Chapter 10
Honoria reached for her bag on the side of Cassandra’s bed before he had the chance to tell her she was to stay behind.
He looked at the bag in her hand then, a worn leather thing, old, plainly a man’s once.
He realized then he had never once seen her belongings and again had the feeling there was more to his wife than he knew.
“You needn’t come,” he said finally, his mind snapping back as they began to descend the stairs.
“I’ll take one of the footmen and ride down.
A countess has no business kneeling over an injured laborer, no matter what skills you may have.
I will merely go to assess the situation, and send a rider to the closest surgeon if that seems to be what is needed.
I will take care of the people in this village. ”
“A man is hurt,” she said, already at the front door, meeting his every step, “and I can help. That settles the matter for me, if not for you. Shall we be on with it then?”
Something in her face told him arguing would cost more time than it saved, which they did not have. And so, they rode down together.
What they found was worse than the frantic account suggested. A middle-aged man was pinned and crushed beneath a fallen beam before men had got him free. He was bleeding badly from a leg wound. Crimson stained his clothes, matched only by the red in his cheeks as he growled.
“Word around is that the nearest surgeon is at least a day’s ride from here,” one of the men said, his hat in his hands as he shook his head.
“We haven’t the faintest idea what to do for somethin’ like that,” another said as he offered the poor man a sip of hard liquor.
“We must try and do what we can for now,” Adrian said. “Get a horse, someone ride to the surgeon at once! You will be rewarded for your haste.”
He looked down then to see Honoria was kneeling by the man’s leg. She began to work, fast and without the smallest hesitation at such a sight. She was remarkable, her hands moving over the wound with a sureness no lady’s hands had any business doing.
She called for what she needed, a clean cloth, more light, someone’s coat rolled to prop the leg, in a voice that expected obedience and got it without question. In some ways, her manner of speaking reminded him of himself, when he had more ambition than disappearing.
He watched as men who would never in their lives have taken an order from a countess obey without question. By the time she sat back on her heels, the man was eased, his color more even, and his breathing steadier than it had been when they’d arrived.
She rose slowly, some of the color gone out of her own face now that the work was done. She wiped her brow with her sleeve, and despite the gore of the scene, Adrian could not look away from her.
It is the strangeness of it, that’s all. A countess doing, with her own two bloodied hands, what a trained surgeon would. It has nothing to do with those ocean eyes, those soft pink lips…
He shook his head and let the former thought stand as the whole of the reason for his watching. He knew he should look away, that watching her rise, spent and swaying very slightly on her feet, would only make the instinct to take her into his arms stronger.
He desperately wanted to know more about the widow who knew more about medicine than the finest physicians in London. No woman, no matter how devoted, learns such skill from attending a single sickbed. I must stop averting my eyes and look more closely at the woman under my roof.
They rode back a long way in silence, the horses picking their way slow along the darkening lane.
“A life shut in the dark is no life,” Honoria said finally as they neared the gate to the manor.
“You saw her today…How quickly the fear passed once she had something to fix her mind on besides her own fear of falling. She is stronger than you let yourself see, my lord, and there is nothing she’s more afraid of than being kept like a caged bird. ”
He meant to refuse her, as he had refused her a dozen times already on the same grounds. He found the refusal did not come. Not today. Not after what he had seen.
“A small gathering, at the Trevanions nearby. We received an invitation I had sought to ignore, but will have us all attend. I will not have her venturing out far,” he said instead, watching the road rather than her. “As countess, I will leave you to the details.”
He knew, even as he said it, watching the hedgerows go by rather than his wife’s face, that he had not agreed to it for his sister’s sake alone. He turned his head, ever so slightly, and saw a smile crossing her face that made his heartbeat faster than the horse’s pace.
Somewhere further on, with the lights of the house not yet in view, he asked her what he so desperately needed to know. While he could enlist a solicitor to dig deeper, and likely still would, he owed her that much.
“Tell me truthfully. How do you know so much about medicine? I have played dumb long enough, and I think you owe me that much.”
“I suppose I do. There was sickness where I was raised…” she said, easily enough, as though she’d given the answer before. “And it was not pleasant. I do not like to speak of what I saw, as a young girl.”
“I see,” Adrian said, and a part of him ached for the young girl.
“It was more of it than the one physician in the village could reach on his own. My father helped, and I made myself useful to him rather than sitting idle. I could not watch people suffer for want of another pair of hands, and I quickly found I had a knack for it. I could not allow my sex to be a deficit.”
It was the sort of thing a capable woman of any rank might plausibly have done, Adrian supposed. He let the answer sit with him, and he pressed no more. He let his mind turn though, considering her. She was not a lady who had once lent a physician her hands out of good nature and a strong stomach.
She was a physician herself, complete and unmistakable, down to her movements and her orders to others.
Her answer explained some of it, but not the way she moved, not the beauty of what he had witnessed with his own two eyes.
He shook his head and decided again not to press her on it.
She had given enough of herself to not endure his questioning.
***
That night, alone in the study long after the house had gone quiet, he did a thing he had not done in four years. He rang his bell and sat back in his desk chair.
“You rang, my lord?” a servant asked.
“Please send for the old ledgers, the working copies versus the final reports.”
“At once, my lord.”
He looked down at the pages, ink-blotted and cross-hatched with corrections, the accounting from which the fair copies were drawn and presented to him each quarter by Mr. Coombe. He realized he had not opened them since before the accident.
He had told himself, in the years since, that it was trust that kept them closed.
But sitting now with the first of them open on his desk and the candle burned low, he understood it had been something closer to cowardice.
He had been overcome by an unwillingness to look closely at anything in his life, accounts included.
He poured himself a small brandy and made himself read. He went column by column, entry by entry. The numbers were unfamiliar to him in a way that shamed him more than he’d expected, but he caught up as he went on.
It took him past midnight to find it, but he did. A single payment, large, entered against work he could not place to any repair or improvement he had ever authorized or heard mentioned. It was paid out to a name that meant nothing to him at all.
It might be nothing. A misfiled entry, an old debt from before father’s death…some ordinary complication of an estate too long left to run itself, he cursed as he took another swig. And yet, my instincts tell me something is amiss. I should look away…
He found he could not unsee it. Sitting there at his desk, with the candle burning low and four years of unopened accounts stacked before him, he understood he had no way of knowing what else might be buried in them, waiting to be found.