Chapter 25 #2
Evander pulled the chair to the side of the sofa but didn’t sit yet. Doctor Moore was washing his hands in the basin they had brought down the night prior. His face was mostly neutral, but his thick eyebrows were drawn together tight. A bottle of laudanum was open next to him.
He sighed. “It is my opinion that the leg is communited, Your Grace.”
“Don’t be shy,” Frederick cut in when the doctor hesitated, choking on a sad laugh. “You told Poole earlier. I kept coming in and out with the sun. I don't know when it was exactly. But I heard… And I feel…”
“Heard what?” Evander asked.
Frederick rolled his eyes as well as he could in his state. “He said the leg can’t be salvaged – didn’t you? That I’m sick with it too… And if it spreads…”
Moore shook his head. “I warned you last night, Your Grace.”
“I’m so hot. All I feel is burning. I can’t feel my toes, brother.” Frederick looked up at Evander with a smile that broke his heart in two. “Or my knees. Though…” He coughed. “I don’t know if I could feel them before, even… I…”
Evander looked at his brother's face and frowned, telling him to stop.
Frederick went quiet. He looked around with the same boyish grief that he had seen at their father’s funeral. And he started crying. The tears ran sideways down his face toward the cushion. Evander put his hand on Frederick's forehead, and he heard Moore make for the door and close it.
“I can't be a cripple,” Frederick said. “Seraphina... What kind of life is that for her? She didn't ask to be the wife of a cripple-Lord. But if it’s that or dying… They’re going to take the leg whole… I’m scared…”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Evander urged, still boiling with anger for Seraphina and everything she had said. He didn’t have as good a heart as Aurelia. He would not forgive her so quickly for what she had admitted to him.
Frederick’s nose was running, the tears coming still. He looked so young and fragile. They were boys again. “She deserves someone who can hold her and give her children, who can walk. What will I be if I cannot walk? Who can walk with one leg?”
“Enough, Frederick.” He waited until his brother looked at him. “You fell off a horse. You have not had a death sentence. Moore does not know yet what the full picture is. He said as much. You are catastrophising on thirty minutes’ worth of consciousness. None of your conclusions are reliable.”
Frederick stared at the ceiling. “You’re just lying to make me feel better. They’re going to take the leg. It’s going to hurt so much.”
“You are going to be all right,” Evander said, swallowing his rising bile.
“How do you know?”
“Because I do.” He paused. “Because I will not permit anything else.”
“As always, I suppose,” Frederick laughed, though the sound was wet and broken.
The morning light was coming through the curtains now, thin and grey. Outside, a wood pigeon was making noise.
“Do you remember that summer?” Frederick asked, as Evander handed him the kerchief from his pocket. “When I was going away because of Father? When you taught me to fish? I’ve been thinking about it all night. I was there…”
“I remember you caught nothing for three weeks.”
“No, I caught one fish. You’re lying.”
“One small trout.”
Frederick sniffed. “It was a good trout, I thought.”
“Good enough,” Evander said, though it made Frederick smile. “I’ll admit a little revisionism this morning, if it pleases you. But I’d rather not talk about trout.”
“I thought you were the best fisherman in England. I thought you were the best at everything. You must have been absolutely maddened by me.”
“I wasn't.”
“No. I suppose you were very patient with me, though it didn’t feel like it at the time.
” He turned his head on the cushion to look at Evander.
“You always were, not just with the fishing, but even when I didn't deserve it.” He paused as his eyes flitted to the ceiling again, his shoulders trembling.
“I know what I did with the weddings. I know the damage it caused.
I know I made things very hard for you and for Aurelia, that poor girl.
I know I did it badly. And I'm sorry. I've said it before but I want to say it again now, while I'm lying here and you can't walk away from me because otherwise you’ll feel terrible, abandoning a cripple in the making while he’s talking to you.”
“I wouldn’t walk away from you.”
“But I'm also glad,” Frederick continued unimpeded . "And I know that sounds like a terrible thing to say, but I am. Because you and Aurelia are exactly right. Anyone can see it. She would have been wasted on me. She is wonderful. But I would have spent our whole marriage wishing for something else. She needed you all along, and you needed her. Isn’t that the funniest thing?”
Evander wasn’t about to laugh, though he agreed. He could still feel Aurelia on his skin, and the memory of her that night, the way he had marveled at her as she lay close to him, at what they had become together, brought a smile to his lips he could not check fast enough.
“You know I’m right,” Frederick said. “I have perspective now. A brush with death will do that, apparently. Losing a leg… Maybe I’ll gain something else. But I'm glad she has you. I'm glad it went the way it went. That's what I wanted to say, really, before it’s too late.”
“I'm glad too,” Evander agreed. “And it’s never too late – shut up about that.”
Frederick smiled, then he winced. “How is… Matchem?”
“He is still standing from what little I heard. He was not my concern last night. You were.”
“But you love that horse.”
“Hm.”
“I knew I shouldn't have taken him, before I did it. I took him anyway because he was the fastest one there, and you always seem so solid on him… Seraphina says I'm going to kill myself before I'm thirty.”
Evander tried to smile but it wouldn’t come.
“She's probably right,” Frederick continued, the words raw and too real. “I know she is not easy. You don’t need to tell me. We fight more than I expected – more than I thought two people who loved each other were supposed to fight. She is difficult, and she is sometimes unkind. But…” He paused to breathe.
“But I love her, don’t I? I have loved her for too long.
Lying here, the only thing I keep thinking about is whether she is all right. Is someone with her?”
“Aurelia.”
Frederick closed his eyes. “Good.”
Just then, the door opened. And Seraphina came in.
If Evander were being honest, she looked terrible.
He had never thought he would think that about Seraphina, but it was true.
Her hair was loose, her eyes swollen, and she was still in yesterday's dress.
She took a moment to brace herself, he saw, before she took in the sight of Frederick where he lay.
“Freddy,” she said. Her voice cracked on the name.
“My darling,” he said.
She crossed the room to him and sat carefully on the edge of the sofa. She took his hand in both of hers and pressed her face to it and held on. Frederick's eyes closed, and his free hand came up to her hair.
Evander knew he had to leave. He looked at Seraphina once, a warning look. But she was entirely elsewhere, with Frederick, and there was nothing left to say. He went to the door and shut it quietly behind him.
He stood there for a moment, thinking. He could hear the staff in the kitchen below, that sound of Carrstone beginning its day. Moore was talking to someone in the entrance hall, asking to prepare another room.
He thought about Aurelia upstairs, or wherever she was, with her smile and the way she had said she loved him with so much certainty it had undone him.
He pushed off the wall where he had been thinking, and he went to find his wife, willing himself not to think about Frederick, about what would happen to him, to all of them.
Aurelia was standing by the window in their shared sitting room, when he found her, a hand pressed against the glass. When she turned, his heart squeezed. He loved her, this woman. He was so glad he could finally admit it to himself and to her.
“Is he…?” she asked nervously, biting her lip.
“Seraphina is with him,” Evander said, not wanting to talk about Frederick’s condition for the time being. He would tell her later.
“Heavens… Who knows how that conversation will go? I only hope she thinks about your brother, and about what’s best for him.”
“Even if she does not, I will.”
Aurelia smiled and came away from the window. “You are a good brother.”
“What were you thinking about?” he asked as she stepped into his open arms. “When you were staring out of that window?”
“I was trying to imagine the grounds at the height of summer. I was thinking what changes I would make.”
“You may change what you like.”
She drew back and looked at him, thunderstruck. “You cannot mean that, Evander. You love this house. You will not let my butcher it.”
“This house…” He ran his hands down her arms, taking her hands and bringing them to his lips. “This house is second in my esteem, my heart, to you, now. Butcher it. Tear down the walls. Rip up the foundations, if it pleases you.”
Aurelia laughed breathily, shaking her head. “How could I do that to this house that reminds me so much of you? I love it. I love you. I will protect both so long as I live.”
“Which will be a very long time, with me,” he whispered, kissing her forehead.
“Yes,” she agreed. “So let’s start not with a sledgehammer but with some seeds. I am thinking… a rhododendron garden, built around that crumbling southern wall?”
“That sounds lovely.”
“We could take walks there in late spring when the trees will bloom. You and me… Our family… Freddy when he is well.” She held him tight. “Yes, I think that sounds lovely. All these things that will happen to us… The things that will grow…”
When she said it, the future didn’t seem so daunting after all. Not with her. Never. Because she loved him – and he loved her. And in the end, that was all that mattered.