Pride House: The Quest for Vainglory
Page 20
Chapter 20 Doubt Discovers the State of Things
That was Doubt’s bleakest winter. Sickness worse than she had ever known took hold of her and would not let go. Hospitalization she ruled out of the question, for she must keep in touch with the doings at the house. Pride himself was somewhat ill and emotionally devastated by his arrest and conviction. So now was the time, with the aid of her friends, to take full control of his affairs, to reduce him to the status of permanent dependent; if only she could find the strength.
So she called in doctors. First she consulted some of the more reputable physicians, such as Dr. Ignorance and the Dr.’s Modern and Conventional. These failing, she desperately turned to an obscure practitioner named Parascience, an unlicensed shaman named Life Force, and even a turbaned adept known as Madam Occult. The ministrations of these left her sicker than ever.
Her illness they diagnosed as everything from pneumonia to demon possession. She herself recognized it as an inherited deformity of the heart, which had both paled her complexion and stunted her growth and which, in this new stage, kept her continually aching and exhausted.
During her convalescence she enlisted Worry as her spy upon the household, Worry being her only friend with the ability to report in something like coherent thought. But Worry characteristically refused to enter the sick room and so reported to Doubt in the form of alarming little notes full of exaggerations, rumors, mystifying hints, and maddening omissions. Doubt always felt sicker after reading one of Worry’s notes.
On a late January morning she at last began to feel better, probably because for a few days she had been free from doctors of any kind. She sat up in bed, looked at one of her thin little wrists, and thought, ‘I must force myself to eat breakfast, or waste away.’
A soft rap at the door and Conscience entered with her tray. She eyed him narrowly. During her illness the old puritan had been experiencing a marvelous recovery from his own, until—without permission from master or mistress—he had quietly reassumed his old duties.
“Good morning, Ma’am. Are you feeling better this morning?”
Doubt noted that he carefully abstained from saying that he hoped she felt better.
“Yes, better,” she answered, “much to the dissatisfaction of those who prefer me dead.”
“Ma’am?”
“Pretend not to understand if you like. Don’t let me trouble you. And how do you feel, Conscience? Younger every day?”
“Fair to middling, Mrs. Doubt. Um, you’ll see you have a note from Miss Worry on the tray. I’ll look in again in a few minutes.”
He went out and, to her displeasure, could actually be heard whistling in the hallway—something sonorous and operatic.
Until she had made herself eat, she put aside the plain little envelope from Worry. Then she opened it and read the following: