The Third Morning
Chapter thirty-five
Henry
He came back in pieces. The first piece was pain. A deep, interior ache that sat behind his ribs and would not be placed. After the pain came thirst, and after the thirst came the awareness that someone was holding his hand.
He tried to open his eyes. The light was wrong, too bright, too white, as though someone had moved the windows. His lids came apart and the room swam and he closed them again. His mouth tasted of metal and chalk. His throat was raw, as though he had been sick many times.
The hand holding his tightened.
“Henry.”
Violet. He knew her voice before he knew the room. He tried to speak. What came out was not a word.
“Do not talk. You are safe. You are in my room. You have been ill for two days.”
Two days. He let that settle. The last thing he could recall with any certainty was brushing her hair.
The weight of it in his hand. The sound she had made when his thumbs found the muscle at her neck.
After that, the dark had come, and whatever had happened inside it had left his body feeling as though it had been turned inside out and put back wrong.
He slept.
When he woke again, the light had changed.
Late afternoon. A different hand was on his forehead, cooler, lighter.
He opened his eyes and found Lady Thornwick sitting in the chair beside him, her hair pinned neatly.
She was reading a small clothbound book and did not notice his eyes were open until he moved his head on the pillow.
“There you are,” she said, with the same calm she might have used if he had come down late for tea. She set the book aside and pressed two fingers to his wrist. Her lips moved while she counted.
“Seventy-eight,” she said. “You are coming along.”
“What happened?” His voice was gravel.
“You were poisoned. Arsenic. Through your shaving soap.”
He stared at her. The words arranged themselves slowly.
“Your wife found it. She heated the soap over a flame and identified the smell. She gave you egg whites to bind the poison in your stomach, scrubbed every surface the razor had touched, refused to allow the physician to bleed you, and kept you alive until I arrived with the iron water.”
He tried to sit up. His arms shook and failed. Lady Thornwick placed a hand on his chest and pressed him gently back.
“My daughter fought a physician twice her age and three times her confidence, and she won.” The corners of her mouth moved. “You married well, Your Grace.”
A knot formed in his chest. He closed his eyes. Not because he was tired, though he was, but because the picture she was painting, Violet at his bedside, scrubbing arsenic from his skin, was not a picture he could look at directly. Not yet.
“Where is she?”
“Downstairs. Preparing more tincture.”
He tried to speak. The sound that came out was not quite a word but it was the most he could manage.
He slept again.
The next time he woke, it was dark and Violet was in bed beside him, her back to his chest, her breathing slow and deep. His arm was around her waist. He did not remember putting it there, but his body had apparently made the decision without consulting him, and he found he had no objection.
He lay in the dark and breathed her in. Lavender and something else.
He was alive. The knowledge of it arrived with gratitude and relief but also with shame.
He was alive because his wife had been investigating murders he had dismissed as a curse.
The madness they whispered about in Lady Thornwick, the eccentricity they pitied, those were the things that had kept him breathing.
And the women with ridiculous bonnets he’d prohibited Violet from associating with, they had cared and had acted to save him.
He had married a woman with an army. He had not known it. He had been too busy protecting his solitude to notice that she had built a fortress around them both while he was looking the other way.
He tightened his arm around her. She stirred.
“You are awake,” she murmured.
“I am told I owe you my life.”
“You owe your life to egg whites and my mother’s iron water.”
“Violet.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you.”
She turned in his arms. In the dark, he could see the outline of her face, the loose hair across the pillow. She put her hand against his chest, and the weight of it settled something that had been unsettled for years.
She began to talk. She told him about Cranbrook and Bainbridge, about the charcoal poultice, about Mrs Bickle arriving with the magnesia from Edinburgh and eating his biscuits. He listened, but he was listening to her voice more than the words, the way it moved through the dark, low and steady.
He watched her mouth move. He had kissed that mouth.
He wanted to kiss it again, and the wanting was not desire but something less manageable.
He noticed, for the first time, a faint line at the corner of her eye.
He wondered if he had put that there. The weeks of fear, the investigation, the sleepless nights…
He had put it there by bringing catastrophe to her feet, and yet she had stayed.
She was telling him about his mother-in-law counting her own heartbeat to time the doses, and he was thinking that he had never seen anything as beautiful as this woman talking about medicine in the dark with her hair undone. She was beautiful by being exactly who she was and nothing else.
“The Duchess of Cranbrook was kind enough to offer assistance with announcing the delay of our ball. You will need the better part of two months until you can stand, I should think.”
“That is unfortunate,” he said in a gravelly voice. “I was looking forward to that.”
She laughed, giving him a light slap on the arm.
“And Sarah?” he asked, because the name was the stone at the bottom of everything.
“In a cell at Bow Street.” Violet paused. “She was arrested in Surrey, at the cottage where she keeps your nephew.” Another pause. “Who is not your nephew.”
He felt the betrayal settle with the slow, cold weight of confirmation. He had known, since she told him about the boy’s age, that Sarah’s story was a lie. He had known and had spent the days since refusing to follow the knowledge to its end.
“Edmund?”
“Cleared. Kit questioned him. His first words were to ask whether you were alive.”
Henry looked at the ceiling. He owed her an apology.
For the argument, for his anger, for sending her from the room.
She had been right to investigate, right to push, right to look while he did nothing except make her feel she had no right to judge family because he had forgotten that she was family.
All because he could not bear to look there himself.
Edmund had been entangled with the murderer, and Henry’s refusal to see it had almost cost him his life.
“I was wrong,” he said. “About Edmund. About what you suspected. You were looking where I would not, and I made you pay for it.”
“You were protecting someone you loved.”
“It was not protection. It was pride. I did not want the danger to come from inside my own house. I wanted it to be a stranger, a curse, a piece of rotten luck, anything that did not require me to doubt the people I trusted.” He paused. “That is not caution. That is vanity.”
Her hand found his in the dark. “It is not vanity to trust your own, but it is expensive.”
His fingers squeezed hers once. He was quiet for so long she thought he had fallen asleep again. Then he said, “The boy.”
“Edmund’s son. Yes.”
“She told me he was Harold’s.” His words came out breathless.
“She came to me a year after my brother died. She said Harold had loved her in secret, that he had got her with child, that the boy was all that remained of him. She wept. I had never seen her weep before, and I believed every word because I wanted Harold to have left something behind.” He paused to catch his breath.
“I have never met him. She would not allow it. She said the boy was settled, and that visits would unsettle him. I told myself every pound I sent was the last service I could do for Harold.”
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at the ceiling.
“She used me. And she used my love for a dead man to open my purse and my guilt.”
His jaw worked. She watched the grief and the fury compete for his face and neither win.
“I should have asked more questions. But I wanted him to be Harold’s. I should like to meet the boy,” he said. “He is not Harold’s, but he is still…” He searched for the word. “He is still ours. In some fashion.”
“Yes,” she said. “He is.”
He closed his eyes. “I miss my brother, Violet.”
She pressed her lips to his temple and stayed there until his breathing told her he was asleep.