Glimmer of Hope (20 page)

Foxglove?
Carter shot to his feet. How had he missed that? “Foxglove is poisonous!”

“Not in wee quantities” came
an entirely unfamiliar voice.

Carter spun to the doorway. A man, middle-aged, sharp-eyed, and authoritative, stepped into the room.

“Is her heart up and drummin’?” the man asked Hannah in tones decidedly Scottish. He crossed to the bed and dropped a leather bag on the blanket beside Miranda.

“A little better, Mr. MacPherson.” Hannah stepped back and allowed the man Carter now realized was the surgeon to examine his patient.

“And ye’ve given her three sips of the foxglove tisane?” The surgeon mimicked Hannah’s search for a pulse, and he seemed to locate it almost instantly.

“Yes, Mr. MacPherson,” Hannah said.

MacPherson continued his ministrations silently, except for an occasional grunt. His visage was stern and focused.

“Her coloring has improved a wee bit just since I arrived,” MacPherson finally said. He pressed a finger to Miranda’s neck. “Rhythm’s not regular yet.”

“Is that what this is?” Carter asked, desperate for some information. “Her heart’s out of rhythm?”

“Aye.” MacPherson nodded and continued to check his patient, not so much as looking at anyone else in the room. “What brought this on? Lady Devereaux seemed improved of late. She hasn’t been ailing, has she?”

“She’s been very tired,” Mr. Benton answered. “I believe she has slipped from her regimen.”

“She hasn’t been eating the hawthorn berries? Lily-of-the-valley tea?” MacPherson looked over his shoulder to where Mr. Benton sat wearily.

Mr. Benton shook his head. Miranda hadn’t been eating or drinking either one. Mr. Benton had told Carter as much.

“They’re not worth a
docken
if she doesn’t take them,” MacPherson grumbled. “Did she collapse suddenly or was she exerting herself?”

“She was running,” Carter said, trying to make sense of the conversation he was being excluded from.

Three pairs of eyes turned to Carter, wide with shock.

“Running?” Mr. MacPherson asked in obvious astonishment.

“Why the deuce was she running?” Mr. Benton was on his feet, looking positively livid and, Carter could see, more than a little accusatory.

“I didn’t—”

“How far did she run?” the doctor asked, curiosity in his eyes.

“From the beach almost to the house.” Carter preferred the look in MacPherson’s eyes to that in Mr. Benton’s.

“Well, now.” MacPherson looked back down at Miranda. “That’s aye something. She couldn’t run across her room when we started with the hawthorn berries and her tea.”

Carter wrapped his mind around the man’s heavily inflected words. If he was interpreting correctly, Miranda had improved drastically since undertaking her treatment of berries and tea. The realization made Carter kick himself ever harder. The food Mother had been denying Miranda was medicinal—for her heart. No wonder Mr. Benton was so furious with both Mother and him.

“I am having a hard time feeling impressed by Miranda’s running,” Mr. Benton said. “It didn’t do her a lot of good.”

“Aye. But it didn’t kill her either.”

“She’s alive?” Carter knew he sounded desperate. He had seen her breathing but somehow needed to hear it from someone with expertise.

“Lady Devereaux isn’t so easily brought down,” MacPherson replied. “A
wicht
, she is.”

“Did you just call my wife a witch?”

MacPherson didn’t even look up at him. He fumbled through his bag as he spoke. “A
wicht.
Means she’s small but strong.”

Carter looked down at Miranda. He reached out and touched her face. Her eyes were unopened, and he didn’t think she’d moved at all. Small? Decidedly. She looked tiny and frail lying there so still. “Small but strong.” Carter nodded at the ring of truth in those words. “Her coloring is still not better.”

“Her heart’s not acting right,” MacPherson replied. “Of course her coloring is not good.”

“But will she recover?” Carter was growing heartily tired of the gruff surgeon and his refusal to answer a direct question.

“
Now
ye want to know?” MacPherson actually looked angry.

“Of course I want to know,” Carter snapped back. “Miranda is my wife. I am worried about her.”

“Aye. ’Tis harder to ignore pain when ye’re looking at it.” There was a level of reprimand in MacPherson’s tone that took Carter entirely by surprise. “Perhaps ye ought to go back to London where ye will not have to think about your wife.”

“You expect me to go to London with Miranda laid low? To forget that she is ill, dying?”

“Well, how’s that for a sudden change?” MacPherson ignored Carter and turned toward Mr. Benton. “First we cannot get him to come. Now we cannot get him to leave.”

“MacPherson.” Carter bit off the words, rising from the bed and crossing the room toward the man who stood several inches taller than he did and weighed several stones more. At the moment, he was too aggravated with the man to care. “I do not like your tone.”

“I would not expect ye to.” MacPherson obviously didn’t care that a man of rank and position was giving him a set-down. “I couldn’t care a
docken
if ye like my tone or not. Any man who would leave his wife to suffer like Lady Devereaux has these three years deserves none of my good opinion.”

“I did not leave her.” The words jerked from him.

“And ye didn’t come neither.”

“I didn’t know she was ill.”

“
Blaflum
! Unless the post has quit delivering to London, ye’ve known well enough.” MacPherson shot Carter a look of stark disapproval. “Run off, Lord Devereaux. Go bide in London. We’ll write to ye so your conscience will not have to bother ye. And ye can ignore the letters like ye’ve always done.”

Carter froze on the spot. Letters? What letters did MacPherson think he’d been ignoring? He’d never received a single letter from anyone regarding Miranda—only the reports Father had received from his man-of-business and the ones that had come to Carter since Father’s death.

MacPherson turned to Hannah. “Two more sips of the foxglove tisane in two hours. Lily-o’-the-valley tea and some thin gruel if ye can get her to take it. She’ll need sustenance.”

Hannah nodded. MacPherson pulled a glass vial, stoppered, from his bag and handed it to Hannah.

“What letters?” Carter demanded. MacPherson looked across at him, an eyebrow raised. “You said I had ignored letters.”

“Aye.” MacPherson nodded. “I sent ye one myself.”

“I have never received a letter from you.”

“I got your address from Mr. Benton,” MacPherson said. “I doubt he was wrong.”

“Lost, then? In the post?” Carter wondered out loud.

MacPherson shrugged.

“I wrote to you too, Carter,” Mr. Benton said. “Maybe I wasn’t clear enough to make you understand how serious—”

“I never received a letter from you either.” Carter looked at Mr. Benton, growing more confused by the minute, more frustrated.

“Two letters lost going to the same person?” MacPherson shook his head. “Hard to believe.”

“I sent more than one,” Mr. Benton said. He looked at Carter with disappointed disbelief.

“I didn’t receive them,” Carter insisted.

“I have a hard time believing that, my lord,” MacPherson said. “Ye need a better excuse.”

“It isn’t an excuse.” Why didn’t they believe him? He hadn’t received a single letter.

“Find out what happened to your letters,” MacPherson suggested. “I’ll have less reason to take an ill will at ye.” MacPherson picked up his leather bag and laid a hand reassuringly on Mr. Benton’s shoulder. “I’ll see that Cook has enough supplies for this episode.”

Carter didn’t notice until that moment that Cook had left.

“Will this be a short one?” Mr. Benton asked, understandable concern in his voice.

“I don’t
ken
.” MacPherson shook his head and shrugged. “She looks well enough, considering. Time will tell all. Two more dribbles, Hannah.” He held up two fingers. “In two hours.”

She nodded her understanding once more.

“She is going to live?” Carter asked one more time as MacPherson made his way to the door.

“We must wait and see.” MacPherson turned those too-seeing eyes on Carter, and he felt remarkably like an insect pinned to a board. “With luck, ye will not have to bother purchasing a black armband yet.”

“You would mock a husband worried for his wife’s life?”

“If I thought ye were truly worried after yer wife, I wouldn’t mock.”

“How dare—”

“I have looked after yer wife along with the staff here and her grandfather for years,” MacPherson said, seeming to grow taller as he spoke. “She is much like a sister to my wife and me. There was a time I wished ye’d come down an’ show her a little concern. If ye aren’t willing to be a husband to this ill-off lady, then I’d rather ye took yer leave.”

The surgeon took himself and his bag and his opinions out the door. Mr. Benton looked momentarily uncomfortable, as if wanting to offer an apology but unwilling to speak the lie. After only a moment’s pause, he too left.

They both believed him heartless and uncaring when he’d never even been told about Miranda’s illness. He’d never been given a chance to “be a husband to her,” as MacPherson had suggested. How dare they assume he would leave her now that he knew.

A voice in the back of his head whispered that he’d planned to do precisely that. He’d intended to head off to London for however short a duration when he knew she was ailing.

Carter brushed it off. He’d planned to come back. It was only that appearing at the opening of Parliament was crucial to his future in the party, his future in Parliament. He would have come back. He would have written to her while he was away.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Lord Devereaux.” Hannah interrupted his thoughts. “I need to gather a few things for the sickroom. If you’d sit with Lady Devereaux?”

“Of course,” Carter answered a little too sharply. “I wasn’t planning to abandon her.”

“No, my lord.” Hannah backed away toward the door. “Excuse me, my lord.”

Then he was alone, with Miranda unmoving on her bed, only the sound of her unsteady breathing breaking the silence. Carter crossed the room to sit beside her bed. He took up her hand and held it. How often had she been like this? Ill? Walking the line between life and death? And he hadn’t been there.

His next breath wrenched out of him, breaking as it came. “I didn’t know,” he said in an anguished whisper to the empty room. “I didn’t know.”

“You must at least try
to eat, Carter,” Mother insisted that night at dinner.

Miranda still hadn’t awoken, and MacPherson couldn’t—or perhaps wouldn’t—give him a straight answer about her condition. Carter glanced momentarily at MacPherson, who ate calmly.
He
hadn’t lost his appetite. To Carter, however, food held no appeal.

He stood abruptly, all eyes suddenly on him. “Excuse me, please,” he said and stepped away from the table.

“Carter,” Mother said. “What are you doing?”

“I am going to sit with my wife.” He looked around the table, expecting arguments or disapproval. He found none. MacPherson looked begrudgingly impressed. Mr. Benton smiled a little. Mother mostly looked surprised.

Rising from the table in the middle of a meal when one was the host was unthinkable in society. Carter, as MacPherson would have said, didn’t care a
docken
. He would go sit with Miranda. He wanted to be with her when she woke up. And she
would
wake up.

He continued to tell himself just that as he climbed the stairs and made his way to Miranda’s room. He was so convincing he half expected to walk in and find her sitting up in bed, smiling shyly at him like she always did. Carter picked up the pace, eager to be beside her again.

“Lord Devereaux!” Hannah jumped to her feet in startled surprise.

Carter glanced immediately at the bed. Miranda still hadn’t moved. He thought her color looked better though. He stepped closer. She
did
look better—still far too pale but none of the deathlike gray that had been there before.

“Go have your dinner, Hannah. I’ll sit with Lady Devereaux.”

Carter heard her leave, but he didn’t look away from Miranda. “Hello, my dear,” Carter said, stroking her hair. He wished she would respond to his voice, move just a little, make some sound. “Please come back, Miranda. I hate seeing you like this.”

Her breathing sounded a little better. Carter put his fingers to the pulse high on her neck, concentrating on the feel of it. He’d checked it a couple of hours earlier, and though it had become more regular since then, it still wasn’t quite right.

“Oh, Miranda.” He shifted his hand to her cheek. “You shouldn’t have run. You didn’t give me a chance to explain.” Carter leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I wasn’t leaving. Not for good. Not even for long.”

He stroked her hair, his chest constricting painfully as the memory of her collapsing beneath that tree replayed in his mind. The stinging in the back of his eyes and the burning in his throat came back. He took several shaky breaths.

She’d said his name as she fell to the ground. But had she been calling for him or cursing him? The possibility of the latter, he knew, would haunt him.

Carter dropped back into the chair beside her bed, holding Miranda’s hand in his and waiting for her to wake.

Near nine o’clock, MacPherson took his leave with instructions that he should be sent for if Miranda’s condition changed. Otherwise, he intended to return the next morning to check on her. After several uneventful hours and numerous one-sided conversations, Carter drifted to sleep in the chair where he sat with Miranda’s hand perfectly still inside of his.

* * *

The sun was up when Carter woke, stiff necked and still tired. Miranda, he noticed dishearteningly, didn’t look much better than she had when he’d gone to sleep. She also didn’t look worse. She was pale but not gray. She was breathing, if not more deeply, at least more regularly.