Chapter 7
Nell looked forward to the hours in Cassandra’s room most of all at Ashcroft.
It was the most honest work she had done in years, with the promise of a future for a girl who so richly deserved it.
She was five days in, mid-exercise, before she understood what had been happening beneath the earl’s silent, watchful presence all along.
“You’ll have her sit with her eyes closed next,” he said from the settee, his arms crossed.
“What is it to you if it helps, my lord?”
“Will she count to twenty before she opens them? You know, Dr. Whitfield tried something of the kind. Though he had her stand rather than sit, and gave it up after a fortnight for want of improvement.”
Nell paused, her hand still on Cassandra’s shoulder and her eyes locked tight on the earl. “You know Whitfield’s methods?”
“I know all men’s methods who’ve had the ordering of my sister’s care these past four years.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Dr. Alderbrook favored bleeding from the neck rather than the arm, on some theory of proximity to the affected area of her body.”
“Sound logic, but a bad idea. Next?” she pressed, ready to challenge the proud earl head-on.
“Dr. Marcus Pooley would not treat her at all.”
“Really?”
“Not without a full month’s confinement to a darkened room beforehand, on the theory that light itself aggravated the turning.
I also have a translated account from a Viennese surgeon who believed the trouble sat in the stomach entirely, and treated it with tonics, to no effect but considerable misery.
” A short, humorless breath, not quite a laugh.
“I could go on. I have done little else with my life.”
“Adrian, please,” Cassandra pleaded.
Nell straightened slowly, looking at him properly now instead of at his sister’s careful head-turns.
He really does care for her.
“You’ve read all of it.”
“Everything I could find. In French, where my French would serve, and badly translated English where it wouldn’t.”
He met her eyes, and there was nothing idle in the look. She found no polite interest of a man passing time in his sister’s sickroom.
“So, when you tell me you mean to succeed where a dozen physicians of standing have failed, my lady, you must forgive me for wanting more than your confidence in the matter. I have tested every road I know of, left no stone unturned. Each one led to the same result. I should like to understand why yours does not…”
And how did you come to know this? he means to press.
It was not suspicion, she realized, or not only suspicion. It was a man who had fought a battle alone, with books and specialists instead of his own hands, but fought just the same. He had earned the right to ask the question properly. Nell took a deep breath.
“Because each one of those men treated the whole complaint as a single mystery,” she said.
“She is only one person.”
“No, I am saying, when it wants dividing into parts you must do as such. The organ that governs balance can be injured without the brain being touched at all. I’ve seen it in sailors thrown from rigging, men everyone declared vegetables who walked steady again inside a month, once someone thought to stop bleeding the head and start retraining the body to trust itself.
Multi-pronged approaches to fit complex systems.”
“I see. You are clever then?”
“It isn’t cleverness on my part, my lord. It’s patience, and the willingness to be wrong slowly instead of certain quickly.”
“And if you are wrong?”
“Like I have assured you, she will be no worse than she was, only tired from an hour’s exercise, and I will have cost her nothing but time she was already spending lying still.” Nell held his gaze.
“I have time to spare,” Cassandra chimed in then.
“I suppose you do,” he said. “And it is your future as well.
“Thank you,” Cassandra said.
Something in his jaw eased, very slightly. It was not agreement, not yet. But she found comfort in the loosening of his shoulders, the softening of his eyes as he looked at her. It was the beginning of something like ease, she thought.
Two people discovering, cautiously and without optimism, that the other was not a fool.
***
While she had decided he was not a fool, what Nell could not make sense of was the rest of him.
The days that had passed, even with the jovial Captain under its roof, she had noticed him with Mr. Coombe.
She would pass by the study door and hear low, urgent conversations that broke off the moment a heel clicked too close.
He would pass with him in the corridor with papers that were folded away the instant she came into view, even though there was no way she could see them, let alone ascertain their purpose. He came away from these meetings changed, his face almost pale for someone so handsome.
Surely it cannot be that bad, she thought to herself, then recalled how short he had been with the servants as well.
It was not just her, or his usual distance.
He was distracted at Cassandra’s bedside in a way his sister noticed too, though she said nothing of it.
She only watched her brother with a small, worried crease Nell recognized because she wore its twin herself.
Yes, I suppose I worry for my pretend husband.
Mr. Coombe himself she could not puzzle out at all. He was not, she thought, watching him from across a room one evening, a sly man. She always assumed stewards were slick men of business, but he was a bit bumbling.
He flinched at a knock on the door that had nothing to do with him. He had gone grey about the eyes in the manner of a man not sleeping, hunted in a way that reminded her of patients who came to her with a wound they’d let fester too long out of dread of what the lancing would cost them.
He is running from something…or something is not right between them…
One evening three days later, she went down to the library. She was in search of some older account of head injuries that might tell her something Whitfield and Alderbrook and the rest of the academics had missed. Instead, she found her husband.
He sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner, a book open and unread on his knee, staring at nothing in particular.
“I did not mean to intrude, my lord. Please forgive me,” she said as she began to turn on her heel.
“You’re not intruding,” he said, and she stopped to look at him. “This is your home as well, and you may sit, if you like.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
“There’s a section on the inner organs of the ear two shelves to your left. I marked what I could find in the index, though I’ll confess most of it defeated me.”
She nodded and found the shelf, and for a few minutes, it was almost easy between them.
He rose to his feet and passed her a second volume without being asked, correctly guessing what she’d want next when she had set the first tome down.
She read a passage aloud next, and he supplied the French word she stumbled on.
“The day’s exercises went well,” she offered then. “Cassandra was steadier today, even more of an improvement than yesterday.”
“That is wonderful,” he said, and something in him had loosened enough to let it show in his eyes.
It emboldened her more than she should have let it.
“Were you always so careful, my lord?” she asked, lightly, turning a page she wasn’t reading.
“Careful?”
“Yes, I find it hard to picture you young and foolish, though I understand from the Captain that you once wagered a cravat on a horse, among other things.”
He closed his eyes, and it was as if his fists were coiled at his sides, prepared to fight some ghost, rather than set on his lap.
“I don’t speak of the years before,” he said, and his voice had gone flat and final in a way that ended the matter more completely than any raised voice could have. Nell would have been prepared for a raised voice.
“I am sorry if I overstepped—”
He was on his feet before she could try to say anything else, the book he’d been holding set down with more care than the moment seemed to call for. She felt as though the room had grown too small to hold them both a moment longer.
“Goodnight, my lady,” he said softly as he walked toward the door.
She set her book down, then turned around to look at him. He was gone before she could speak again.
Nell got up from the desk and stood among the shelves a long while after he left. The book she’d gotten up for was still unfound, and she was listening to his footsteps recede down the corridor until they were gone, and she only imagined them. Her heart ached for him.
I have no right to feel this way, to care at all, she reminded herself.
She had given him nothing true of her own and had no right to expect true connection in return.
She had not given her real name, explained her trade.
She dared not speak of the hunger that had brought her to this house in the first place, her fervent desire for a better future.
She had no standing to ask a man to hand her his.
She took a taper from the desk and left the library, walking the cool, lonely hallway to her quarters.
Betsan helped her get into her nightdress, as Nell had found she must to maintain the farce that she was Lady Ashcroft in truth.
If the girl noticed her husband did not come to her quarters, and she did not go to his, Betsan was smart enough not to say it.
Nell laid down in the comfortable bed, wishing for sleep that did not come. She lay awake long into the night, turning over their interactions the way she turned over a slew of symptoms that would not tell her plainly what was wrong.