Chapter Seventeen
The fever came up out of the flooded cottages two days before Twelfth Night, as such things did after a wet autumn. By the second day, there were nine down with it in the mill row, and two of the Hockaday boys, and the Tremletts’ baby, and the ball was the first thing the Duke gave up.
He gave it up without ceremony. Elowen was in the estate office with the supper lists when he came in from his ride. He stood for a moment with the chill of it still on him and said, “We cannot bring the county into the house with a fever in the parish. Put the ball off.”
And that was all.
The green silk went back into its wrapping, and Amabel, who had wept to wear it, now wept that she might not, and was set to rolling bandages instead, which did her more good than the dancing would have.
Elowen turned the South Stillroom into a dispensary.
It was the one room in the house that had come nearest to being her own domain, and now it ran day and night: barley water and wine whey, saline draughts measured into rows of little bottles, vinegar for the sickrooms, honey and blackcurrant for the throats that closed.
She knew this work to the bone. She had nursed her mother through her last winter and half of Wrenfield through every fever since.
Her hands knew what to do without her, and for three days she barely sat.
And the Duke worked beside her.
That was the thing she had not expected, and could not afterwards forget.
He did not stand in the hall and give orders while other men carried them out.
He had the dry cottages opened and the sick moved out of the damp.
He carried coal and carried children. He rode to the county town himself through a freezing dusk and brought the physician back behind him, and would not leave until the man had seen every house.
When Elowen said the Tremlett baby must be watched through the night and there was no one to spare, the Duke of Marcombe sat up with the child in a cottage with an earth floor.
In the morning, he sent word by the underkeeper that the baby had taken a little whey at four o’clock and the fever seemed no worse, which was more than Elowen had dared hope and exactly what she would have wanted to know.
In the Hockaday cottage, the eldest boy’s fever climbed frighteningly high, and his mother lost her head. Elowen knelt by the truckle bed and sponged him, speaking to the woman all the while, low and steady.
“Mrs Hockaday. Look at me. I want the kettle on, and a clean cloth wrung out in the coldest water you have, and I want you to do it, because your hands are better than anyone’s at your own hearth.”
“He’s burning, miss. He’s burning up…”
“He is. And we are going to bring him down, you and I, and it begins with the kettle. Go.”
The woman went, because there was no arguing with a voice like that, and Elowen looked up to find the Duke filling the low doorway, his head bent beneath the beam.
“The window,” she said. “A hand’s breadth. The catch is broken; you will have to hold it against the wind.”
And the Duke of Marcombe stood in a labourer’s one-room cottage and held a broken window open with his own two hands for as long as she had need of it. He did exactly as he was bid and said nothing at all.
They fell into a way of working that needed few words.
She would reach for a thing and find it already in his hand.
He would begin a sentence about the Coker cottage, and she would finish it with the dose.
In the dispensary, they passed each other in the narrow space a hundred times a day, her arms full of bottles and his of wood, and never once collided.
They moved around each other in the small warm room like people who had been doing it for years.
At some point on the second night, Elowen looked up from the draughts and found him watching her across the steam with an expression she had no leisure to read. She did not let herself try. The work was the thing, and there was a great deal of it.
Once, late on the third night, he came into the dispensary and found her swaying a little over the bottles. He put his hand flat on the table beside hers.
“Stop. An hour. The housemaids can watch the draughts for an hour.”
“None of the housemaids can measure a saline draught, and the Coker child will go into a fit if it is got wrong.” She did not look up. “I am perfectly well.”
“You are grey to the lips.”
“It is the steam.” She filled the bottle, corked it, and set it in the row with its fellows, her hand quite steady, which cost her something he was not meant to see. “There are forty of these to go out before morning. When they are done, I shall rest. You may hold me to it.”
He stood looking at her.
A month ago, he would have picked her up and carried her to bed, set Patty on the door, and had the whole thing arranged before she could draw breath to argue. He could feel his hands wanting to do it now.
He put them in his pockets instead.
“Then tell me the houses,” he said, “and I will carry these down myself. You will have one errand the fewer. That is not me ordering you to bed. It is two people with too much to do.”
She looked up at him then, just for a moment, with something in her face he had not earned and did not know what to do with. Then she told him the houses, and they worked on.
It was the best three days of her life.
She knew it even while they were happening.
She was needed past bearing, and she was not alone in it.
Somewhere beneath the exhaustion was a thing so like happiness that she was afraid of it, and so she did what she had always done with things she was afraid of.
She worked harder, and ate standing, and slept four hours, and told the small hot ache in her throat that it was the steam and the cold and the want of rest; that it was nothing; that there was no time for it to be anything.
On the fourth morning, she rose, and the room went sideways. She held to the bedpost until it came level, then went down and made the draughts, because the draughts would not make themselves.
By noon, she could not always hear what was said to her the first time.
By dusk, her throat had closed to a knife, and the heat was coming off her in waves, and she had stopped being able to tell whether her hands were doing what she had told them to do.
She was measuring the saline into the little bottles, very carefully, because it mattered, when she heard the Duke say her name from a long way off.
“It is nothing,” she said. “I have only to finish these.”
And the floor of the stillroom rose with a great soft roar and took her.
***
He caught her before she struck the table, which he was always afterwards glad of, though he could never have said why that one thing should matter when so much else had not been caught in time.
She weighed nothing.
That was the thing that went into him and stayed.
He had carried sacks of seed corn that fought him harder than she did.
She lay in his arms with her cap askew and her face burning, and said something about the third draught going to the Coker cottage, very clearly, as though it were the most important thing in the world, which, to her, it was.
Lucian carried her up through the house she had run to its bones and laid her on the bed in the narrow room at the top of the back stair.
He had never crossed its threshold. He had asked about it and allowed her answer to satisfy him, and now he saw the window cracked against the smoking chimney, the grate laid but cold, and all the small signs of a room endured rather than inhabited.
It was the coldest room in his house.
He stood in it with the knowledge like a hot coal in his bare hand.
Then he did all the things he knew how to do. He sent a man on the fastest horse for the physician, who was away over the moor at another sickbed and could not come until morning. He had wood brought and the fire built high. He ordered warming pans, hot bricks, blankets, broth, another maid.
He stood in the open doorway directing the whole machinery of a great house, and not one of the things he ordered was the thing. He knew it and went on ordering, because the alternative was to stand still and face what had followed him into the room.
It was Mrs Pike who stopped him.
She came along the passage on the nurse’s arm, one foot brought slowly to meet the other. She had heard the house change before anyone thought to send her word. At the threshold, she looked at Elowen on the bed, then at the tray on the little table beside it, and something shifted in her old face.
“Her tea’s stone cold.”
There was a pot on the tray, newly brought up and untouched, with a clean, dry cup beside it. Mrs Pike looked at it for a long moment.
“It always is,” she said. “Patty told me. Miss Vane’s tea always goes cold beside her when she works. I ought to have known by that alone, if I had not been so taken up with my own troubles. A woman who will pour for everyone but herself…”
She stopped. Her mouth worked once.
“Get out of the room, Your Grace, begging your pardon. You can do nothing here that I cannot do better, and it is not fit, and she would not have you see her so. Send me the young nurse and another warming pan, and then keep out. I will bring her through it. I have brought worse through worse, and it is the one thing left I am good for.”
Her sound hand closed around the bedpost.
“Go on. This is mine to do. You have all had the doing of her quite long enough.”
He went.
He stood in the cold passage outside the door, the Duke of Marcombe, with a house full of servants who would have run into fire at his word, and there was nothing for him to do.
Inside, he could hear Mrs Pike moving about, slow and certain, and the small sounds of the room being put to rights. Once Elowen’s voice came through the door, fretful and far inside the fever.
“I must get up. There’s the Tremlett child. And the supper. Who will see to the candles?”
“There’s none of it wants you tonight, my girl,” Mrs Pike answered, low and flat and entirely without pity, which was its own kind of mercy. “Not one thing in this house wants you tonight. You may lie still.”
The voice from the bed quieted.
Lucian stood with his back against the cold wall and heard the silence that followed. It sounded like the setting down of something carried too far and too long.
He had thought he saw her.
He had taken a private pride in noticing what other people missed: the darned wrist, the pallor, the lip bitten white.
He had seen the cups go cold beside her work and understood only that she had forgotten to drink them, never what the forgetting meant.
He had tried to care for her in the manner he knew, by noticing a want and arranging for it to be supplied, and had too often mistaken the arrangement for the care itself.
Mrs Pike had read the cold cup because she knew its language.
Lucian had not.
The physician came at first light and was reassuring. It was not the dangerous putrid fever. She was worn very low, which was the chief concern, but her constitution was sound. Rest, warmth, and the same draughts she had been making for everyone else, and she would mend.
She would mend.
Lucian held to the words, but they did not alter what he had learnt in the passage.
Mrs Pike would let him send up anything and let him do nothing.
He sent grapes from the hothouse, light wine, a better mattress and more wood than the room could use.
Each gift returned to him the same truth: he knew how to provide whatever could be ordered, purchased or carried upstairs.
He did not yet know how to give without making the giving answer some need of his own.
Three or four times a day, he stood outside Elowen’s door with his hand not quite touching the wood. He did not go in. For once, the kindest thing he could do for her was to leave her in the care of someone who required nothing from her.
On the second night, he took the cold pot from the tray before Patty could reach it.
He stood holding it in the passage, full and cold and useless. In the end, he did not ring for anyone to carry it away. He took it down through the sleeping house himself, poured out the tea, washed the cup and set it to dry.
Then he stood for a long while in the dark scullery, his hands flat upon the cold stone.
Wanting to save her did not make him different from all the others who had taken what she gave. Not unless he could learn to offer something and ask nothing in return—not her gratitude, not her usefulness, not even the private comfort of believing himself the man who had understood her first.