Chapter Eleven
Summerwind House
Northampton, England
It was, by far, the largest house Abigail had ever stepped foot in.
As she followed Mrs. Robbins, the housekeeper, on a tour of the palatial estate filled with personal anecdotes from when Stephen was a child (“Lord Lancaster always used to stub his toe on that step” and “That’s the chandelier Lord Lancaster swung from when he was training to join the circus” and “Here is the kitchen, did you know Cornish pasty is Lord Lancaster’s favorite dish?
”), she found herself intimidated by the overwhelming vastness of it all.
Perhaps it was a good thing that her cats weren’t here, as it wouldn’t take her long to lose them and forever to find them again. Ferdinand already had the bad habit of climbing into cabinets and disappearing for hours. If she let him free in the drawing room, she doubted she’d ever see him again.
Stephen had told her about the manor, of course. But nothing—not her modest upbringing, her string of small lodgings, or even her husband’s letters—had prepared her for the size of the orangery, the sheer number of parlors, or the baffling labyrinth of hallways.
During her second year of medical school, a patient seeking the help of a doctor had stumbled right through the front doors of the classroom.
He’d been bleeding profusely from a wound in his abdomen from which intestine was visible.
Three of her peers had fainted. One had vomited.
Two fled the room. But Abigail hadn’t done any of those things.
Instead, she’d run straight up to the man and helped him onto an exam table while the professor, a retired surgeon who had amputated limbs overseas in the Tripolitan War, examined the source of the bleeding and together they’d managed to save the man’s life.
All things being equal, Abigail would have preferred a hundred patients with their innards dangling out to a house of this magnitude to manage.
While most women of her age and social position dreamed of hosting balls and dinner parties, she didn’t have the vaguest idea of where to begin or what was required.
Because she was a doctor. Not a countess.
If only she could make Stephen understand that, but she hadn’t seen him since they’d arrived yesterday evening after their . . . excursion in the carriage.
When her cheeks warmed, she turned away from Mrs. Robbins and pretended to admire a painting hanging on the wall of the east wing parlor. Eventually, the tour came to an end, and after thanking the housekeeper for her time, Abigail retreated into the one room that offered something familiar.
The library.
Finding a practically untouched copy of The Popular Compendium of Anatomy by William Burke tucked away amidst the rows of floor to ceiling shelves, she settled in an armchair in front of the crackling fireplace for a bit of light reading.
After an hour or so, a maid dressed in black appeared with a full afternoon tea service and Abigail’s stomach grumbled, reminding her that she had skipped breakfast.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at the maid who bobbed a quick curtsy and left, leaving the door partially open behind her.
Taking care to mark her page, Abigail poured herself a cup of tea—Hyson, by the smell of it—and applied a thin layer of butter to a generous slice of seedcake still warm from the oven.
Very well, she admitted silently as the cake dissolved on her tongue in a perfect mixture of caraway seeds, nutmeg, and allspice, perhaps there were some small benefits to being a countess.
An attentive staff, for one. Though accustomed to preparing her own meals, she was, admittedly, not the best cook.
Nor was she adept at tending a fire. Such things would be a welcome improvement in her life.
As would not having to worry about money.
It was the other changes that concerned her.
Clasping the warm cup of tea to her bosom, Abigail went to a large window framed with long silk curtains and stared blindly out at the unfamiliar landscape covered in a fresh inch of snow.
Her mother had likely once stood in a library similar to this one, her belly heavy with child, her mind burdened by decisions beyond her control.
Rather than submit to a husband she did not love and settle for a life that was rich in all things but those that mattered most, she’d taken that child and fled to an unknown country.
She had risked death in pursuit of independence.
She had learned to survive beyond the material comforts of a society designed to keep women complacent so that they might be more easily controlled.
She had done all of that, and where had her daughter ended up?
Standing in the footsteps she had forsaken.
It was irony in its purest form, and if Abigail had the power to go back and change time, she wondered where she would be now if she had refused to marry Stephen. But there was no going back, only forward. Even when that forward contained a future that wasn’t certain.
Yesterday morning when she woke up, she had been a doctor in London. This morning, she was a countess in a country estate. Two different lives that were so drastically opposite, she had no idea how to even begin to merge them together. Or if such a thing were even possible.
Over a hundred years ago, a French doctor had managed a medical miracle.
Taking blood from a sheep and transferring it into a dying boy who had, against all odds, survived the unprecedented procedure.
But subsequent transfusions had failed, proving that while human and animal blood appeared visually the same, they contained different properties within that made it impossible to recreate the initial experiment without deadly consequences.
No matter how much care was taken, merging animal and human blood simply could not be done.
It was a medical impossibility, and eventually it was deemed not only dangerous, but reckless as well, and banned completely, first in France and then in England.
In America, Abigail had only read about the historic procedure.
But it made her think that there were some things that could not be merged. Science forbade it, and for likely good reason. No matter what she and Stephen did, perhaps their worlds were comprised of two different types of blood. Incompatible with life.
She turned at the sound of the door creaking open and her pulse quickened when she saw her husband standing in the doorway.
Dressed in an emerald-green tailcoat tailored perfectly to his broad shoulders, crisp white cravat stuck through with a gold pin, and black breeches tucked into leather riding boots lightly speckled with dirt, indicating he’d just gotten in from a morning ride, he appeared every inch earl of the manor.
Handsome.
Powerful.
Domineering.
She, by comparison, could not have looked less like a countess in a plain, slightly wrinkled gray dress, spectacles that were bent from falling asleep with her face pressed against the carriage window, and untamed curls barely clinging to the remnants of a coiffure.
They were so different in presentation it was almost laughably absurd.
Couldn’t Stephen see that it wouldn’t work?
Was he willfully blind to the irrationality of their marriage?
Or simply tethered to the anchor that their fathers had bound them to before they were born, regardless of how far it sank?
“Good morning,” she said tentatively, her voice louder than it should have been amidst the library’s multitude of tomes. Her knuckles gleamed white as she brought the teacup to her chin as if it were comprised of impenetrable steel instead of breakable porcelain.
“Abigail.” He prowled into the room, his steps fluid and silent, the only sound coming from the sharp click of the door as he closed it behind him. “How was your tour of the house?”
“Very informative, th-thank you.” She pivoted to watch him when he went to the fireplace, her eyes as wide and wary as a small animal observing a fox from the tangled branches of a thicket.
Embers flew into the air and the logs crackled when he jostled them with a poker before finally turning toward her, his expression impenetrable as he leaned against the back of a leather sofa and crossed his arms.
“Do you have any questions?”
Only a thousand.
If this were a surgery, she would know the next step to take.
Assess the damage, stop the bleeding, flush the wound, repair what could be fixed, and stitch the skin closed.
But in this broken farce of a marriage—broken, she was willing to admit, in large part due to her own actions—was there anything left to fix?
“In regard to the house,” he clarified before she could respond, his gaze dropping briefly before returning to her face where it hardened, a muscle pulsing in his granite jaw.
“I’m sure you have plenty of questions about why I’ve brought you here, which I do intend to answer.
But not with you standing across the bloody room looking at me as if I’m about to pick that poker back up and hit you over the head with it. ”
Her mouth dropped open. “I’m not . . . I’m not looking at you like that.”
He snorted; the first sliver of humor to cross his countenance since arriving on her doorstep in London. It softened the somber lines bracketing his mouth, and for a fleeting instant, Abigail wasn’t in the library but a narrow alley beside a coffee shop standing in the snow.
“Half past nine?”
“Half past nine. Look for a black carriage.”
“They’re all black.”
“Then look for me. I’ll be the chap bounding up the pavement to collect his beautiful bride.”
“Physical attractiveness is a relative means of—”
“Beautiful. You are beautiful, Abigail.”