Chapter 21
Colin found her in the nursery at seven in the morning, in the same chair he had left her in at midnight.
He had known from the landing, because the house felt wrong. There was no singing in it.
Katherine was in her cot, her cheeks the color of brick and her breathing fast and shallow. Beside the cot, in a chair too small for her, sat his wife.
“She’s cooler than she was at four,” Leonora said, without turning around.
“I’ve had the window open a crack, and she’s taken a little water.
Mrs. Pike says that babies run hot over nothing at all, and I have decided to believe her.
But I would rather somebody sent for a doctor anyway, and I would rather it were now. ”
“How long have you been in that chair?”
“That isn’t the pressing question.”
“How long?”
“Since about two,” Leonora replied. “She was crying, and I couldn’t think what else to—”
Colin crossed the room and pressed the back of his hand against her forehead. She was burning.
“Right,” he said.
“I’m perfectly—”
“Right.”
He bent and picked her up out of the chair.
There was a great deal of noise about it.
She informed him that she could walk. She informed him that she had walked a good deal further than this yesterday, up a rope ladder, one-handed.
She managed to add that a duchess of five days carried through her own corridors in front of the staff would be in the columns by Friday, before her head fell onto his shoulder, which rather made his argument for him.
“Mrs. Pike,” Colin called, on the landing. “Send Tom to Reading for Dr. Aylmer, and tell him to say it’s for the Duchess and the child both. Then bring up whatever you’d give a person who has been sitting in a draft since two o’clock in the morning.”
“Broth.”
“Broth. And bring the cot into the blue room.”
“Both of them in the same room, Your Grace?”
“She will get out of her bed and go sit with the child within the hour,” Colin said, “and I would rather not spend my day carrying my wife back and forth across a landing.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Pike murmured, “you’re learning.” Then she took off down the stairs at a speed her hip had not permitted in years.
The doctor came at eleven and was not much use, which Colin had expected.
He was a decent man with a bad wig and twenty miles of road on him. He listened to the baby’s chest for a long time and then to Leonora’s, and asked how long, how hot, and whether either of them had been in wet clothes.
“Both of them,” Colin replied. “Tuesday. My fault.”
“Your Grace—”
“It was my fault. Say the rest of it.”
“There is no rest of it,” Dr. Aylmer said, packing his bag.
“Children catch colds. Grown women catch colds. This one has gone at them both hard because they have been passing it back and forth between them like a plate, and the child is small, and the mother, if you’ll forgive me, has clearly not slept since it started. ”
“She isn’t the mother.”
Dr. Aylmer paused with his hand on the clasp.
“Your Grace,” he said, “I have been in that room for forty minutes. I have watched her hold that child’s head while I listened to its chest, and I have watched her lie to me about how long she has been sitting up with it, and I have delivered four hundred children in this county and I know what I am looking at.
You may call her what you like on the parish register. I shall go on calling her what I saw.”
Colin did not answer.
“Now. Keep them warm and keep them fed, and send for me tonight if the breathing changes in either of them. And before you ask me what I shall do when I come: very little. I shall listen, and I shall tell you whether it has gone to the chest, and that is a thing worth knowing at two in the morning, because if it has we act and if it has not you go to bed. That is what you are paying me for. Not medicine. An answer.”
It was a cold, and a bad one, and the child was small. Colin paid him three guineas and saw him to the door with genuine courtesy, because the man had ridden for twenty miles.
Then he went back upstairs and shut the door and gave his entire day to it.
He had not looked after anybody since he was fifteen.
He discovered, over the course of that Wednesday, that he had forgotten less of it than he expected.
He got Katherine to take water off a spoon by being, once again and to his lasting shame, a captain with an enormous hat.
He got broth into his wife by simply sitting on the edge of the bed with the bowl and refusing to discuss anything else until it was empty.
“This is undignified.”
“Eat.”
“I am a grown woman and a duchess, and you are holding a spoon.”
“I am aware of the spoon. Eat.”
“Colin—”
“You have had four hours of sleep since Monday, you sat in a draft for five of them, and you are the reason there is a child in this house who eats at all.” He held out the spoon again. “So you will forgive me if I am unmoved by your dignity, Duchess. Open your mouth.”
She opened her mouth.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, when the baby had gone down for the third time and the light had turned the color of weak tea, they played a word game because she was too hot to sleep and too miserable to read.
“A town.”
“Bath,” Leonora said, with feeling.
“A creature.”
“A bat. Colin, this is a very poor game. Everything begins with B.”
“That was the design of it.”
“That was the design?”
“You’ve been arguing with me for ten minutes instead of complaining about your head.” He shrugged. “It seemed a fair exchange.”
She looked at him from her pillow, with her hair stuck to her forehead, and laughed, which turned into a cough, which she was extremely rude about.
By eight o’clock, Leonora could not bear herself.
The fever had broken somewhere in the early evening and left her in a state she could only describe as swampish. Her hair was wet at the roots, and she had been in the same shift since two in the morning. She had reached the point where lying still was worse than moving.
“I need a bath,” she declared.
“You need to sleep.”
“I want a bath, and then I will sleep. If I do not have one, I shall lie here all night thinking about it. So, on the whole, the bath is more efficient.” She pushed herself up on her elbows, and the room briefly tilted sideways. “Ask Mrs. Pike.”
“Mrs. Pike is fifty and has been on her feet since five, and she is asleep in a chair on the landing outside this door because she would not go to bed while the child was feverish, and I have already carried her shawl out to her once.”
“Then Susan.”
“Susan went home to her mother’s on Tuesday. Her sister’s lying in.”
Leonora lay back down and put her arm over her eyes. “Then I shall be swampish,” she groaned, “and we shall not speak of it.”
There was a silence of about four seconds.
“I’ll do it,” Colin said.
She dropped her arm.
He was standing at the end of the bed with his sleeves rolled up, his expression unreadable.
Leonora understood in a slow beat that he had made the offer as a piece of household arithmetic, the way he had claimed a child and married a stranger and gone into a lake, and that he would take it back if she made anything of it.
“All right,” she agreed.
It took him twenty minutes and four trips. She lay listening to him going up and down the back stairs with buckets in both hands, and thought that if she said one word about it he would stop.
Then he put a screen up in front of the fire, turned round, and waited by the door with his hand on the latch.
“Call when you’re in.”
“I don’t think I can take off my shift,” Leonora said. “My arms are heavy.”
He came back across the room.
She would remember the entirety of the next quarter of an hour for the rest of her life.
He pulled the shift over her head like a man handling glass and put a towel round her shoulders before she was cold.
He kept his eye on her face the entire time with the intense focus of a man doing a job.
When she was finally in the water, he pushed his sleeves further up his forearms and knelt on the boards behind her and washed her hair.
Nobody had washed her hair for her since she was a child in a nursery.
His calloused hands were very careful as he lathered up the strands, then he rinsed them one cupful at a time, his free hand shielding her eyes.
Leonora sat in the hot water with her knees drawn up and cried silently so he would not hear. Not from unhappiness. She could not have explained it to anybody, least of all to him.
“Head back.”
“Colin.”
“Head back, wife.”
She tipped her head back.
Eventually, he pulled her out, put her in a dry shift, and tucked her into her bed. By then, she was past tired, and was only distantly aware of Katherine snuffling in the cot beside her and him moving quietly about the room, tidying it up.
Then he sat down in the chair by the window.
“What are you doing?”
“Keeping an eye on both of you.”
“In a chair?”
“I’ve slept in worse.”
“You have not slept at all this week, and I have it on excellent authority that you were in a lake yesterday.” Leonora patted the counterpane on the far side of the bed without opening her eyes. “There is space, plenty of space. My mother would have a seizure, and she is twenty-two miles away.”
“Duchess.”
“You have washed my hair, Colin. We are a long way past the point where anybody in this house would raise an eyebrow at a chair. I am too tired to argue, and if you make me get up and drag you over, I shall be extremely disagreeable about it.”
There was a long pause. Then the chair scraped, and the mattress dipped on the other side of the bed. The three of them lay in the dark in the blue room with the fire going down, the baby’s quick breathing barely audible.
Leonora fell asleep almost at once.
She woke once, hours later, with no idea what time it was and the fire down to embers, and lay still in that soft floating place where nothing was quite real.
Somewhere above her, her husband was talking very quietly.
“Take the week,” he said. “Take the month. Take as long as you want, and don’t ever let me tell you otherwise.”
Leonora did not move a muscle.
“I’ll not ask you again,” Colin added.