Chapter 33
Iwent to check on Anna after her early departure from the ball. I regret to inform you that she is unwell, and I am staying to help. Please do not expect me tonight. I will write when there is more information.
R.
The note from Rachel found him the following morning at breakfast as he sat alone. After the waltz, he’d lost Anna somewhere in the crush of silk and candlelight. He decided he didn’t deserve to be looking for her. But the one word on the page unnerved him. Unwell.
He had no right to run after her, yet he was reaching for his coat. Only in the hall, hat in hand, did he stop for a breath.
Unwell covers a wide range of possibilities. A cold, a headache, the ordinary aftermath of an evening spent in too-warm rooms.
He told himself this all the way to Anna’s townhouse and did not believe it. He could feel that something was wrong in his marrow, and it set his blood on fire. He wrapped on the door, and the footman who answered the door looked faintly startled at finding a duke on the step.
“I have been informed that Lady Birchall is unwell. My sister Lady Rachel is here. Where is she?” He asked in a tone that did not leave room for the usual introductions or a calling card.
He was shown upstairs without further discussion. Rachel met him in the corridor outside Anna’s room. She pulled the door closed behind her softly. She looked tired, as if she had been awake for most of the night.
“Frederick.” Whatever she had been about to say rearranged itself when she saw his face.
“How quickly did you? Never mind. Come inside.” She lowered her voice.
“The physician has been by this morning. Her fever is serious. She walked home in the rain last night and was soaked through by the time she arrived. The housekeeper found her in the hall barely able to stand.” A pause.
“He says there is nothing to do but help her body fight it. Cold compresses, broth when she can take it, keep her comfortable and watched at all times.”
“Where is he now? I’d like to speak with him—”
“He’ll return this evening.”
Frederick absorbed this. He kept his expression even, which required more effort than usual.
“Has she been conscious?”
“In and out. She recognized me this morning, but she was confused. She asked something.” Rachel stopped. “She was confused. She kept saying words I couldn’t quite make out.”
He nodded once and opened the door. The room was dim, the curtains half-drawn against the daylight, warm from the fire someone had built up in the grate.
Anna was in bed with her hair loose and pale against the pillow, curly and matted with sweat.
Her face was the color of the white linen, her eyes closed tight.
Frederick crossed to her bedside, unable to stay away any longer.
He stood and looked at her. He watched the shallow rise and fall of her breathing, her hands lying limp and still on the coverlet in a way that Anna’s hands never were. Something in his chest cracked open at the vulnerability, at seeing her like this.
This poor angel…
He sat in the chair drawn up beside the bed.
The cloth in the basin beside it was still damp.
Rachel had been doing this already. He wrung it out and folded it without being asked and laid it carefully across Anna’s forehead.
Her brows drew together faintly at the coolness, but she did not wake. She did not make a sound.
“She needs to drink when she’s able,” he said, noting the cup on the table beside the basin. “Keep the cloth cool. How long between the physician’s visits?”
“I do not know. Like I said, he will come back tonight, sooner if…”
“If she worsens.”
“Yes.”
He nodded again, kept his eyes on Anna, and said nothing else. There was nothing else to say and everything to do. He would not leave her. He would see her through this.
She will be alright.
He heard Rachel sit down in the chair near the window, and for a while the room was quiet except for the fire and the sound of Anna’s breathing. Frederick continued to sit at her bedside and counted the breaths as if it was the only thing in the world that mattered.
“Frederick.”
He looked up. Rachel was watching him closely, and something in her face shifted into recognition. He knew that look, which she had been giving him since she was born. Her eyes moved from him to Anna and back again, and her expression softened.
“You should have told me,” she said quietly.
He held her gaze for a moment. “Rachel—”
“Sooner. You should have told me sooner.” She wasn’t accusing him. Rachel was too kind and gentle for that. She looked down at her hands. “I was… I have been so caught up in my own…” She pressed her lips together.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been. But I see it now, Frederick.” She looked back at him. “I see it plainly.”
Frederick said nothing. He just looked back at Anna instead.
Rachel did not press him further, and they sat in silence.
He took the cloth and dabbed her forehead, adjusted her covers when she seemed uncomfortable.
After a while, Rachel rose. She moved to the door, and he thought she was leaving to find herself some tea or rest, but she paused with her hand on the frame and turned back.
“When I was small,” she said quietly, “and I was ill. You used to sit with me.” He was looking at her now; her expression was very even, very deliberate.
“You used to talk to me. About nothing in particular. What you’d seen in the park, or what you were reading.
I don’t know if I always understood what you were saying, but it helped.
” She paused. “The physician said that sometimes they can hear, even when they can’t answer. ”
She held his gaze for one moment longer. Then she went out and pulled the door quietly closed behind her. Frederick sat in the silence she left, and looked at Anna’s face against the pillow. She had turned on her side and seemed to be pained. It tore at him.
Perhaps my sister is right.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He took a deep breath, and after a moment, he began to speak.
“The park was very crowded yesterday afternoon,” he said.
“I went early to avoid it but was detained on the way. I bumped into an associate and when I began my stroll, the fashionable hour began. It was not at all leisurely and I cut it short…” He paused.
“Percy has taken up residence on the good chair in the study again. He just won’t stay on the floor, even when I have pillows set for him.
It is beneath him I suppose. I have told him three times this week that it is not his chair.
He does not appear to believe me. I’m not certain I believe it myself anymore… ”
He watched her face. She did not wake. Her breathing continued, shallow and steady.
My Venus.
“There was a boy in the park feeding the pigeons I recall,” he said after a moment.
“He threw the bread too hard and fell over, right onto his face. He was entirely unhurt; luckily it was on the grass, but he was furious about it. His governess helped him up, and he stood covered in grass, and I thought—”
He stopped.
You would have laughed, then felt sorry for him, which is exactly the right order.
He talked to her until his voice was low and hoarse, and the light through the curtains changed, and Anna, somewhere in the depths of the fever, turned her face very slightly toward the sound. He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the fire instead.
“The first time I saw you, you were standing in my entrance hall at two in the morning with your wedding flowers still in your hair.” He paused.
“I thought you were the bravest and the most desperate thing I had ever seen. I thought… Well, I suppose I told myself it was duty. That anyone with means and a spare room would have done the same.”
The fire shifted. Anna breathed.
“It stopped being duty very quickly. I’m sure a part of you knows that.
” His voice was low, stripped of its usual composition.
It was three in the morning, and there was no one present to maintain appearances for.
“You stayed in my mind. Through the annulment, through Rathbourne, through all of it. I watched you make friends with Percy, who has never once voluntarily made friends with anyone, and I watched you talk to Rachel as though you had known her your whole life, and I told myself…” He stopped.
Began again. “I told myself a great many things.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“The cloth needs cooling.”
He quickly attended the task, wringing out the warm fabric, dipping it in the cool basin, and pressing it back on her head. He was grateful for the task, and had never done well with idle hands.
“When I saw your arms,” he started. “I saw the bruises. The day you arrived. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. But I knew what they were.” He looked at his hands. “I had seen them before. On my mother. In the same places, from the same kind of grip, left by the same kind of man.”
His jaw tightened, and he lovingly pressed the cloth onto Anna’s temples as he continued.
“I made a vow to my family,” Frederick said.
“When I was young enough that I suppose vows don’t entirely count, and yet I have never stopped keeping it.
To stand between my mother and my father when I was able.
To keep Rachel from…” He stopped again. “I told my mother I would not let anything happen to her. To either of them. That it was my job now.”
He looked at Anna’s face, pale against the pillow, and felt the familiar weight he had carried so long it had become indistinguishable from his own body.
“That is what I recognized in you,” he said.
“Not just the bruises. What’s underneath them.
” He exhaled slowly. “I could not leave you to Birchall. I could not have done it for anyone in those circumstances, but I want to be honest, which I am finding rather more possible than I once did… It was not only duty. It was not only principle. It was you, Anna.”
He looked at her hand on the coverlet, and without fully deciding to, covered it with his own and squeezed gently.
“I can manage estates and legal matters and men who make inappropriate remarks at White’s with nothing more than a glance, but I cannot…”
He looked at her perfect face with the fever flush and the shallow breathing and the absolute stillness of her. He felt fear move through him, and so he held on tighter.
“I cannot control this. I cannot take responsibility for this. And that is the most frightened I have been since I was thirteen years old in a nursery holding an infant. But that is a story for another time.”
He did not move his hand. He did not intend to.