Chapter 5
Early the next morning, just as the sun had begun to rise across the moor, a maid arrived at Nell’s door. She could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, round-faced with bright blue eyes that rivaled a robin’s egg.
“My name is Betsan, my lady. You must forgive me from the start…You see, I’ve never dressed a countess before! Not properly at least, only helped Mrs. Scott turn out the guest rooms when there was company, which there hasn’t been in ever so long, not since…Well...”
She caught herself, too near a thing she’d clearly been told not to speak of, and pressed on with a cheeky smile. “I hope I do it well enough. You have the most lovely hair, if I may say. It’ll take a curl beautifully.”
Nell sat at the vanity and let the girl work and talk on. She found, to her own surprise, that she did not mind the chatter nor the help. Nell did not have the faintest idea how a countess should fashion herself, and it had been a long while since anyone had simply been glad of her company.
She let herself enjoy it a moment longer than was wise, letting herself forget for a moment that this was all a temporary farce.
Betsan took up her hand to fit a glove, and turned it palm-up toward the window, and went quiet.
“Begging your pardon, my lady, but there is something…” She turned the hand a little further into the light, frowning at it the way Nell herself did a wound that perplexed her.
“You’ve calluses here, and here. My uncle’s a smith, and his hands look near enough the same!
Which great house did you keep, my lady, before you were married?
My mother always said a fine lady’s hands ought to be soft as a baby’s bottom! ”
“I was never one for idleness,” Nell said quickly, and drew her hand back gently to smooth her own glove on with a forced smile.
“You see, my prior husband’s household kept me busier than most, I think.
Sewing, mostly, and a great deal of it. They said it was important that a lady keep up with her hobbies and I found I quite liked embroidery. ”
It was an answer as thin as a sheet of paper. She heard how thin it was even as she said it, saying a bit too much about something that should be simple. Betsan nodded and let it go, the way servants were trained to let things go, but Nell’s chest grew tight all the same.
Good eyes on that one. I shall have to be plainer with my gloves and less plain with my hands. Lord knows what else may give me away…I must tread carefully, no matter how pleasant she is. I cannot risk being found out before all is settled, with Honoria, Cassandra, and myself.
“I think I am settled for the day, thank you for helping me dress,” Nell said as she rose to her feet, putting on the air of a confident countess. “Although I dare say I have one favor if you could attend to it…”
“Of course, my lady! Please just say the word.”
“I would like more ribbon for the trim of tomorrow’s gown if you could fetch some,” Nell said, an invented errand for a hasty exit.
“Of course, we have a lovely selection, and I will be sure to bring several options to you to choose from. Thank you, my lady,” Betsan said as she exited the room, practically skipping.
Nell waited a moment until all was quiet and went straight to the East Wing before the rest of the house had properly woken.
I am only looking in on my new sister.
She knew it for a lie before her hand had even found the door.
***
Cassandra was awake, and unsurprised to see her, which told Nell something about how little surprised the girl. She was intuitive, sharp and bright.
“You’ve come to meddle,” she said with a wry smile. “I find I don’t mind nearly so much as I ought to. Meddle away.”
“I’ve just come to look,” Nell said. “The meddling comes later, and only with your leave. May we begin?”
“Do your worst.”
Nell did not draw the curtains fully; she knew the morning sun might be a bit too much for her delicate eyes.
She cracked them enough to see by and drew a chair close to Cassandra’s bed.
She began the only way she knew how to begin, which was slowly and with lots of observation.
She also would not try her hand at any of the things London’s physicians had tried and failed at.
No bleeding. No dosing with laudanum. No dark room. No waiting for a thing to pass on its own…
“Follow my finger,” she began as she moved her hand slowly from side to side. “Start with your eyes only. Don’t move your head.”
Cassandra did, gamely, her gaze stopping and dragging in a way that told Nell something, though she wasn’t certain what. Not yet.
“That’s good. Now I want you to slowly turn your head this way,” Nell said, motioning to her right. “Stop the instant the room so much as thinks of moving.”
“You are speaking of magic, rooms moving and having thoughts,” Cassandra quipped. “I knew I would like you.”
“This is exactly how my father taught a green sailor to find his feet again after a bad crossing,” Nell said. “Even the strongest of men are no match for the test of the sea.”
“That is true. How am I doing?”
“Well, but remember we need patience and not stillness as you do this exercise. Stillness and bed rot are what they’ve fed you for four years, and look what it’s done for you.”
“I like your plain speech.” Cassandra turned, an inch, then two, her breath catching at the third.
“Stop and hold there. Hold and let it settle,” Nell said. “Good, now let’s try again the other way.”
It was slow, unglamorous work. It was the kind of simple but impactful exercise that would earn no physician a reputation.
As she went through the motions, Nell found she had missed it.
Even though she had only been away from her practice for mere days.
She craved the quiet absorption of watching a body for what it would tell her, rather than what it had been told to say.
They worked that way for the better part of an hour, and Cassandra talked through most of it, undoubtedly trying to occupy her mind through what was arduous and foreign exercise.
“Honoria,” she said, somewhere in the middle of it, warm and familiar, as though the name had been on her tongue for years. “Tell me of your late husband.”
Nell hesitated; she still could not get used to the name, then caught herself.
“Oh, I fear there is not much to tell—”
“Was he very dashing? I imagine a viscount must be dashing, at the least in the portraits. They always have good portraits.”
“He was…a steady man, I suppose,” she said, thinking it was vague enough and thought better than to leave that statement hanging without more details. “Not so much dashing, but handsome in his way.”
A husband stitched out of my bloody imagination, hoping it holds together the way I stitch a bloody wound.
“And where were you raised? You don’t speak quite like the London ladies who used to visit before—” Cassandra stopped suddenly, and Nell wasn’t sure if she was on the edge of some awful memory or the feeling that Honoria was not who she seemed to be.
“The south coast,” Nell replied, which was as true as anything else she could say, for Nell had been raised everywhere and nowhere. “A quieter sort of life than London’s, I promise you.”
Nell found quickly that half-truths came out easier, so she stuck to those as the conversation went on.
She had lied to strangers a hundred times in her surgery.
She lied about fees to those who could not pay, lied to frightened patients about pain that would not pass quickly.
Those lies had cost her nothing, spent on people she’d never see again and all to help.
This was a different story, one that began to weigh heavily on her chest. Nell did not like lying to Cassandra, especially as the girl began to trust her as they continued their work.
“Now you,” Nell said, ready to turn the conversation from herself. “How did it begin…the turning, I mean? Was there some cause you can point to? A trigger?”
The graceful ease went out of Cassandra’s face at once like a deflated balloon. Nell leaned closer, waiting for her patient to speak, as she always did.
“There was an accident,” she said, quieter and less confident. “A carriage. Four years ago. Our parents were killed in it…I was thrown clear, or so I’m told. I don’t remember the throwing, only waking up after with the room spinning. It has not stopped since.”
“I am sorry,” Nell said softly, and meant it.
Cassandra picked at her eiderdown with her fingers, not meeting Nell’s eye. “I remember almost nothing of that night,” she continued. “Which the physicians all found very interesting, and none of them found useful.”
“And what of your brother? Where was he, what does he think?”
Cassandra’s voice dropped low until it was barely more than breath. “He will not speak of it. Not the accident. Not our parents. Not that whole year after, not one word of it, not to me nor to anyone that I’ve ever heard.”
“I see,” Nell said, sitting back and crossing her arms.
“He leaves the room if it’s so much as raised.
I tried, once, in the first year, and watched him go white.
He walked out of the room and did not come back to me for two whole days.
As you can understand, I stopped asking questions after that.
He’s been my only company these long years, aside from the household staff… ”
Nell said nothing to that. She took it in, the way she let a difficult diagnosis settle before she said anything. Her heart grew heavy as she thought not only of all Cassandra had suffered with the loss of her parents, but the loneliness of years confined to a bed with no company.
***
They were over an hour into the work and Cassandra’s cheeks flushed with the small triumph of a head-turn held three full seconds without the room betraying her.
She looked much healthier and more radiant than when Nell had first met her.
If such a small success improved her countenance, Nell could not imagine what would happen if they were to continue.
Suddenly, the door opened without a knock.
The earl entered the room and stood at the door, taking in the scene in a single sweep. She watched him note the open curtains, his sister upright and engaged rather than lying flat and silent, the color in her cheeks.
“This is finished,” he said coolly, calmly. “Now.”
“It is not finished! We have only just begun! Can’t you see, even after a short visit with Honoria…I am better, Adrian, can you not simply—”
“I said now, Cassandra. That was not a question.”
Cassandra pushed herself upright, assumedly to argue with him properly, all flushed and stubborn in a way Nell suspected the household hadn’t seen in years. But then, she moved just a bit too fast for a body four years unpracticed at defending itself. She tipped to the side.
Nell and the earl reached her in the same instant, from two different sides of the bed, but Nell’s hands found her first. She secured her grip gently on the jaw and the back of the skull, sure and practiced. It was a surgeon’s hold for a head that mustn’t be let to snap sideways.
His hands came down a heartbeat after, meaning to catch a sister, and closed instead over his wife’s fingers. Nell almost let go of Cassandra at his touch, a jolt of electricity pulsing through her body at the proximity.
For the length of one breath, neither of them moved. Cassandra steadied between them, safe, already laughing at her own clumsiness.
Nell heard none of it, nor was she thinking of Cassandra just then. She was memorizing the warmth of his hand closed hard over hers, and the way she could feel, through nothing more than that strong grip. His eyes had found hers over his sister’s head and stayed there.
“You will do this only when I am present,” he said at last as he stepped back, to Nell, his voice recovered but not fully. She could feel that something still under it was unsettled. “Every time. I do not yet trust you with her.”
Nell stood up and smoothed the blanket on Cassandra, needing a task to distract her from him. She did not look at him.
“Then be present,” Nell said, her eyes down on the bed. “It is no more than I hoped for.”
More than I ought to hope for.
Deep down she knew that she had wanted, in that small, secret corner of herself, not merely his permission but his presence. She had come to this great house with a box of jewels and a false name with the price of three or four weeks’ pretending.
She had accounted for that, but not accounted for coming to care for the girl in the bed. And certainly not the craving of a man’s hand closing over hers as though it belonged there forever.
My husband’s hand…
“Time to rest, Cassandra,” she said as she gathered her things to go, knowing that she was playing a dangerous game. “I will see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Cassandra said, a lightness to her voice that had not been there before.
Nell was already half-turned toward the door when she felt it, a shot that struck her at the core. She did not need to turn around to know he was looking at her, but she glanced back all the same.
The earl had gone very still, his stoic stature temporarily melted. His gaze, briefly hot on her, dropped to her hands and then averted to the corner.