“More like none of us can read a quarter as well,” Venetia corrected him.
Hastings closed the book. By now Helena must have sickened of his voice—she’d never have consented to listen to him for hours on end if it weren’t for her incapacity. He only wished she could have told him to shut up herself.
“Go have your supper, all of you,” he said to the gathering. “Especially you, Duchess, you should be eating for two.”
There was a round of desultory agreement. “Come with?” said Fitz.
“I had mine two hours ago. You go on without me.”
When her family had gone downstairs, he asked Nurse Jennings whether she’d care for some fresh air. Nurse Jennings agreed readily and made haste to rendezvous with her cigarette.
He took Helena’s hand in his and brushed his fingers against the uninjured side of her face.
“It will be a gloomy supper downstairs,” he told her. “I’m not sure whether you heard the conversation earlier. We’ve been giving you water and bits of mush, but that’s not enough to sustain you. Tomorrow morning they will administer the tube.”
He had to take a deep breath before he could continue. “I told them this is not you, Helena. You will not allow yourself to remain in this vegetative state. You will come around. You will speak; you will walk; you will dance. You will publish a thousand more books. You will live life as it is meant to be lived, on your feet, making your own decisions.
“Wake up, my love. I have loved you for a very long time, and you have never been anything but supremely obstinate. I need you to be more obstinate than you’ve ever been, Helena. Wake up. Everything depends upon it—my entire life included.”
CHAPTER 8
Someone was using a chisel on Helena’s skull. She winced and slowly opened her eyes. A plaster medallion greeted her sight—a plaster medallion three feet across in diameter embedded in an unfamiliar ceiling.
Where was she? At a relative’s house? Did her Norris cousins have such a ceiling? Or her Carstairs cousins? She tried to sit up, but her body was heavy and unwieldy, and it took a surprising amount of effort to raise herself to her elbows. The strain hurt her shoulders; the movement made her head throb harder.
The source of illumination in the room was a wall sconce that had been covered with dark paper. She stared at this light—there was something odd about it: It didn’t flicker, but burned with a disconcerting steadiness. Was she—was she looking at an electric light?
Surely not. Electric lights were what inventors demonstrated to curious crowds, not something to be found in an ordinary dwelling.
She forgot about the oddity of the sconce when she realized that she was not alone. A woman in a green dressing gown slept with her head and her folded arms on the edge of Helena’s bed. Venetia. But she looked…older. Quite a bit older.
Behind Venetia was a man Helena had never seen before, sleeping in a chair, his shoulder leaning against the side of a wardrobe. Helena recoiled in alarm and was just about to shake Venetia’s arm when she saw another man dozing with his head tilted back, on a small chaise opposite the bed.
Her mouth opened wide as she recognized Fitz. The difference in his appearance was stark. His face, covered with dark stubble—stubble!—had elongated and sharpened from what she recalled. He no longer looked like the boy she remembered, but a man well into his twenties. To compound her shock, a woman was on the chaise with him, sleeping with her arm around his knees, her head on his thighs.
Was she still dreaming?
She must have made some sound, a whimper perhaps, at the prodigious strangeness of the tableau before her. Her family remained asleep, but a figure in the corner she hadn’t noticed before stirred. The person rose and stepped toward the bed. Another man—was there no end to the irregularity of the situation?
His clothes were crumpled, his necktie unknotted. He was unshaven, his hair longish and messy, blond curls that hadn’t known the comb for a while. And there were circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for days.
“Helena,” he said softly. “You are awake.”
His voice was oddly familiar. But as she had no idea who he was, she couldn’t possibly have granted him the intimacy of addressing her by her Christian name. She was about to demand his identity—and chastise him for his boldness—when Fitz’s voice came, still slow with sleep. “You are already awake, David? What time is it?”
Helena turned toward him. “What is going on, Fitz? Why do you look—”
“My God, Helena!” Fitz sprang up before he remembered the woman on his lap. He shook her. “Millie, Millie, wake up. Helena is awake.”
The woman bolted upright, nearly banging into his chin. “What? What did you say?”
Fitz was already pulling her to her feet, dragging her to the edge of the bed. He grabbed hold of Helena’s hand. The fine-boned, fine-featured woman he called Millie wrapped her own fingers around their clasped hands.
Her eyes shone with tears. “We were so worried. I cannot tell you how happy I am you’ve come to.”
Helena was shocked to see that Fitz’s eyes—at least his eyes still looked the same—were also damp. And he seemed utterly incapable of speech. Her stomach twisted. “What is the mat—”
Before she could finish her question, Venetia squealed. “Helena! My goodness, Helena! Christian, she’s awake!”
The man behind Venetia, whom she’d called by his given name, stood up from his seat to help Venetia rise. He smiled at Helena. “Welcome back.”
“Welcome back, indeed,” echoed Millie.
They all seemed to know her very well. Why didn’t she know them in return?
“I would hug you so hard, my love, if I weren’t afraid of hurting you,” said Venetia, taking Helena’s other hand. “Shall we put a few pillows behind your back so you can be more comfortable?”
“That won’t be quite necessary.” The very thought of having to move made her stomach protest. “Would someone please tell me what is going on?”
Venetia’s hand went to her throat. “My goodness, you don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Your accident, of course.”
Accident? She looked about her and noticed yet another woman in a corner—this one in a nurse’s cap and uniform. Were the other men in the room physicians? The one Venetia had called Christian certainly had that air of cool competence about him. She glanced toward the one named David. He stared at her as if she were the Koh-i-Noor itself, a thing of infinite beauty and worth.
She looked away, discomfited and perhaps just a little flattered—for all his dishevelment, he was not an unattractive man. “When was this accident? And what kind of accident are we speaking of?”
“A carriage accident,” Fitz answered. “It happened three days ago and you’ve been unconscious ever since. We were beginning to wonder”—his voice caught—“whether you would ever wake up again.”
The accident would explain all her pains and discomforts. A three-day coma was a decent reason for tears and high emotions upon her reawakening. But it still didn’t account for the familiarity with which all these strangers treated her; nor was it reason enough for Fitz and Venetia to have aged ten years overnight.
“It’s probably a good thing you don’t remember,” said Millie. “It was a horrible accident. My goodness, when I saw you lying in the middle of the street, blood from your head soaking into the stone dust, I thought—”
Her lips quivered. Fitz handed her his handkerchief. “It’s all right. Everything will be all right now.”
“Of course.” Millie wiped her eyes. “Please excuse me.”
Venetia was dabbing at her own eyes. The man named Christian had his hand on her shoulder.
Helena could no longer contain her bewilderment, which was beginning to congeal into a cold, knotted sensation that was not unlike fear. She didn’t know whether she ought to demand the reason why her siblings had aged so much before company, so she asked, “Venetia, Fitz, would you plea
se perform the introductions? I’d like to meet our guests.”
Her request caused a long moment of communal gaping, followed by dismayed glances among the five people surrounding her bed, which only made her stomach clench with premonition.
“We are not guests,” said Millie. “We are your family.”
Helena hadn’t thought she’d like the answer she’d receive, but she had not anticipated that it would turn incipient fear into outright fright. She bolted straight up, ignoring the pain in her head and the roiling in her stomach caused by her abrupt motion, and tried to arrive at a logical explanation. Were they distant cousins? Or perhaps…“Did I meet everyone just before my accident? My mind is quite blank concerning that time period.”
“No, no.” Millie shook her head hard, as if the force of her denial could make a difference in the matter. “We—you and I—met eight years ago at Lord’s, at the Eton and Harrow cricket match.”
Helena’s father had been a cricket enthusiast. The entire family had attended several Eton and Harrow matches with him, but she had no recollection of ever meeting this Millie. “I’m sorry. I must have forgotten. I imagine we have not seen much of each other since?”
Millie looked aghast. Helena felt her heart sink—she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what Millie might say. Millie, it seemed, shared her reluctance. She looked at Fitz, who looked thunderstruck, before turning her gaze back to Helena.
“We have seen a great deal of each other since, Helena. I am your sister-in-law.”
Helena gripped the sheets. But this was preposterous. “You are married, Fitz? When did you marry?”
“Eight years ago.” Fitz’s words were almost ghostly in their feebleness.
“Eight years ago? What year is it now?”
“Eighteen ninety-six,” said Millie.
Eighteen ninety-six? No wonder Fitz looked like a man well into his twenties—he was a man well into his twenties. And Helena, born on the same day as he, a woman well into her twenties.
She shook her head, trying to settle her careening, incoherent thoughts. But the movement instead caused a sharp thrust of nausea. She gritted her teeth and turned to Venetia. “Is the gentleman next to you your husband?”
“Yes,” said Venetia quietly.
“And have you also been married a long time?”
“No, we married only this Season.”
An uneasy silence descended. Helena’s agitation began to scale dizzying new heights as, one by one, her siblings and their spouses looked toward David, who appeared, if possible, even more stunned than they were.
“What about David?” Fitz sounded as if he were pleading. “Surely you remember him—you’ve known him half your life.”
She stared at this David, a tall man with elegant bone structure: etched cheekbones, a sharp jawline, and a nose that would have been almost too perfectly straight if it hadn’t been broken a time or two—a face she would not mind looking at had she encountered it at a gathering. But she didn’t want him here, a stranger granted intimacy, a man who expected her to know him.
“And how are we related, sir?”
Her stomach churned as she braced herself for the answer.
He glanced toward Fitz. An unspoken message passed between them. He looked back at Helena, inhaled deeply, and spoke with the sort of care one might use to inform a child that her puppy was no more. “The world knows me as your husband.”
Precisely the answer she was hoping not to hear. Her stomach churned even more violently. She clamped down on her lower lip, willing her body to settle down and leave her alone. But the nausea only surged.
She yanked aside her bedcover. “Gentlemen, please clear the room. I’m going to be quite sick.”
With her sister and sister-in-law supporting her, and the nurse trailing behind, Helena made it to the water closet barely in time.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, when she’d finished ejecting the contents of her stomach. She hadn’t felt so physically miserable since the bout of scarlet fever she’d suffered when she was nine. And she hadn’t felt so emotionally miserable since—
She didn’t know what to compare her experience to. It had been terrible losing her parents, but at least she had been able to share her grief with her siblings. But this…this waking up to find that half of her life had been wiped from her mind and that she was now saddled with a husband she could not remember meeting, let alone choosing—she felt utterly rudderless.
“My poor darling,” said Millie as she placed the cover on the blue-enameled commode and pulled the cord to flush.
Venetia was already escorting Helena to the washstand. “Miss Redmayne had said that you might experience nausea and vomiting when you awakened—those are common enough symptoms for people who’ve suffered a con-cussion.”
“Miss Redmayne is our physician,” added Millie helpfully. “She is on her way as we speak.”
A woman physician? Helena certainly approved, but she’d had no idea that there were now enough women physicians for the Fitzhugh ladies to have one.
A mirror hung above the washstand. She recoiled at her appearance: Half of her face was bruised, the discoloration almost greenish in color. Still she couldn’t help staring: She didn’t in the very least feel like a child, but how strange—and thrilling, in a way—to suddenly see her own grown-up face.
She covered her mouth. In a gap between the bandaging, she could clearly see her scalp. “What happened to my hair?”
“Miss Redmayne had to shave it in order to stitch the wound on your head,” answered Millie.
“All of it?” Her question was a whimper. Fate seemed needlessly cruel.
“Your hair will grow back.” Venetia’s eyes reddened. “When I think that you could have died on the spot…”
Millie patted Venetia’s arm. “You mustn’t torment yourself with thoughts of what didn’t happen. You’ll get in a state and it wouldn’t be good for the baby.”
A baby? Helena spun around—and had to grip Millie’s shoulder to steady herself. “You are with child?”
“Yes.”
She glanced down at Venetia’s middle. “You don’t look it.”
“I still have months and months to go. In fact, we’d just told everyone the good news the night before your accident.”
The accident.
Abruptly, everything Helena didn’t know about her family closed in around her, a suffocating ignorance. “Do you have any other children, Venetia? Do you, Millie—you don’t mind that I call you Millie, do you?”
Before either one of them could give an answer, a fist of panic struck her. “Dear God, do I have any children?”
Not the most auspicious of new beginnings, is it?” muttered Hastings.
It was as if some part of her remembered exactly who he was and how much she could not stand him.
He and Fitz were alone in the passage outside her door. Lexington had gone to compose a cable to the Herr Doktor from Berlin, informing the latter that his services were no longer required, but that he would be compensated for his time and expenses, should he have already started his journey to London.
“Miss Redmayne told us that she’d be prone to nausea and vomiting upon awakening,” Fitz pointed out reasonably. “You know that.”
Hastings supposed he did. He sighed. “At least she is awake now. Thank God for that.”
If only he could quite comprehend the fact that he was now a complete stranger to her.
Millie came out of the room. “How is she?” Fitz and Hastings asked in unison.
“Back in bed, but already asking the nurse when she will be free of medical supervision.”
“She never likes supervision of any sort, does she?” said Fitz. “What about her memory?”
“She was grilling us—she is still grilling Venetia as we speak. She doesn’t remember being a publisher. Or attending university. Or Venetia’s first two marriages. We’ve been informing her of the major events of her life and ours.”
“What about Andr
ew Martin?” asked Fitz, saving Hastings the trouble.
“She hasn’t brought him up, but I would be quite shocked if she remembered him alone when she has forgotten everything else.”
Hastings wanted to know whether Helena had any questions about him, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask.
Footsteps came up the staircase. Miss Redmayne had arrived. “Lord Fitzhugh, Lady Fitzhugh, Lord Hastings.”
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Hastings.
“Is there anything about Lady Hastings’s current condition that I should know?”
It still gave Hastings pause to hear Helena referred to as Lady Hastings. “She vomited a few minutes after she awakened.”
Miss Redmayne noted it down. “That is normal and not in itself a cause for concern.”
“She has also lost her memory,” Hastings added.
Miss Redmayne raised a brow. “You mean she has no recollection of the accident? That is also not uncommon.”
Hastings shook his head. “I’m afraid her memory loss is more extensive than that. She has no recollection of ever meeting Lady Fitzhugh or myself—and we’ve known her many years.”
Miss Redmayne tapped the end of her pen on her chin. “That is a more extreme case of amnesia than one usually encounters.”
Amnesia. The syllables were ominous. “How soon can we expect her memory to return?”
“There is no fixed schedule of recovery, from what I know of the condition. She could have it back by the end of the day, the end of the month, or the end of the year.” Miss Redmayne paused delicately. “Although there is also the possibility that she may not recoup it.”
“What?” Fitz exclaimed. “That can’t be. We are speaking of years and years of memories here. How can so much recollection vanish into thin air?”
Miss Redmayne’s tone was gentle, almost apologetic. “It has been known to happen, and medical science, unfortunately, has yet to fully understand the condition, let alone cure it.” She turned to Millie. “Lady Fitzhugh, will you show me in?”
Fitz thrust his hands into his hair. “I can’t imagine it, her memory permanently wiped away. At least Venetia and I still share childhood memories with her, but for you and for Millie—”
Tempting the Bride Page 9
