Page 70 of The Earl She Once Saved

Verity’s pen stopped. “How feverish?”

“Enough that Mr. Bellamy is concerned.”

She set down the pen. “Has the physician arrived?”

“Not yet. The road by the village is flooded.”

Verity was already standing. She told herself it was practical. A fever left unattended could turn quickly, and she had more experience of illness than anyone else beneath the roof.

She would have gone for any tenant, any servant.

Anyone.

The argument followed her all the way upstairs.

Rafe lay tangled in the bedclothes, with his face flushed and his hair dark with sweat. The curtains had been drawn against the draught, and the room smelled of smoke, damp linen, and fever.

For one moment she was no longer at Edgeworth. Canvas walls rose around her. Rain struck a field-hospital roof. A young officer lay beneath her hands with blood running into his hair.

Verity stopped at the bedside. Rafe turned his head upon the pillow. His eyes did not open. She reached for the cloth in the basin and laid it across his brow.

“It is only a fever,” she said, though she did not know whether she spoke to him or herself.

Ezra remained as the evening deepened. Win brought broth, clean water, and more wood for the fire, but there was still no sign of the physician.

Near ten o’clock, the groom returned alone, soaked through and spattered with mud. The lower road was impassable. The physician meant to attempt the longer northern route, but no one could say when he might arrive.

Verity dismissed the groom and returned to the bedside. She knew what to do. She had treated fevers in tents with shells falling close enough to shake the instruments upon their trays. Yet knowledge did little to quiet her as the heat beneath her palm steadily worsened and Rafe’s breathing grew rougher.

Ezra came and went, never remaining absent for long. Win carried away untouched broth and returned with fresh water. The clock marked one hour and then another.

By midnight, the physician had still not come.

The fever drew Rafe toward waking. Verity changed the cloth upon his brow, counted each breath and told herself that the chill had not yet settled dangerously upon his chest. She could not be certain of it. That was what frightened her.

Sometime in the darkest hour before dawn, his low and broken voice began to drag fragments of the war into the quiet room.

The physician arrived shortly after sunrise. By then, Rafe’s fever had broken. The physician listened to Rafe’s chest, declared that the danger had passed and ordered several days of strict rest, advice Verity had already given and suspected Rafe would resist.

By mid morning, the house was even more quiet. Outside, rain whispered against the windows. Rafe shifted. His hand closed suddenly around the sheet.

“No,” he murmured.

Verity leaned nearer.

His voice came again. “Hold the line.”

The war.

She knew the sound of it in a man’s fever. She recognized the orders stripped of sense, names of the dead spoken as though they waited just beyond the bed, pleas dragged from places pride guarded in waking hours.

Rafe’s breath quickened. “Get them out.”

Verity put one hand upon his wrist. “You are at Edgeworth.”

He did not hear her.

“Rafe.”