by Mary Balogh
He could hear the rasping of his own breathing. If he concentrated on the rhythm of it, he thought, he could impose some sort of control over the situation.
“We should not have put him on his back.” That was Joseph.
“No.” That was Lily. “He will be better thus. Neville, you must take this laudanum that the doctor left.”
“Go to hell,” he said, and his eyes snapped open. “I do beg your pardon.”
Her lips were quirking into a smile. “I will support your head,” she said.
He had always fought against taking medicines of any sort. But he meekly downed the whole dose of laudanum as punishment for what he had said to her.
After that everything became a blur of pain and gradual, blessed fuzziness. He thought Elizabeth and Portfrey were in the room, though he did not open his eyes to see or take any particular notice of the report that no trace had been found of any suspicious character with a pistol. And then there were just Elizabeth and Lily in the room, arguing over who would stay with him during the night. At least, Elizabeth was arguing—she would take the first watch, the housekeeper the second. It was unseemly for Lily to be alone with him in his bedchamber—if only he could climb out of the depths of himself, he would find something decidedly funny in that argument. She would tire herself out. She was too emotionally involved to make a good nurse—they could expect a fever, and then calmness and a certain detachment would be essential.
Lily put up no argument at all; she simply refused to leave.
He was sinking fast into lethargy by the time they were alone together, but he opened his eyes to confirm his impression that they were. She was standing beside the bed, gazing down at him. She was still wearing the elegant gold silk and gauze evening dress she had worn to Vauxhall.
“You are not going to sit beside the bed all night while I sleep,” he told her—it sounded to his own ears as if his words were slurring. “If you are intending to stay, take off that dress and lie down beside me. You are my wife, after all.”
“Yes,” she said, but his mind was not focused enough to understand to what she was agreeing.
The pain had localized and became a dull pulsing in his shoulder. His tongue felt thick. His breathing was deepening. There was a new warmth along his left side and someone’s small hand was in his.
Lily awoke when the predawn light was graying the room—an unfamiliar room. She felt as if a fire was burning close to her right side. Someone was talking.
Neville was apologizing to Lauren. Then he was telling Sergeant Doyle in marvelously profane language what a damned foolish thing he had done by throwing his body in the path of a bullet intended for someone else. Then he was instructing a whole company of men to stay where they were in the pass, to ignore the murderous French fire from the hills to either side—to search for the marriage papers until they had found them. Then he was telling someone that he was by thunder going to get Lily alone at Vauxhall and just let Elizabeth try to stop him.
He was in a raging fever, with the accompanying delirium.
Lily had opened his nightshirt down the front and was bathing him with cool water when Elizabeth arrived. But apart from raising her eyebrows as she observed Lily clad only in her shift and then glancing at the left side of the bed, which had obviously been slept in, she made no comment. She quietly set about sharing the nursing. She had, she told Lily, made arrangements to cancel all lessons until further notice.
Lily steadfastly refused to leave the room until late in the afternoon. She knew from experience that many more men died from the fever that succeeded surgery than ever died from the wounds themselves. A bullet in the shoulder ought not to be a mortal wound, but the fever might well kill. She would not leave him. She would nurse him back to health or she would be by his side when he died.
But Elizabeth had been right—it was hard to nurse a man when one had an emotional involvement with him. When one loved him so deeply that one knew his death would leave a yawning emptiness in one’s own life that could never again be filled. When one knew that he had taken the bullet intended for her. And when one did not understand why it had happened.
She had never told him that she loved him—or not since her wedding night. Now it might be too late. She could tell him so a dozen times during the course of the day—and she did so—but he could not understand.
She had never told him that to her dying day she would consider him to be her husband no matter what the church and the state had to say to the contrary—that she had never wavered in her fidelity to their marriage.
He caught her wrist in a hot, bruising grip late in the morning. “I should have kept her with me at the head of the line, should I not?” he asked her, his eyes bright with fever. “I should not have entrusted her safety to other men at the center. I should never have done that. I should have died protecting her.”
“You did your very best, Neville,” she told him, leaning close to him. “That is all anyone can ever do.”
“I might have saved her,” he said, “from— Is it true that it is a fate worse than death, do you suppose? I wish I could have died to save her from that.”
“Nothing is worse than death,” she said. “There is always hope this side of the grave. As long as I was alive, I could dream of coming back to you. I loved you. I have always loved you.”
“You must not say that, Lauren,” he said. “Please do not say that, dear.”
Elizabeth finally persuaded her late in the afternoon to return to her own room—with the promise that she would not argue about Lily’s keeping the night watch again. Dolly was waiting for Lily, she said, and was threatening to come and drag her mistress away by force. There was a hot bath awaiting her and a bed.
“I will have you woken if there is any change,” she promised. “He is tough, Lily. He will come through this.”
Lily would have known very well that Elizabeth spoke the truth if he had been anyone but Neville. But she was too desperate for him to live to believe that he would.
She surprised herself by sleeping deeply and dreamlessly for four hours. When she rang for Dolly, her maid informed her that his grace, the Duke of Portfrey, begged a few minutes of her time in the drawing room before she returned to the sickroom.
Lily had very firmly pushed from her mind all thoughts of what had happened at Vauxhall. It was easier said than done, of course, but she had refused to dwell upon the terrifying mystery. She could not afford to do so now. She needed all her emotional strength for Neville. But the terror came rushing back when she learned that the duke was belowstairs—and with it the memory that he had suddenly appeared at Vauxhall between the time she and the others had left for their walk and the time of their return. And he had been wearing a long black opera cloak.
She went down to the drawing room anyway.
He came hurrying across the room toward her, both his hands outstretched. “Lily, my dear,” he said. His handsome face was all frowning concern.
Lily leaned back against the door and clutched the doorknob with both hands behind her.
He dropped his hands and stopped a few feet away from her. “We were unable to catch him,” he said. “I am so sorry. Did you see him, Lily? Did you have a good look at him? Can you remember anything in addition to the dark cloak and the pistol?”
“Was it you?” She was whispering.
He stared at her in seeming incomprehension. “What?” he said.
“Was it you who shot Neville?” She was speaking aloud now.
He said nothing for what seemed a long while. “Why would you think it was me?” he asked her.
“It was you on the rhodondendron walk,” she said. “Was it you in the woods? And you who pushed the stone over the cliff and tried to kill me on the rocks below? Was it you who tried to run me down with your horse in Hyde Park? I know I was the target at Vauxhall, not Neville. Was it you?” Curiously she felt very calm. His face, she noticed, was drained of all color.
“Someone tried to kill you at N
ewbury?” he asked her. “And in Hyde Park?”
“I saw a figure on the rhododendron walk,” she said, “standing still and looking for me—I was in a tree. And then I came down the path and there you were. Why do you want me dead?”
His hand was over his eyes, which he had closed. “There is only one explanation,” he muttered. He opened his eyes and looked at her. “But how the devil am I going to prove it?” He blinked and looked at her with more awareness in his eyes. “Lily, it was not I. I swear it. I do not wish you any harm. On the contrary. If you but knew …” He shook his head. “I have no proof … of anything. Please believe that it was not I.”
And suddenly her suspicions seemed ridiculous to her. She could not imagine why she had ever entertained them. But then the idea that someone wanted her dead was ridiculous too. And one could hardly expect a prospective murderer to confess to the victim he had stalked for well over a month.
“For your own peace of mind,” he said, “please believe me. Oh, Lily, if you just knew how I love you.”
She recoiled in horror and pressed herself against the door so that the knob to which she clung dug painfully into her back. What did he mean? He loved her? In what way? But there was only one way, surely. Yet he was old enough to be her father. And he was dangling after Elizabeth—was he not?
His grace ran the fingers of one hand through his silvering hair and blew out his breath from puffed cheeks. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have never been so inept. Go up to Kilbourne, Lily, and ask Elizabeth to join me here, if you will. And do me the honor of trusting me, I beg you.”
She did not answer him. She turned and opened the door and fled through it. She had every reason to distrust him—now more than ever. What had he meant by saying that he loved her? And yet, when he had asked her to trust him, she had felt inclined to do just that.
The room was dark when he opened his eyes. He was not sure if it was the same night as the one during which a bullet had been dug out of his shoulder. He rather thought it was not. He was feeling weak—and his shoulder was stiff and as sore as hell. He turned his head and winced from the pain. She was lying beside him, her head turned toward him, her eyes open.
“If I am dreaming,” he said, smiling at her, “don’t tell me.”
“Your fever broke two hours ago,” she said. “You have been sleeping. But you are awake now. Are you hungry?”
“Thirsty,” he said.
She was wearing only a thin shift, he could see when she got out of bed and crossed the room to pour him a glass of water. She held it while he sat up. It took him awhile to do so—he had refused her help. But she set a bank of pillows behind him after he had taken the glass. He leaned gingerly back against them after he had finished drinking.
“Civilian life makes one soft, Lily,” he said. “If this had happened in the Peninsula, I would have been back on the battlefield by now.”
“I know,” she said.
He patted the bed beside him and took one of her hands in his when she sat down. “I suppose,” he said, “no one was caught.”
She shook her head.
“You must not fear,” he told her—not that he could really imagine Lily cowering with prolonged terror. “It was one of those senseless and random acts of violence that always seem to happen to other people. He was some sort of madman, or else something had happened on that night to give him a grudge against the world and we happened to be there in his line of fire. It will not happen again.”
“It has happened before,” she said.
He did not for a moment misunderstand her. He felt himself turn cold. He had not, he realized, believed his own explanation—except that he had nothing to offer in its place. Why would anyone wish to shoot at either him or Lily?
“Someone has shot at you before?” It was too bizarre even to think about.
She shook her head. “Not shot,” she said, and proceeded to tell him about the distant glimpse she had had on the rhododendron walk of a figure in a black cloak and the feeling she had had in the woods that she had spotted someone in a cloak again. She told him about the stone falling from the cliff as she had been scrambling on the rocks below. She told him about her near encounter with death in Hyde Park.
“Someone wants me dead,” she said.
“Why?” He frowned. He wished he did not feel so damnably weak. He wished his brain was not working so sluggishly.
She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.
Someone wanted Lily dead and had almost got his wish on three separate occasions—once at Newbury.
He reached for her suddenly, hardly even noticing the screaming pain in his shoulder. He brought her down half across him and wrapped his arms about her, her head cradled on his left shoulder.
“No,” he said, almost as if by his very will he could protect her, “it is not going to happen, Lily. I swear it is not. I failed once to save you. It will not happen again.”
“You must forget about that ambush in Portugal,” she said, her hand smoothing over the side of his face. “You saved my life at Vauxhall. The slate is wiped clean.”
“No one is going to harm you,” he said. “My word on it.” Ridiculous word of a man who had not even known that her life had been threatened and almost lost on his own property.
She kissed the underside of his jaw. “You must rest again,” she said, “or the fever will come back.”
“Lie down with me, then,” he said. “I do not want to let you out of my sight.”
She came around the bed and lay down beside him beneath the covers. “Rest,” she said. “I should not have said anything until you were strong again.”
He took her hand in his and turned his head to look at her. “Let me make love to you?”
She hesitated, but she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not yet, Neville. It is not the right time.”
She was calling him Neville again, he noticed. And although she had said no, she had added not yet. He closed his eyes and smiled. Where the devil would he have found the energy if she had said yes?
“Besides,” she said, “you are still too weak.”
“Grrr,” he said without opening his eyes.
She laughed softly.
She must have used up a great deal of energy nursing him. And for all her calm manner, she must have been exhausted by anxiety. She was fast asleep within minutes.
Neville lay beside her, staring upward. Someone wanted Lily dead. It made no sense. Why? What possible motive could anyone have? Who could possibly have any reason to resent her? Try as he would, he could think only of Lauren or Gwen. And the sort of resentment either of them might feel was certainly not the stuff from which murder came. Besides, they were far away, Gwen at Newbury, Lauren at her grandfather’s. She had decided to go there quite on the spur of the moment soon after his departure for London, his mother had written, but had refused company for the journey.
Who else?
There was no one else.
What did Lily have that anyone could want, then? Lily had nothing. Her locket was the only thing of any value that she possessed, and no one would want to kill her for the sake of a gold locket when almost every mansion in Mayfair must be loaded down with far costlier jewels. Besides, until the evening of Vauxhall, she had not worn the locket since the Peninsula. There might have been money for her in Doyle’s pack, but it would not have been a sum for which to kill. Besides, whatever it was had been burned.
His mind for some reason stuck on that idea. Perhaps because there were no other ideas.
Was it likely that Bessie Doyle would have burned the contents of that pack without sifting through them first? If there had been anything of value, would she not have kept it? Had she kept something apart from the bag itself? She seemed a woman of open enough honesty, though. He had not been given the impression that she was hiding anything—he still did not believe it.
She had been away from home when the pack arrived. Presumably her husband had received it. He had died in an acci
dent before she returned home, leaving the pack and its contents spilled all over the floor in one corner of the cottage.
Almost as if he—or someone else—had been searching for something.
Without understanding the reason, Neville felt chilled and uneasy.
Sergeant Doyle had been trying to tell him something before his death. Something he ought to have told Lily and someone else. Something about the pack he had left back at the base. He had repeatedly told Lily that there was something inside it for her. Was it possible that William Doyle had found whatever it was?
And had been killed as a result?
But there was no way now of discovering the answers.
This was ridiculous, Neville thought impatiently. He would be writing Gothic novels before he was finished. But then the idea of three attempts being made on Lily’s life was ridiculous too.
And then a memory popped into his head as if from nowhere—a detail he had not paid much attention to at the time. A letter had come, Bessie Doyle had told him, informing them of Sergeant Doyle’s death. And William, who could not read, had taken the letter to the vicar to read to him. If the pack itself had contained a letter or a package with some writing, would he have taken that too to the vicar?
This was ridiculous stuff, Neville thought again.
Someone wanted Lily dead. Nothing was more senseless than that. But somehow, somewhere, there must be a reason for it.
He knew then what he was going to have to do.
He closed his hand more protectively about Lily’s.
He was going to save her. If it cost him his life, if it cost him her, he would save her from terror and death. He would not stop looking until he found and destroyed whatever—or whoever—was threatening her.
