. They say…”

“They say what, my lady?”

“That he’s not quite…sound.”

“Is he mad?”

“Not mad exactly, or so I am told. He is known to be cold and strange. His solicitor won’t speak of him above a whisper.

You see, I am to marry a stranger no one will describe to me above a whisper.

I am to go and live in a house I’ve never seen, at the far end of the country, with a man half the ton believes has gone quietly mad from grief. I would rather go to France.”

“Then, go to France. In the few times we have met, although in unfortunate circumstances, I have seen you to be nothing if not resilient. I am sure you can manage it.”

“And I intend to.” Lady Vane leaned forward, her eyes sharp.

“Then what is the problem?”

“I cannot simply vanish before marrying Ashcroft. My future husband would surely send men after me, and my late husband’s family, such as they are, would be glad enough to see me hunted down and made an example of for disobeying them.”

“I do not understand what you are getting at, or how I could possibly fit in this situation or its solution? Surely you have at least one old friend, or an acquaintance more appropriate to assist in such matters. I have no resources to lend, no way to—”

“I have no one. You are my only hope.”

“What are you asking, Lady Vane? Please, be plain.”

“I need the marriage to happen, Miss Frayne. I need it done, witnessed, and entered in the register, so that everyone may believe Lady Honoria Vane has safely become the Countess of Ashcroft. Gone quietly off to Cornwall to be someone else’s trouble. And then, I need to never be found again.”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere out on the water, a gull was screaming about something, but Nell paid it no mind.

“You want someone to marry him in your place,” Nell offered simply, having arrived at the only logical conclusion.

“Yes. And I want you to marry him in my place.” Lady Vane said it, no more rehearsed words or careful tones, and Nell understood this was the true purpose of the visit.

“For a few weeks only. Long enough for me to be across the Channel and gone. No one in Cornwall has ever laid eyes on me! The match was made through solicitors, if you can credit it. My face is not known to a single soul at that end of the country. You need only go, and be married, and be “Honoria” a little while, and then when it’s safe, when I’m well away…

you may vanish too, or confess it, or do as you like.

It will be my scandal by then, not yours. ”

“This is quite a request.”

“I understand that—”