Chapter 22

Lyd—can you find Gabe and send him here? Right away, if you can. I don't like to write it but—I'm frightened.

—from Selina to Lydia, sent with a footman to the Hope-Wallace residence

Freddie was still sick the next day.

They'd brought the children home, and Peter had stood, dazed and helpless, as Selina tucked Freddie into the bed they'd acquired from Barrett's. She'd produced a folded linen and a crystal cup full of water and violets.

"When we were children, it was lavender," she'd told Lu with sturdy cheer. "But I always thought lavender a most unpleasantly potent scent."

She'd dipped the linen and then laid it against Freddie's brow. She'd had tea sent to the sickroom, and then—when Freddie began to toss and turn uneasily—she'd ushered Lu out the door.

When she came back, she'd thrown open the windows and told Peter that Lu was to be sent to Rowland House, for fear of contagion.

But really, Peter thought, she didn't want Lu to see her brother like this. Little, in the big rosewood bed. Sweaty and miserable as he twisted in the white bedsheets. Peter thought perhaps she didn't want Lu to feel as helpless as he felt, sitting pointlessly beside the bed and watching his brother cough and cough and cough.

It had been a long night in the sickroom. Selina had tried to persuade him to come to bed—"Emmie will watch him, or Humphrey"—but he couldn't make himself leave. He didn't trust his own legs.

And when the sun cracked the horizon, nothing had changed. When the shadows lengthened with the afternoon, Freddie had taken two sips of beef tea, Selina had gone through an ewer of cool water and half a dozen linens, and the room, despite the open window, smelled sour with sickness. Peter remembered that smell.

"All right," said Selina. "I don't like this. I'd like to call a physician, if you don't mind." She laid a hand on Peter's shoulder. "Do you mind?"

He should have done that. He should have managed it himself—the linens, the water, the physician. He should have realized Freddie was ill and kept him home. He had known he would fail them, in some critical moment, when it mattered the most. He had known he would not be enough.

"Yes," he said. "Call the physician."

The man who came into the room several hours later was roughly of an age with Peter, and Peter—when he forced his gaze away from his brother's thin, restless form—thought he looked vaguely familiar.

"Gabe," said Selina, leaping to her feet from the chair on the opposite side of Freddie's bed from Peter. "Thank goodness you're here." She caught the man's arm in hers, bringing him to the bed beside Peter, who'd managed with an effort to bring himself to his feet.

"Peter," she said, "this is Lydia's brother, Gabriel Hope-Wallace. He's a year out of the Royal College of Physicians. Gabe, this is my husband Peter, the Duke of Stanhope."

The doctor was tall and fair, though the new growth of beard on his jawline was as red as Lydia's hair. He bobbed a quick nod at Peter, his gaze already trained on Freddie. "How long has he been ill?"

"Since yesterday," Selina said. "He fainted yesterday afternoon in the Park. He's been feverish, and last night he started to cough."

"Conscious?" the doctor said.

Peter felt his jaw tighten painfully. Once again, Selina responded. "Yesterday, he was. Today he's been lucid at—at times." Her voice broke a little.

"All right. Anything else?"

Selina shook her head wordlessly, and Hope-Wallace strode forward to examine Freddie. He felt along his body, rolled him to his side like a doll. He pressed his ear to Freddie's back for a few long moments then stood, casting about with an expression of frustration.

"Have you a heavy sheet of paper?" he asked.

Selina darted for the door. "I'll get one. I'll be right back."

Peter looked at the doctor, panic chasing circles in his chest. "Paper?"

"Mm," said Hope-Wallace. He'd returned to the boy, lifting Freddie's hand to examine his fingernails, cupping Freddie's jaw to look into his mouth. "Helps me listen to the lungs when auscultation by ear is insufficient."

Selina returned with an engraved sheet, and Hope-Wallace rolled it into a long, thin tube. He placed it against Freddie's back and put his ear to it.

Mad , Peter thought. It seemed mad—the doctor, the fragile roll of paper. He bore no instruments, no lancets for bleeding or small glass jars of laudanum and oils.

Eventually the doctor stood, satisfied by what evidence had emerged from the paper tube. "Pneumonia," Hope-Wallace said. "His lungs are inflamed."

"Consumption?" Peter forced the word from where it had lodged, painful as glass, in his chest the moment he'd heard Freddie's cough. His voice was raw.

Hope-Wallace turned to him, sharp blue eyes softening. "No. Not consumption at all. His symptoms are entirely different."

Relief slid through Peter, making his joints weak.

"Consumption," said Hope-Wallace, in the tones of one giving a lecture, "has symptoms for weeks—even months or years—before the crisis. His fingernails would be pitted and, at this stage, quite blue." He gestured to Freddie's hand. "See for yourself. A bit pale, perhaps, but those are healthy digits."

Peter blinked at Freddie's fingers, his vision hazed.

"All right," Selina said hesitantly. "What can we do?"

There was a long silence, long enough for Peter's vision to clear, for him to watch the tightening of Hope-Wallace's whiskered jaw. "Nothing, I expect."

"You can't mean that." Peter scarcely recognized his own voice.

The doctor turned to him, his expression kind. "He will likely recover. But bleeding, leeches, starving—I have hundreds of observational studies from my colleagues in England and India showing that they do not help in cases of catarrh and pneumonies. I have—" He broke off. "Keep him cool. Yarrow tea for the fever. I mislike willow bark for children. Laudanum or whiskey, if the pain takes him harder."

"That's it?" Peter said roughly. "You can't cure him? You have no solution, not even something you can try —"

Hope-Wallace's mouth drew into a stiff line. "Certainly there are things I could try. All manner of tinctures I could sell to you with my name on them, and half a dozen ingredients that could kill as well as cure him. I could cut open his vein, if you insist."

"Gabe," said Selina. Her voice was reproachful, and the doctor looked chastened.

"My apologies," he said. "It is—frustrating. Not to be able to do more. But I will not hurt this child out of impatience or stubbornness."

"So we wait," Peter said.

"Yes. You wait."

"Will you attend him tomorrow?" Selina asked.

A half smile touched the doctor's lips. "For anyone else, I would say that you've no need of me. But—yes, Selina. I'll come back tomorrow night for your boy."

Hope-Wallace moved briskly to straighten the bedsheets around Freddie, to change the lukewarm water for fresh. He looked out the window, and asked after the housekeeper so that he might make a list of what herbs she ought to acquire from the apothecary. Selina offered to take on the shopping herself.

And all the while, Peter sat, motionless, at the side of the bed.

While Selina was gone, her maid, Emmie, came into the room, bearing fresh bedlinens and clothing for Freddie. Wordlessly, Peter helped her lift his brother's small body. Freddie felt as hot as a brand to the touch, and when Peter peeled off his sweaty shirt, Freddie coughed so hard his body nearly came out of Peter's grip.

"Sorry," Freddie mumbled. "Sorry, Lu—the kitten."

"Hush," said Peter, pushing Freddie's dark damp hair back from his forehead. "Hush. Everything's all right."

When he slipped the fresh shirt over Freddie's head, the boy didn't protest.

"Your Grace," said Emmie hesitantly. "I'm happy to watch the child for a few hours. I've a small sister of my own—I've sat by her many a night, whilst she's been fevered."

"No," Peter said.

"As you wish. Only—that is, Her Grace. She would have you take your rest."

"No," Peter said again. "I can't. I'm sorry."

Emmie nodded and slipped from the room, and Peter was alone again, but for the small boy in the too-big bed.

Perhaps he dozed. It felt like only moments had passed when he felt the cool touch of a hand at the back of his neck, but it was full night. No candles winked in the darkness, and the weather was warm enough that no embers glowed in the fireplace.

"Any change?" Selina said softly at his side. Her fingers petted the nape of his neck, then both hands came to his shoulders, kneading into the muscles there.

"I don't think so." Freddie's face was drawn into sharper lines, and when Peter tried to run a wet linen along his cracked and reddened lips, he whimpered and turned his head away.

"Come to bed," Selina said. "You need to lie down."

"I can't."

"Peter. I will stay with him."

"I can't ." His voice snapped out like a whip, but Selina didn't flinch back.

"You aren't helping him if you make yourself ill as well, Peter. You need food and rest. You need—"

"I can't leave him. He might wake. He might need me. When your physician comes back, I want to be able to tell him if Morgan has—"

He choked off the words as he heard them. Too late.

Selina didn't respond for a long time. She stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders, her thumbs tracing circles on his shirt.

When she dropped her hands and stepped away, he clenched his jaw and didn't speak. Shame surged in him. He had failed Morgan, had failed Freddie and Lu. Even now, he could not do what needed to be done. He wanted to curl into his wife and lay his head in her lap, wanted to beg her not to leave him alone. Selfish. Reckless. Weak.

And then she pulled a chair from the other side of the bed around to sit beside him.

"How old was Morgan when he died?"

It was so dark in the room. He could barely hear Freddie's raspy breathing, barely see his own hands tangled into the white sheets before him.

"Twelve," he said. "We were of an age. Which should tell you something of our father—he married my mother and fathered Morgan and me within the same trip to New Orleans."

"Who was she—Morgan's mother?"

"Josephine was a French servant in the house. A maid he took a fancy to." He'd asked Josephine once—when he was much older—if his father had forced her. No , she'd said. Peter, child, no.

But his father had been the new master of the house, Josephine an unmarried girl of eighteen with a little sister to care for. There were many ways a woman could be forced.

"Was he… much like Freddie?"

"No." His hands closed into fists on the bed. He couldn't say more. He didn't want to think of Morgan's face, even as he could think of nothing else.

"How did he die?"

Christ, she was relentless in her questions. He opened and closed his fingers on the bedsheets, angry and ashamed of his own anger.

"Consumption," he managed.

"Was he sick for a long time?"

"Selina." He grasped at her name like a lifeline. "Why are you doing this?"

"I don't know!" To his surprise, her voice rose on the words, and he turned toward her, though he could scarcely make out her features in the dark room. "I have no idea what I'm doing, Peter. Only that you are hurting and alone, and I want to be with you, and… and take on some of this burden, only you will not let me!"

"Selina—"

"No, I'm sorry," she said over him. "I'm sorry, God, I'm so sorry. I am frightened, and I don't know what to do, and I'm so sorry I can't do more. That's what I should have said, not speared you with recriminations when you do not deserve them."

He didn't know what to do with all the emotions that clogged his throat, burned at the back of his eyes. He seized on the easiest thing to express. "I won't let you take on this burden? Selina, you have done—you have arranged everything. The doctor, the water—even the bed in this room, damn it."

"I—but—" She hesitated. "Peter, those are just things ."

He remembered when she had said the same about the great empty house, the day they were married. The furnishings were just things . "I don't know what you mean."

He felt, more than saw, her helpless shrug. "It's easy for me. To arrange minutiae. To call for someone, to pay someone to fetch furniture or fresh cloths." She drew a breath, let it out shakily. "I do not know how to make someone stop hurting. How to help when… when someone is afraid or grieving. I'm not good at things like that, at being gentle or kind or…"

He reached out blindly in the dark and found her hands, locked together in her lap. He closed his fingers over hers and squeezed.

"Don't you hear what I'm doing, Peter? Right now—talking about myself, how frightened I am, when all I want to be doing is easing things for you."

"You do ease me."

Her hands unlocked and grasped his, cradling his fingers between her palms. "How can you say that?"

"You make it possible for me to be beside him. You make it so that I don't have to worry that the children don't know where they belong. You have made this goddamned house, which reminded me of nothing so much as my father, into a home. For all of us."

They sat in silence for long moments. He looked at the small outline on the bed that was Freddie, motionless but for the coughs that occasionally rippled through him.

He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to answer her questions and make her understand—who Morgan had been, and their father, and Josephine—and yet it was so hard to do it. He couldn't find the words that usually spilled from him like water from a cup.

"I didn't know he was my brother," he said finally, "for a very long time. Stupid, really—we looked so similar. I was older, by two weeks, but Morgan was bigger. And better than me at"—somehow, a breath of laughter slipped free—"everything, he would have said. Swimming and starting fires and finding the most interesting places to hide. I was better at convincing his mother not to punish us."

He would have expected that seventeen years after his brother had died, Morgan's face would be hazed over by time, but he could still call it up: hazel eyes in a pale face, the deep notch of Morgan's upper lip. Perhaps because Morgan's face had been so like his own.

"Our father married my mother because she was rich, and when they married all of her property became his. She was a woman alone, her parents dead, and he convinced her that he believed in what she did. Abolition. Self-government." Josephine had told him, over a dish of her rice and beans, of how charming Silas Kent had been. How easily Peter's mother had been taken in by his pretty words, wanting to believe that she had found someone to share her life's work.

"After they wed, he told her he wanted to purchase a plantation," Peter continued. "She fought him tooth and nail, and every time he went back to England—which was often—she dismantled what he'd done. She wrote to Wilberforce, to Thomas Clarkson, long letters against slavery that she asked them to read aloud in Parliament. She tried to convert to Quakerism but, because she was married, they wouldn't allow it.

"He was always angry. His name, his reputation—she dragged it through the dirt and spit on it, he'd say."

It was easy, too, to call up these memories—his father, red-faced and screaming. Stupid selfish bitch! You have no idea what you've done.

Peter had thought his father might kill her.

"Eventually he gave up. When I was nine or so, he left for the last time. He was sick already, then—yellow fever. He took every penny we had and left us there." Rot in this godforsaken place , he'd said.

They would have, probably, if not for Josephine. His mother had crumpled—she had always been brave, but she had also always been wealthy, had always had servants and caretakers, a cook, people to work for her who loved and respected her. But without money, the house had fallen to decay, vines curling through the walls of the stables, the well filling with brackish water.

Josephine had taken care of Morgan and Peter and his mother too, had single-handedly managed their finances, taught Peter and Morgan to mend their own stockings and pick persimmons when the skins were soft.

"It was a year or two after that that Morgan got sick. He started to cough when we'd swim." Morgan's face, breaking the surface of the pond, white and a little frightened, gasping for breath. "He would grow feverish at night and in the morning be fine again. It went on and on—he wasn't hungry. He didn't want to ride any longer. One day I was taller than he was. One day he got in bed and never got out again. That was when Josephine told me that he was my brother."

Selina, who had been silent through this recital, cupping his hand between her own, took a small, gulping breath. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that you lost him."

He let her trace the arch of his knuckles and did not pull away. "I got it into my head that my father didn't know." He couldn't have said why he'd believed it—he'd known his father was a contemptible sod for years.

Hope, probably. Impossible, childish hope.

"I wrote to him. I told him that Morgan was sick. I begged him to send us—hell, anything. Doctors. Money. Medicines. And then when he didn't respond, I thought the letter must have been misdirected, so I wrote to him again. And again."

"Oh, Peter. Oh no."

"He finally answered. He said he had no son in New Orleans—not Morgan, and not me." He laughed, and it was a wrong sound, here in Freddie's bedroom. Bitter and hateful. "He would have been so goddamned angry to see me here. Living in his house. Spending his money. Ruining everything he thought was so important—the Kent name, the title, our place in this world—all the things that mattered more to him than his own children." His voice broke on the last word, and he hated the weakness in it, hated the pleasure he took in spiting his father, who was dead , for God's sake, who should not matter any longer, and yet did.

"It wouldn't have changed anything, in the end. Morgan had consumption—it's not as though he could have been cured, even if our father had sent a chest full of gold bars. But he didn't even try—he didn't even see Morgan, didn't acknowledge him." He'd left them—all of them—to rot. Just as he'd said.

Selina tucked her feet up into her chair and shifted her body closer to his, pressing her arm against his arm, tipping her head onto his shoulder. She was warm, and she smelled familiar and real beside him.

"We won't leave Freddie alone," she said. "Not for a moment. I promise."

He swallowed, and could not speak.

"Put your head on mine," she said. "Rest."

Peter drew a breath then laid his head atop hers. Her hair was soft against his cheek.

He had done nothing to deserve her. There was no reason she should be here beside him, all night, holding vigil over his brother.

There was no reason she should care for all of them—no reason except that it was her nature to care, to protect and love and try to set things right.

He didn't know how to make the family he'd always wanted, how to drag the fantasy kicking and screaming into the world. He didn't know how to give Freddie and Lu security, a solid steady hearth fire. He wanted to keep the children safe, and yet part of him was shouting that this was proof—that he could not do so. That he would fail.

He could not think of losing Freddie. He could not bear to imagine losing any of them, and yet it seemed inevitable now: loss and grief and the sickening childish heartbreak over being abandoned.

It took a long time for his anger to dissipate, and Selina said nothing all the while. Merely held fast to his hand. He gripped her fingers in return, holding as if to life itself, and she did not pull away.

She was the heart of their small, fragile family, and he feared what would happen between them if everything fell apart. He trusted her—her calm and confidence and patience—and yet he feared too that she would not want to live in a family as fractured as his own had been. She had been raised in the tight knot of Ravenscroft affection, in the knowledge that she was safe and precious and loved.

Safe , he thought, and tightened his fingers on hers. There was nothing he would not give to keep her that way—Selina and Freddie and Lu.

Precious , he thought, and breathed in the spicy-sweet scent that was bergamot and Selina's skin.

Loved , he thought. My love , he thought and had no other words but those.