As they were about to leave the hotel and he was helping her into the warm jacket that she’d brought with her he asked, ‘Do you want to take a stroll by the lake?’
‘Yes, if you like,’ she told him, with the memory of that other time when she’d done the same thing alone and in daylight on the morning after the party.
It was then that she’d been attracted to Greystone House, the property on the island, where she was going to stay in a couple of weeks’ time.
Tonight it was floodlit with lanterns and so was the lake, like diamonds sparkling on water. When Nathan took her hand in his she didn’t draw it out of his clasp, but kept it there, warm and safe, in case she should trip in the semi-darkness.
‘What is that place?’ he asked, glancing across the water to where the house stood solid and unreachable. ‘I remember it from way back but don’t ever recall what it was used for.’
‘I don’t know about then,’ she told him, ‘but now it is a very popular holiday let, though I’m not sure what degree of the services it has, such as lighting, heating and water, but for anyone wanting peace and solitude it’s the perfect place. It’s owned by a local businessman who lets it out when his family aren’t using it.’
If she told him that she was going to stay there herself in the near future he would think she was crazy no doubt. But it would give her the opportunity to be alone with her thoughts, with the reassurance of knowing that she was just a boat ride away from the things she held dearest.
Every moment spent with Nathan in tranquillity was a joy, but there was always the reminder of things past to spoil it. It was why on the night of his father’s party, when she’d been ready to give herself to him completely, she’d backed away. There had been no real closeness between them since then until tonight, just as long as they could keep gentling along like this.
Walking alongside her, still holding her hand, Nathan was thinking the same kind of thoughts. He’d been too pushy that other time and spoilt it, but not tonight. They were in a different mode, though still overwhelmingly aware of each other.
‘Is Toby enjoying his stay by the river?’ she asked as they went back to where the car was parked on the hotel forecourt.
He was smiling. ‘Yes. I don’t know which of the two of them is enjoying it the most. Having him around has given Dad something to keep him on his toes, but I have to make sure he isn’t doing too much, though Toby isn’t a demanding child like some are, and Dad says that he brightens up his life.’
‘Becoming his guardian has caused you to have to make many adjustments in yours, hasn’t it?’ she commented.
‘Yes, I have to admit that is so. Before he came to me I was used to doing what suited me first and foremost, and now my requirements must always come second. Toby seems happy enough with me, but he needs a mother figure too, which I suppose means that I should find myself a wife.’
He was sounding her out, putting out a feeler to see if she would respond, and she did, but not how he wanted her to.
‘I’m sure there will be plenty of applicants for the position once you let that be known,’ she replied coolly. ‘You have the looks, a beautiful cottage, the job…’ And a heart of stone to be discussing something like this with me of all people.
She was averting her gaze from his, didn’t see him flinch, and when he opened the car door for her, she slid into the passenger seat and stared into the distance.
They were back in the centre of Swallowbrook in minutes and instead of inviting him in for coffee, as she had been intending to, Libby thanked him for the meal, bade him a brief goodnight and was gone, closing her front door behind her decisively.
Yet there was nothing decisive about the way she began to climb the stairs with dragging feet and a heavy heart.
Why couldn’t she accept once and for all that Nathan only wanted her as colleague, neighbour and someone to play hide and seek with Toby? she thought bleakly.
Throwing off her clothes, she got into bed and wished that it was tomorrow that she was going to the house on the island.
She slept at last, only to dream that Nathan was down below, ringing her doorbell, and when she let him in he said, ‘I love you, Libby, can’t live without you.’ But as she moved towards him, smiling with arms outstretched, she awoke to find that the doorbell was ringing and when she went downstairs he was there, but he wasn’t saying the words of her dream. ‘Dad has just phoned to say that Toby is sick,’ he said without preamble. ‘I’m going there now and thought I’d better warn you that I might be missing from the surgery in the morning.’
‘What does he say is wrong with him?’ she asked as the doctor in her rose to the surface.
‘Temperature, headache, rash—it all sounds worryingly familiar.’
‘Meningitis?’
He nodded.
‘Give me a couple of minutes to fling on some clothes. I’m coming with you,’ she told him.
‘Are you sure?’
She was already halfway up the stairs and called down to him, ‘Of course I’m sure. Have you got your bag?’ He nodded bleakly. ‘So go and start the car.’
‘When did Toby start to be ill?’ she asked as they drove towards the river and his father’s lodge.
‘Just a short while ago, Dad said. Awoke fretful, poorly, covered in a damned rash and is vomiting. If anything else bad happens to him, I shudder to think how I’ll cope,’ he said, with his voice thickening, and she thought that love could make strong men weak.
‘Nothing is going to happen to Toby,’ she told him steadily as the complex of retirement homes came into view. ‘The two of us, you and I, are not going to let it. We are being given a taste of what it’s like for the families of our sick patients. It’s the other side of the coin, a lesson to be well learned.’
Toby was how John had described him, but Nathan’s father had met them at the door with the news that the rash had come out fully and wasn’t the same kind as the symptoms of meningitis. ‘My feeling is he’s picked up a bug or some sort of virus,’ he said as they examined him.
Nathan muttered, ‘Thank God it isn’t the other thing. This we should be able to cope with, but the problem is I don’t know anything about Toby’s health before I took him into my care, what or if he had any health problems before I became responsible for him. In normal circumstances parents have firsthand knowledge about anything regarding their child’s health.
‘I feel pretty sure that his condition this morning is allergy related but am loath to start prescribing anything until someone else has seen him beside ourselves. What do you think, Libby?’ he asked.
‘It could be something he is allergic to,’ she agreed, ‘but from what to make him so poorly?’
‘That’s just it, we don’t know, do we? It could be from anything—food, toiletries, plants, something airborne.’ To Toby, with incredible gentleness, he said, ‘Aren’t you the lucky one, with three doctors to look after you?’
As she took his hot little hand in hers to feel his pulse he said drowsily, ‘When can we play hide and seek again, Libby?’
‘Soon,’ she soothed, and when she turned round Nathan had been replaced by his father, who said, ‘We’re not sure what the rash is, are we, Libby? I’m wondering if his condition is due to something that Toby has eaten, and agree with Nathan that we shouldn’t prescribe until we are sure what is wrong, which is going to mean taking him to A and E immediately. Do you want to go with them and I’ll take the morning surgery for you?’
Daylight was already filtering through the curtains and she asked, ‘Where is Nathan, and what time is it, John?’
‘He’s on the phone to the hospital, and it is almost a quarter to eight o’clock.’
‘I’d like to go with them, but am not sure if Nathan would rather you were there,’ she told him.
&
nbsp; ‘Maybe, but Toby is asking for you and that’s all that matters.’
‘Yes, you’re right, of course it is,’ she said steadily, and wished that John had felt confident enough to reassure her with regard to Nathan’s desire for her company.
She sat in the back seat of the car next to Toby as Nathan drove them to the hospital. Apart from a brief word of thanks from him for accompanying them, and her telling him that thanks were not necessary in such a situation, they hadn’t spoken since they’d left his father’s place, but she could feel the depth of his anxiety like a tangible thing.
Taking over the care and wellbeing of a child in Toby’s circumstances must be nerve-racking enough without this kind of thing thrown in for good measure, she thought. But apart from that moment of weakness when they’d been hastening to his father’s place after he had received the phone call, Nathan was in control again.
Yet she did wish that he didn’t feel he had to thank her for being there for the two of them. She’d witnessed his distress when she’d opened the door to him in the early dawn, and seen how much he loved the boy when they’d arrived to find him so poorly. That was enough to make her want to be with them every second of the trauma that they were caught up in.
CHAPTER SIX
SHE’D never loved them both so much as at that moment, Libby thought as Nathan drove them to the hospital through the morning rush-hour traffic, the child because he was ill, and the man because he was being cast in the role of the frantic parent.
Holding Toby’s hand tightly, she ached to do the same for Nathan, but felt that the memory of what he’d said when leaving her after they’d spent the previous evening together didn’t give her the right to do anything other than give him the kind of support that anyone would do in such a situation, which wasn’t quite what she had in mind.
Tense behind the wheel, Nathan was aware of how much he needed her, how much she brought stability into his disrupted life, but it wasn’t just that, he was in love with Libby. The man who had decided that love was not to be trusted had found that with her it wasn’t like that. Life could be so good for them if she would only forgive him.
Since he’d returned to Swallowbrook and got to know her better he’d discovered that it was a passionate, caring woman that he’d once sent away. All his doubts were disappearing as he was getting to know Libby for the person she really was and he wanted her in his life for evermore.
Whether she would believe that was doubtful after the way he’d talked about finding himself a wife the night before as if she didn’t come into it.
When the nightmare they were in the middle of with Toby had been hopefully resolved he would take her somewhere special and propose to her amongst candlelight and flowers. Maybe then she would accept that he was totally sincere in what he had to say.
The months had gone by. Working from dawn to dusk out there, he’d done nothing about the moment of raw awareness that she had awakened in him, until his father had casually mentioned Libby’s approaching marriage to Jefferson.
It had jolted him into the realisation that he couldn’t let it happen without seeing her first, that he had to go back to see for himself if the love she’d had for him was still there. And much good it had done him, he thought grimly, with the memory of those desolate moments in the church porch surfacing once more.
He was watching her in the car’s rear-view mirror, noting how gentle and reassuring she was with Toby, and as the turning for the hospital loomed up ahead the tight band of anxiety across his chest increased its stranglehold.
When they arrived at Accident and Emergency he carried a drowsy Toby inside, with Libby close by his side. Two of the staff had been alerted by his phone call and were waiting for them, and once they’d been shown into a cubicle a doctor appeared.
‘I don’t recognise your youngster’s symptoms immediately,’ he told them when he’d examined Toby, ‘and I take it that neither of you are sure or you wouldn’t be here. If I had to make a guess I would say that whatever is wrong with him is allergy related, but we don’t rely on guesses so we’re going to admit him for a couple of days while we do some tests.’
Turning to Libby, he said, ‘We have met before, haven’t we, Dr Hamilton, at some meeting or other? And this is your family, I take it?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ she told him with an anxious look at Toby, who was clinging to Nathan and looking really poorly. ‘This young patient is Dr Gallagher’s ward. We are both employed at the Swallowbrook Medical Practice and live next door to each other.’
‘Ah, I see,’ he said, and turned his attention to what Nathan was saying.
‘One of the reasons we’re here is because I’m in the process of adopting Toby,’ he explained, ‘and have not yet received his medical records from the practice where he and his parents were registered before they were involved in a tragic accident. So I felt that the hospital needed to see him before we began to treat him.’
‘Has he eaten anything that could have caused this? Or been near any plant life that could have a sting in its tail?’ the other man asked.
‘Not that we know of. He spent yesterday with my father and he doesn’t let Toby out of his sight.’
‘Hmm. So what do the two of you think it might be?’ he asked as they bent over the small figure on the bed.
‘I thought of urticaria,’ Libby told him. ‘When he is at his grandfather’s place Toby sometimes plays in a field nearby and if nettles are present he could have been stung by them.’
‘Yes, but there would have been tears if that was the case and Dad would have picked up on that,’ Nathan said sombrely. ‘If we are looking at plant life I think that it might be something he has eaten.’
Looking down at Toby, he asked, ‘Did you play in the field yesterday?’ And got a drowsy nod for an answer.
‘And did you eat anything that you found there?’
‘Only the grapes,’ was the weak reply.
‘What kind of grapes were they, Toby?’
‘Black and shiny.’
His next question cut into the tension in the room like a knife. ‘How many…er, grapes did you eat?’
‘Two. I spat the others out because I didn’t like them.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ Libby told him gently, and as the three doctors observed each other there was the same thought in their minds. Toby’s symptoms could be those of the poisonous plant belladonna, or deadly nightshade, as it was sometimes called due to the serious effects it could have if the berries were eaten.
As Libby stroked his hot little brow gently the doctor took Nathan to one side. ‘It does sound as if your young one has been in contact with the so unsuitably named belladonna, or something similar. The vomiting will have brought some of it up, but I’m afraid that we will have to resort to water lavage if blood tests show the belladonna poison is present. Stomach washing out is an unpleasant prospect for anyone, especially a child, but that is what needs to be done immediately if our premonitions are correct.’
The answer they were dreading was there with the test results and the doctor in A and E said, ‘Fortunately Toby doesn’t seem to have eaten many of the berries, which is a godsend, but the situation is still critical. Hopefully once his stomach has been washed clear of the poison it will prevent any further complications, but it must be done now.’
Nathan nodded bleakly. ‘I’m in favour of anything that will save Toby’s life so, yes, let’s proceed as quickly as possible. Time has been wasted because neither Dr Hamilton or myself had any idea that Toby might have been near belladonna and been tempted by what he thought were black grapes.’
The doctor was already arranging for a theatre to be made available with staff there ready to assist by the time Toby was brought down, and as he was being transferred there, with Libby still holding his hand, Nathan said with
his face a grey mask of horror, ‘I’m going to insist that I’m there while they do what they have to do. I’ve done plenty of theatre work while I was abroad, it won’t be anything new. But you should get back to the practice, you’re needed there more than here. I’ll see you when this is over, Libby, and thanks for coming.’
‘Will you please stop thanking me? I don’t want your thanks,’ she told him, stiffening at the abruptness of his dismissal. ‘What I do want is to know that Toby will soon be well again and that the pain and the nightmare that is there for the parents of any sick child will soon be over for you, and now I’ll do what you suggest and go back to my patients, which will leave your father free to come here.’
As Toby’s bottom lip began to tremble she said gently, ‘I won’t be long. I have to go and see to my other sick people now, but I’ll bring you something nice when I come back.’
‘What will it be, Libby?’ he asked with a momentary brightening of his small pale face.
‘It will be a surprise,’ she told him, and turning to Nathan as the feeling of being no longer needed persisted, ‘I would appreciate a phone call when you have a moment to spare.’
‘That goes without saying,’ he said evenly, and as she went out into the corridor with a heavy heart she didn’t hear him groan at the way he’d told her to go as if she’d served her purpose. It had been the right thing to do. It was Libby’s responsibility as senior partner to be back at the practice, but it had been the wrong way to do it. What was the matter with him? He’d been floundering about like a quivering jelly ever since they’d found Toby in this state, while she’d been like a rock to hold onto, and now he’d sent her away.
They’d arrived at the theatre on the lower ground floor and after that everything else was forgotten as the great machine that was the NHS took over.
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