Chapter 4
Edwina had, indeed, been unable to achieve any sort of relaxed state. She’d nibbled a bit at the food Darina had sent up to her, but she found herself without much appetite as she considered what sort of man she’d been invited there to “help.”
If he were a self-hating, angry, miserable drunk, well, that would be hard enough to deal with. But if he had succumbed to opiate addiction as she suspected, then a clash of wills between them was sure to be something of a nightmare.
She hadn’t had much experience with such things firsthand.
Juice of the poppy was generally not an indulgence found among the good people of the Wallace clan.
The only source to obtain the vile stuff was the chamber of Drusilla herself, and she was always tremendously careful and sparing in terms of who she administered it to for fear that they might become hooked and unreasonable.
There had been one time, however, when Edwina had seen what such a substance could do to the human spirit. Even though she had outwardly laughed it off with her usual sardonic temperament, inwardly, it had frightened her to her core.
A servant lad who worked in the stables—Archibald was his name—had been kicked in the chest by one of the horses.
Such an injury might have killed most men in his position, crushing their ribs entirely and damaging their hearts beyond repair.
Archie had been lucky, though. He’d seen the hoof coming for him just in time to redistribute his weight so he could go with it rather than standing against it, and it had only broken two of his ribs, leaving the rest of him intact.
Still, the pain had been ghastly for him.
Edwina had watched Drusilla treat the lad as best she could, wrapping the ribs tightly despite his cries of anguish and then giving him a few drops of laudanum for the agony.
The stuff had worked its magic right enough.
Archie’s pain had subsided almost immediately, and he had relaxed visibly.
Drusilla had told him to get plenty of rest and not to return to his duties for a week.
But after that, Archie had started to haunt the corridor outside the healer’s chamber, complaining that his pain kept returning worse than ever. Drusilla had indulged him the first couple of times, giving him fewer and fewer drops of laudanum despite his desperate mewling for more.
One day, when Edwina had been passing by the healer’s chamber on her way to the scullery to oversee preparations for her brother Cameron’s birthday supper, she’d heard a dreadful commotion and gone to investigate.
She found Archie in a dreadful frenzy, wild-eyed and violent, tearing the healer’s chambers apart and demanding more of the opiate at once.
Drusilla had been able to pacify him with the aid of a cudgel swiftly administered to the back of the lad’s head, and he’d been dragged out and kept in irons in the dungeon for several weeks until the poison was entirely out of his system and he promised to behave himself.
(He was as good as his word, though everyone had certainly kept a close eye on him for quite some time after that.)
Edwina had been perplexed by the whole episode, not to mention haunted by the madness she’d seen blazing in the boy’s eyes.
She had asked Drusilla about it, and Drusilla had explained how the substance was powerful enough to hold someone under its spell if that person took too much of it or came to rely upon it too heavily.
She had allowed Edwina to borrow a book that explained the phenomenon in greater detail, and Edwina had turned the pages rapidly that night, enthralled and horrified at once.
Naturally, part of her had always remained curious about what it must be like to take a few drops of such terribly alluring poison—just as she had remained scared of the results.
From time to time, she idly wondered if she would ever be injured gravely enough to require such treatment and whether she would be wiser to refuse it if it was offered.
Either way, she had certainly come to fully understand the cruel grip it exerted over those who had become too enamored with it. If she ended up face-to-face with such a person, would she be able to help him? Would she even stand a chance?
She didn’t know. She only knew her sister needed her to do her best, and that was what she intended to do.
After a few hours of sitting quietly and contemplating what was in store for her, Edwina decided that enough was enough. Nothing would be accomplished by such fretting, and allowing another night to pass without addressing the situation would likely only make things worse.
She needed to simply get up, go to the room of this James person, and see for herself how bad things were. A quick look would likely let her know whether her time here would be futile.
Edwina left her chamber and found a servant asking her where James’s room was.
Once she was told, she started off in that direction, wondering vaguely whether anyone would find it objectionable for her to be in a man’s room without any sort of chaperone.
Under normal circumstances, that sort of thing could lead to any number of unpleasant rumors and suppositions which might damage the reputations of all concerned.
Then again, these were hardly normal circumstances, were they? If the man was in as bad a condition as everyone seemed to indicate, then she doubted whether he would be suspected of lewd acts in his drugged state.
Besides, Edwina had never much bothered with those sorts of formalities. People could think whatever they wanted of her; she cared not. She knew what she had and hadn’t done, and that was enough for her.
When she reached the door of James’s chamber, she decided not to bother with knocking.
What good would it do? No doubt he would belligerently yell for her to leave him alone, and she would end up barging in anyway unless her announcing herself first gave him time enough to lock the door or even barricade it, which would be detrimental indeed.
No, she would just enter and deal with whatever sight greeted her. If he was in some state of undress, well, so be it. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before.
In the illustrations of Drusilla’s medical books, at any rate.
She took a deep breath and opened the door, walking through. Sure enough, what she encountered inside shocked and sickened her.
It was the smell of the room that hit her first. The chamber pot had clearly not been tended to in at least a couple of days, no doubt because the occupant had refused to allow any servants inside.
Its contents were rancid, but at least it wasn’t overflowing, which hardly surprised Edwina; habitual use of opiates was known to hinder the processes of the bowels.
Even so, the hot and rotting smell of disease hung heavy in the air.
That, and the reek of the man’s body and hair, which had probably not been bathed in over a week.
The man himself, who was angrily squawking and flapping his arms like some outrageous bird and predictably demanding that she leave at once, was an absolute wreck from the look of him.
His face was pale and scruffy and glistened with foul cold sweat.
His shoulder-length brown hair was greasy, and his entire posture seemed hunched and pitiable, as though he was in pain and constantly expecting more of it, prepared to flinch and double over at any moment.
From the way he was keeping all of his weight on one leg, it was easy to determine where he’d been injured.
He was clothed, so at least they had both been spared the embarrassment of her encountering him in the nude. Indeed, his clothes were so rumpled and filthy that she had no doubt believing he’d been wearing them (and sleeping in them) for many days.
One look at him—and one whiff of the stale, vaguely acrid air in the room—and it was clear that he was not merely a drunkard. His use of opium was undeniable.
She would have her work cut out for her, it seemed.
“Get out of my room this instant, you damned harridan!” he howled. “No one gave you leave to enter! You are not wanted here!”
“My sister seems to want me here,” Edwina countered calmly. She was doing her best to keep her tone neutral and her eyes fixed upon his unwaveringly, though the stink of the place was making her feel ill. “Your brother, too, for that matter.”
“You do not know me, you do not know my pain, and you have no business intervening,” he snapped.
“If you think you can storm in here and act as though you somehow hold the keys to end my suffering, then you are a fool! What do you believe you can do for me that the healers have not already tried, eh?”
“First of all, I can tell you that you are behaving like an idiot and a child,” she shot back. “I doubt very much whether your healers have already told you that, and if they have, clearly you need to hear it again since it doesn’t seem to have penetrated that thick skull of yours.”
“My brother has not hurled nearly enough insults at me already, is that it?” James spat mockingly. “He has sent you here to come up with new ones?”
“If he had, then it seems to me that you would certainly merit hearing them. Have you seen yourself? They tell me that you were once a mighty warrior, and now look at you! Nothing more than a foul and twisted horror! Do you enjoy living this way? Do you wish to languish in here, drowning in laudanum and your own stupid self-pity until you waste away to nothing?”
“If I do, that is my affair, not yours! And I make use of wine, nothing more!”
“Lie to others if you wish, but not to me.” She smirked knowingly. “I am well acquainted with the reek of the poppy, and it clings to you shamefully. If I cross the room and examine the contents of that bottle next to your bed, I believe we both know full well what I shall find there.”
“If you make any attempt to put your hands upon my bottle,” he warned, jutting a trembling finger at her, “I shall fling you headfirst out the damned window!”
Edwina drew herself up to her full height.
“You will do no such thing. All the same, I shall not press the point…for the moment. Rather, I will leave you to consider the things I have said, and to enjoy one final night with your precious bottle. For after tonight, you will no longer be able to lean upon it.”
“So you think,” he grumbled. “Now leave me at once.”
Sure enough, Edwina took her leave, shutting the door gently behind her and shaking her head. Yes, that had gone more or less the way she’d expected it to and had certainly confirmed her worst fears about the state of the man.
Now she was left to wonder: Was there anything she might conceivably do to help him?
As she went back to her own room, she knew that there was only so much that was within her power.
She could not restrain James bodily and pour the treatment down his throat.
She doubted very much whether she would even be allowed to give him the constant monitoring he’d require in order to make sure he did not find some new way to obtain the laudanum.
(Where he was getting it in the first place was a mystery she knew she would need to solve if she’d have any hope of ensuring that replenishment of his supply would remain out of his reach.)
Most of all, she understood that in order to get better, James would have to want to get better.
She was sure that behind the rage in his eyes, she had seen sadness, guilt, and regret. It would be difficult to get past the armor of his self-pity and access those emotions so that she could make him see reason. That would take cleverness, determination, and above all, patience.
Was she up to the task?
Edwina did not know. She only knew that this was the only favor her sister had ever asked of her, and that made it crucial for her to try her hardest.
She sat at the small workbench she’d been furnished with and began to grind the herbs that Drusilla had given her.
It was a start, at least.