Chapter Twelve

I n the middle of the night, Tammie's own restlessness woke her. She could not get comfortable. Her legs first and soon her arms had to keep shifting, trying to find a more comfortable position only to discover after a moment or two that the new position was as impossible as the one before.

Tammie recognized the beginnings of what would soon be hell. Next would come a fever and the aches throughout her body, turning into bone-wrenching pain as her own stomach and bowels turned against her. Even worse was what followed, but she had never gone very far into that. Always, she had stepped back from the brink, or Guy had found her and forced her to drink laudanum—by then, she had not resisted him, for she had believed her quest for a normal life was doomed.

Thank Jowan and Mrs. Wakefield for Evangeline! Evangeline swore it was possible to leave the drugs behind. If she wanted it enough. Evangeline had seen it with eight of her eleven patients, though two of them had tried twice and one four times before he succeeded.

"I will stay with you until you no longer need me, Miss Riddick," she had assured Tammie.

That was acceptable. Tammie had tried at least five times, so she was due a win this time.

She was clearly not going to sleep. She had noticed books in one of the downstairs rooms. Perhaps one of them would suffice to take her mind off her growing discomfort. Her new wardrobe did not include a house coat to put on over her night rail, but she wrapped herself in one of the shawls and put on a pair of slippers. It would suffice.

With a candle to light her way, she found the room with the books. It was something of a general-purpose room, with comfortable chairs and sofas, a games table in a corner, a desk in another corner, and a wall of bookshelves.

Tammie headed for the bookshelves but tripped partway on something she didn't see in the dim candlelight. She went down with a crash, and the candle guttered and disappeared into the sudden darkness.

Her shin hurt! Tammie sat on the floor, hugging it and swearing under her breath. She had recovered enough to feel around her for the candle when a voice from the doorway said, "Show yourself." Jowan, sounding grim.

"Did I wake you?" Tammie asked. "I tripped over something. I am sorry for the noise."

He sounded relieved when he said, "Tammie. Bran, can you light a candle or something?"

A moment later, candlelight revealed the brothers standing just inside the door, each barefoot and wearing no more than pantaloons and loose shirts. Tammie could also see a footstool lying on its side a yard away. "That must be what I tripped over," she said. She looked around. There was the candlestick, within reach of where she fell. The candle had fallen out and rolled a few feet away. "Thank goodness it went out when I fell."

Jowan took a few steps and offered Tammie his hand to help her up, and Bran passed her to fetch the candle. The brothers worked smoothly together. In the seven years since Jowan and Tamsyn had been so wrapped up with one another, Jowan had found a similar partnership with his half-brother. One without the complication of the physical attraction that had led his father and her mother to exile Tamsyn.

Tammie was jealous and ashamed of herself for the feeling. She should be glad for Jowan. She was!

"Having trouble sleeping?" Jowan asked.

Tammie nodded. "It is the beginning," she explained. "An ache in the muscles that can only be relieved by movement, but it doesn't go away when you do move. So, you move again, and again. But all the time it gets worse and affects more of you."

"You sound as if you have done this before," Bran commented.

They might as well hear the worst of her. They would see it soon enough. "Five times," she said. "Twice, I only got this far, and Guy saw how restless I was and made me take a dose. Twice, I was really ill before he found me. Once, I managed to get far enough away from him that I made it all the way into hell." She swallowed hard and admitted. "When he found me, I was glad to take the dose. I hope this time, with support to continue through the worst of it, I might make it out to the other side."

The two men exchanged glances, and then Bran spoke, his voice gentle. "How bad will it get, Miss Lind?"

"Call me Tammie," she said. "You are about to know me far better than you want to. That is if you plan to stay while I go through this."

"We all plan to stay," Jowan said. "Ruth, the doctor I mentioned? She says you need someone to be with you. Evangeline, yes, to nurse you. But just someone to keep you company when you cannot sleep, to listen when you need to talk, to read to you when you need to be distracted. Bran and I will take turns, if that is acceptable, Tamsyn. Tammie."

"Tamsyn is dead," Tammie explained. "I had to kill her, Jowan, or I would not have been able to endure. Perhaps, when I am no longer a slave to the drugs and the alcohol, she will be able to return, but for now, I am Tammie." That was a hope she had never articulated before, even to herself. That Tamsyn might live again. Might write music again. Might once again enjoy a sunrise over the moors, a rainbow in the mist, the wild sea crashing on the sea cliffs with the gulls wheeling above.

Jowan swallowed hard but nodded. "Tammie, then."

Bran had asked something, but it had skittered away from her jumpy mind. "What did you ask me, Bran?"

"How bad will it get?" Bran repeated.

"Very bad. First comes the restlessness and the itching. Next, the aching gets worse, until every muscle and bone in my body feels sore, my head hurts, and my nose runs, as if I have a bad ague. Then, and I do not know a polite way to say this, my body rejects food. I vomit. I have watery stools. By that time, I will be feeling hot, then cold, then hot again. I will sweat even though I am shivering with cold, and my body is covered in goosebumps. Then, in a blink, I will feel as if I am burning."

"Is there anything we can do to help you feel better?" Jowan asked.

"Not that I know. Evangeline might know of something," Tammie said.

Evangeline spoke from the doorway. The nurse was also in a night rail and wrapped in a shawl. "I treat the symptoms," she said. "Cold cloths for fever. Warm ones to remove sweat. Blankets for cold. Drinks help, too. I have made several gallons of lemonade, so you have something to be sick with. It is worse, those of us who nurse such patients find if the patient does not have enough to drink."

"Did I wake you?" Tammie asked. "I am sorry. I came down to find a book to read because I could not sleep, and I fell over a footstool."

Evangeline dismissed the apology with a wave of her hand. "No matter. It is useful to hear how you have responded before. It will help."

"Then you get better?" Jowan asked.

Tammie wished that was so! "Then it gets worse," she explained. "It turns to hell. That is when I need you to hold fast. I shall beg for any release from the pain. Drugs. Alcohol. Death. Any release. You must keep me from them. I might see or hear things that are not there. I might fight you, believing you have turned into some kind of monster. And all the time, right through it, I will be longing for opium, for a drink. Craving them beyond anything you can imagine. As if they would grant me a day in paradise, though I know full well their promise is a lie."

She took a deep breath. "When the craving is on me, I will do anything and say anything to make it stop. To make the pain stop. I have failed five times. I have never yet managed to get through to the other side."

"But there is another side, and you can reach it," Evangeline said, reassuringly. "I have seen it repeatedly. Just when you think the hell will go on forever, you will find yourself coming out of it. You will sleep for the first time in days, and when you wake, the worst of the symptoms will be gone. Then, each day after that, you will feel more well. You will be able to see the beauty around you again. Life will be worth living once more."

That was what Tammie wanted. That was what she hoped she could hold on to when the pains and the cravings were at their worst. "If I can reach the end, it will all have been worthwhile," she said. "But it is not the only possible outcome, Evangeline, and you know it. If I die in the coming days, you must all three remember I prefer death to living in thrall to the poppy and the booze. Do not blame yourselves. Do you hear me? If death is my way to freedom, then so be it."

*

It was as bad as Tamsyn had described. No, worse, because the beginning was so benign. Jowan sat up with her for the rest of the night, and they shared memories of the childhood they had shared when he was the only son of the baronet, she the only daughter of the housekeeper, and both were neglected by their parents.

A "do you remember" would set off a torrent of stories to take out of storage and bring into the light. Some things, they remembered differently, and when that happened, they argued amiably, even as they had back then, when in all the world there was only Jowan for Tamsyn and Tamsyn for Jowan.

By dawn, her nose had begun to run, and her eyes were red and itchy. The aching had increased, too. She did not complain, but she shifted again and again, never still for more than a moment, and, while she kept her trained voice light and easy, the strain on her face spoke of pain.

It was downhill from then. Jowan went to bed after breakfast. Tamsyn ate little but seemed cheerful enough when he left her playing vingt et un with Bran. By the time he woke, the next stage had begun. She was calling for a chamber pot every half hour and complaining of the cold while sweating profusely.

As day turned to night and back to day again, they pushed her to drink lemonade, mint tea, broth—anything she could tolerate. Evangeline was calmly determined. "You must drink, Tammie."

To Tamsyn's complaint, "I will only bring it back up again," she said. "Enough of it will stay to do some good." Sure enough, it inevitably came up again. The maid was kept busy bringing clean chamber pots upstairs as Evangeline removed the one that was recently filled.

Evangeline took most of the burden of care, cleaning up after Tamsyn, sponging her face with cooling water, helping her to change—which she did every couple of hours since she sweated so much.

Jowan and Bran sat with her when Evangeline slipped away for a couple of hours of sleep and also took turns to keep her company throughout the day. Tamsyn said little as she walked up and down or shifted, tossed, and turned in her bed. She was absorbed in her fight against the pain and the fever, which the willow-bark tea Evangeline made did not seem to touch.

On the fourth day, Tamsyn began begging. For opium, for alcohol, for anything that would relieve the pain. "It is crushing my bones. I cannot bear it."

Each of them had their own way of coping with her increasingly desperate pleas. Evangeline reminded her of the goal—a life no longer in thrall to the drugs and the people who gave them to her. Bran scolded that she had made him promise to say no, and he intended to keep his promise.

The first time she pleaded with Jowan, he thought his heart would break. "You don't want it, Tammie. Not really. Not deep down. Take my hand. If you need to, squeeze it. Hold me fast, dearest, and we shall get through this together."

When he relinquished her to Evangeline or Bran, his hand was bruised from her squeezing, but he always offered it again, and again.

By now, she was not just shivering, but shaking, and her fever was so high they were constantly changing the water they used to sponge her down. Even so, she was losing touch with reality, casting each of her carers as a person from her past—a dresser she once knew, her mother, a rival singer, a lover. In those hours, Jowan learned more about her past than he wanted to know.

Around the middle of the day, she sat up straight, her eyes wide with horror. "Snakes!"

Jowan followed her eyes. Nothing.

"Coming out of the wall," Tamsyn insisted, her voice shrill. "Help me! They are coming for me. Won't somebody help me?"

Jowan put his arms around her, and though she struggled, saying the snakes were coming, he would not let her go, but held her and murmured to her that she was safe, that he would let nothing hurt her.

A short time later, she fell into convulsions, her shakes turning to full-body shudders, her eyes wide open and staring at nothing, her legs and arms stiff, her teeth clenched. Evangeline was perturbed, though she remained calm.

"Talk to her, Jowan," she recommended. "Anything you like. A human voice might help, and she knows yours."

Jowan obeyed, telling an oblivious Tamsyn about the nefarious agent Thatcher, and how Drew had helped him and Bran find replacement investors.

He didn't get far. According to Bran, the fit only lasted a couple of minutes, though it had seemed much longer. Afterward, Tamsyn slept briefly, only to wake convinced that Jowan and Bran were bears, coming to eat her.

It was the beginning of days of fits and delusions. The shaking frenzy , Evangeline called it. "I should have realized Tammie was drinking heavily, as well as taking drugs… Ah, well. We are started now, and must stay the course," she said.

"Can you do nothing for her?" Jowan asked.

"If it was just the alcohol, I would give her laudanum to calm the symptoms," Evangeline explained.

"Ah."

Evangeline nodded. "Ah, indeed."

Jowan slept in snatches. Tamsyn barely slept at all. She was incoherent much of the time and confused even when she was mostly conscious. She was locked in a world of pain, peopled by spiders, snakes, bears, lions, and other threatening entities. As far as he could tell, Tamsyn held the worst of them to be the elf king.

It was the elf king who directed all the other delusions. Jowan couldn't tell whether his goal was Tamsyn's death or her capture. Perhaps Tamsyn herself was not sure. What she did believe, Jowan came to realize, was that the Earl of Coombe—Guy, she called him—was the elf king.

"He is coming for my music," she told Jowan once, during one of her semi-conscious states. "He wants to consume it. Then he shall be full of music, and I shall be empty. Forever empty."

Hour followed hour, and day followed day. The excellent cook sent up meals at measured intervals. The maid came and went, nurturing the fire, bringing trays, and then fetching them again when the food and drink had been consumed. Tammie continued to suffer.

The three caring for her fell into a routine. If her fever spiked, Evangeline would wash her. If she convulsed, whoever was with her would make sure she had something soft under her head and was lying on her side. If she was frightened by the figments of her imagination, Jowan or Bran would hold her until the delusion went away.

Then one day, her temperature fell almost to normal, and she did not convulse. Not even once. She fought imaginary creatures only twice in the entire day, and several times roused enough from her confused state to know their names and remember the escape from London.

And when she went to sleep that evening and slept right through the night, Evangeline said, with a relieved smile, "She is on the mend."