The Duke she Desires

by Violet Hamers

  Lavinia made a soft mewling sound, and it was all Peter could do to keep himself from heaving the woman onto his lap and ravishing her, with her consent, of course. He was not a monster, after all.

  But instead, he broke away from her sweet mouth, keeping his hand on her face as he whispered, “Do you know, if we did that a few more times, I reckon I would be completely cured.”

  Lavinia’s cheeks lifted as she smiled at him, a brow raised in false suspicion as she said, “Really? Well then, I shall have to add it to your treatment regimen.”

  The thick heat and tension that had settled in the air between them dissipated as they broke into laughter, something they seemed to be doing with increasing frequency these days. Peter had spent so many months without laughter, without joy or mirth, that he found himself becoming rather addicted to the sensation of the ache in his cheeks and belly from so many chuckles.

  And rather addicted to the woman herself. She was unlike any person he had ever known, forthright but kind, clever but humble. She was the exact opposite of the kind of wife he ought to choose for himself, which of course made her all the more appealing.

  When she left his chambers sometime later that evening, after hours of conversation and more laughter, Peter found himself wishing once again that it was she who would be his next betrothed. Life would certainly be a sight more interesting with her by his side, rather than some uppity maiden of the ton.

  However, Peter knew she would never agree to such a thing. Lavinia clearly valued her unorthodox lifestyle, and would not want to be saddled with the trappings of a title and all the duties that came with it.

  Not even if the most important of those duties is simply loving me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lavinia’s cheeks hurt from smiling so much. Two days ago, she and Peter had begun his walking exercises, and she had never seen the duke look so joyous. His feelings were infectious, and now she too found herself grinning like a Punch and Judy puppet.

  Peter still had a ways to go until he was able to once again walk about the house and the surrounding London environs unaided. However, he was able to walk, and that was more than enough to make Lavinia feel good to her very core.

  She had cured and treated countless patients in her day, and had never failed to be amazed by the human body’s ability to recover and convalesce. However, no recovery had meant quite so much to her on a personal level as Peter’s. She knew this was because she cared for Peter, loved him, neither of which were feelings a physician ought to have for her patient. And yet, she did not stop herself from feeling them, did not try and persuade herself to remain placid and apathetic.

  To do so would be impossible, in the first place, and in the second, Lavinia didn’t want to stop these strong feelings. Though they scared her, they also served to make her feel more alive, more awake, than she had felt in years, perhaps in the whole of her life.

  Peter was breaking down all of her assumptions about the ton and making her see that she could not assume a person’s personality and goodness of heart based simply upon their class.

  She ought to have known this already, of course. She never judged her patients in East London or down by the docks for having less than she. She treated them as they deserved, as humans worthy of health and wellbeing. But she had not afforded the ton the same objectivity. She could see now how very wrong she had been.

  Peter was teaching her so much about life and love, and this was, even more than his recovery, was in large part why Lavinia couldn’t stop smiling. Her eyes, mind and heart had been opened, and it was a truly wondrous feeling, comparable only to the delight of seeing Peter take his first steps.

  They had been halting and unsteady, of course. She would have expected nothing more from a man who had not even stood up in nearly two months. But gradually, Peter was improving, no doubt thanks in part to the contraption she had fashioned for him.

  Scouring the texts she had brought with her had afforded her no good ideas of how to help Peter walk unassisted. She knew he would want to practice unaided, for both his confidence and his own peace of mind, and she wanted to make that possible for him.

  After speaking with Stevens and Hannah and discarding at least fifteen ideas, they had finally decided to create two small railings which could be fashioned on small, smooth boards that would glide across the polished ground floor of the house, allowing Peter to lean his weight on the railings and shuffle his feet beneath him as the contraption moved forward.

  The construction of the contraption had, thankfully, been completed in less than a day, thanks to the help of the house’s gardener, who was also an amateur carpenter.

  Peter had tried out the contraption two afternoons ago, the day after the marquess’s visit, and now he was able to walk all the way from one half of the house to the other, with rest breaks, of course.

  The first few hours, he’d been so unsteady she had worried more than once that he would fall on his face. But each time he wobbled precariously, he caught himself, steadying his movements and straightening himself back into an upright, standing position. Lavinia had to force down the urge to clap for him, instead schooling her face into its professional mien and offering him the occasional suggestion or adjustment to his posture or grip.

  Now, three days later, he was steady and erect as he made his way down the hall. When he got to the end, he maneuvered himself around, coming back for her at a slow but steady pace.

  “How have I done, Miss Bell?” he asked, his eyes twinkling with mischief. When alone, he had taken to calling her Lavinia, but out in the main halls of the house where other servants might hear, she was still Miss Bell. But Peter managed to say that title in such a way that it almost felt like he was whispering it in her ear, his lips brushing against the tender skin of her lobe, for the two syllables sent shivers all down her spine.

  “You did wonderfully, Your Grace. You are improving so quickly! I daresay in a week or two you might be able to take a walk about the grounds,” she said, smiling as she stepped towards the contraption.

  “Would you accompany me on such a jaunt?” he asked as he let her guide him out of the rails and onto the bottom stair of the staircase. She would ring for Stevens in a minute to take the duke up to his chambers, but she wanted to talk to him a few minutes more.

  He would be resting soon, and rather than finding the quiet time useful, as she had her first few days in residence, she now missed his presence, his voice, his laughter. Writing down notes and observations was not nearly so fun as talking to her Peter.

  My Peter? Lavinia was shocked by the sudden possessiveness. Peter wasn’t hers, no more than her other patients. And yet, she couldn’t help feeling a protectiveness over him, and a greed, too, the need to have him all to herself, so she could learn all she could about the fascinating, handsome gentleman.

  “Are you all right? You look upset,” Peter commented.

  Lavinia immediately smiled, doing her best imitation of happiness as she laughed and said, “Oh! No, I was just thinking about something I’d read in a text this morning. It contradicted some of my research. I must write to my father about it. Would you excuse me? I’ll go ring for Stevens and then retire to my room to send a note to my father,” she said, not waiting for Peter’s response before fairly running down the hall and down the steps to the servants’ quarters.

  Heat. That was the first thing Peter felt when he woke up. Heat, and an ache in his entire body, legs included, that had him curling himself into as small a ball as he could manage, in the hopes the position might mitigate the pain.

  It did not, of course. If anything, stretching and rounding his spine, touching his limbs to each other, only seemed to heighten his discomfort.

  He felt sweaty and clammy all over, like he’d exerted himself and hadn’t bathed afterward. But this was not the good sweat of exercise, he knew. It was the sweat of sickness. He was sick, and gravely so.

  Relaying this information to anyone, however, proved difficult, as Pete
r found himself falling in and out of a strange half-sleep, half-wakeful state that rendered him mute and unable to open his eyes. He could hear indistinct voices around him, could just recognize the familiar intonations of Stevens’s South London accent and Lavinia’s comparatively patrician tone, but they seemed a very far distance away.

  His head ached, pain pulsing just behind his eyes, and when a cloth was applied to his forehead he shrank back, the sudden cool fabric against his hot face only heightening his discomfort.

  I’m going to die. He’d never felt like this before, not even after being shot. He’d been in pain, then, but it was a focused pain only in his legs. Now, however, the whole of his body was one big ache, and he could feel himself growing weaker with every passing second.

  Every passing hour? He wondered, unable to recognize the passage of time. He felt like he had been in bed for years, his body slowly rotting away into the blankets until all that was left were bones.

  Peter could tell he was slipping away, and he welcomed the darkness. In the darkness, he didn’t hurt. In the darkness, he just rested and dreamed, of what might have been. Of Lavinia, and his mother and father, and the siege, the war. All had happy endings, the polar opposite to the real-life events.

  Peter liked this space, this liminal state, and so he stayed there, letting the real world fade away as his dreams took over.

  “I don’t understand why he isn’t improving,” Lavinia muttered as paced about Peter’s chambers. “None of the treatments are working. The emetic, the bloodletting. I even tried saline and antimony wine! Nothing is working. It doesn’t make sense!”

  She could hear the exasperation and fear in her voice, the slight quaver to her words, but she ignored it. She was unable to remain calm and professional, not when the man she loved was rapidly deteriorating from a fever she didn’t seem able to cure.

  “It does not seem like the fever from before, Lavinia. The one when you first arrived. It’s different. Stronger, somehow. I do not think it’s the cold we first suspected,” Stevens said, sounding similarly concerned.

  “No indeed, it is not. Colds give their sufferers stuffed noses, coughing, a headache, a slight fever at most. They do not cause their victims to fall into a sleep from which they do not seem able to wake, and they most certainly do not cause their victims to be so hot with fever that multiple changes of bedclothes per day are needed,” Lavinia said, pointing to the lump of sheets sitting on the chair by Peter’s bed.

  Stevens had suggested they call a maid to retrieve them, but Lavinia was planning to take them down to the laundry area herself. She hoped that by escaping this room for a little while, her head might clear, and she would be able to happen up the cure for this fever, the likes of which she had never seen.

  As she descended the stairs to the laundry area, however, she found no solutions, except to send a note requesting her father’s presence.

  Peter’s fever had been going strong for three days and showed no signs of lessening; if there were ever a time to call for help, it was now.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “This is no normal fever, Linny,” Lavinia’s father told her. He had just finished examining Peter, who was still tossing and turning, lost in some feverish dream that occasionally caused him to moan and twitch.

  “What do you think it could be caused by?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. She hadn’t changed her clothes since Peter first took ill, and could feel the filth and fear of three days settling against her skin, making her feel soiled and foul.

  Still, she didn’t want to take the time to go to her room, bathe and dress again. Time was of the essence right now; Peter was growing weaker by the hour. If she and her father did not find the cure to his illness soon, she had a sickening suspicion that he would not be long for this world.

  “I do not know. Are you sure you have used the correct rations in the medicines you have administered?” her father asked, turning to her.

  Lavinia couldn’t hide the hurt she felt at his accusation, and it came out in her speech. “Of course I did! Father, you and I both know I can make a saline solution and an emetic with my eyes closed. It’s not that, I promise you,” she said with a huff.

  Her father held up his hands in placation. “I did not mean to insult you, Linny. I was only asking, trying to eliminate any factors inside the sickroom itself. This looks to me like a fever caused by overabundance of some substance. My guess would be poison.”

  Lavinia had been on her way back to the sickbed to mop up the sweat that had collected at Peter’s forehead, but now she stopped and turned back toward her father.

  “Poison? But how could he be poisoned? No one has visited the house in…” she thought back, trying to remember when the various chandlers and grocers had made their deliveries. “Five days!”

  “I am not suggesting it was someone from the outside world. In fact, I rather suspect it was someone from inside this house,” her father said.

  “Someone from inside the house? You don’t mean the servants, do you? Because Father, they are by far the most loyal people I have ever met in all my life. They want nothing but good tidings from their master, of that I can assure you.”

  “Even the most loyal of servants can be swayed, my dear Linny,” her father said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe her naïveté.

  “But Father—” she started, but her father was already shaking his head.

  “We need to rule out the possibility. Just like we do when we visit a patient and connect their symptoms to a range of possible illnesses before eliminating them one by one, until we know what the patient is actually suffering from. We need to look at this scientifically,” her father said, emphasizing the last word.

  Lavinia knew why he did it: to remind her that she was the duke’s physician, first and foremost. Robert Bell had never been particularly adept at emotions, both feeling them and recognizing them, but he had pulled her aside earlier that day and warned her that she was getting too emotionally involved in the situation.

  She had been crying silently in her room while poring over a chapter on fever in one of her books when her father entered her room, making his presence known with a quick clearing of his throat.

  “Stop crying,” he had ordered, and Lavinia had looked up to find him glaring at her with disappointment.

  “I-I’m sorry, Father. I’m just so—” she started, but her father held up a hand to stop her speaking further.

  “I do not care what you are ‘just so’, child,” he said.

  Lavinia balked at being called a child, and at her father’s harsh tone—he was hardly ever so emotional that it bled into his voice.

  “Yes, I am calling you a child, because you are acting like one. You are not that gentleman’s lover, nor his friend. You are his physician. You do not get emotional about his condition; you focus instead on the symptoms, finding the cause for them and the cure. Your tears help no one and nothing.”

  Lavinia heard those words echoing in her mind now as she and her father stared at each other.

  “Very well then. If we are to rule out the possibility of poison administered by someone in the house, then we will need to monitor the duke’s chambers through the night. That would be the most likely time for someone to come in and slip him the poison,” she told him.

  “Indeed. I will entrust that job to you, since you seem so… familiar with this space,” he said, administering one last biting remark to her before taking his leave of the room.

  Lavinia was glad when he left. She and her father normally worked so well together, but it was clear that her feelings for Peter had broken something between them.

  Therefore, she was relieved when she heard the sound of her father’s footsteps echoing down the staircase ten minutes later. A moment later, she could hear the door being opened for him, and then he was gone.

  She was not ashamed at feeling more relaxed she felt now that she was once again the only physician in residence. Her father’s presenc
e had unnerved her, as had his remarks about her improper relationship with the duke.

  Deal with that later, she reminded herself as she, too, descended the stairs and made her way to the kitchen. She would take dinner with the household staff, making what observations she could about each and every member during the meal.

  Lavinia was hoping that her observations would prove her father wrong, that no one in the household was capable of betraying Peter is such horrific fashion. But to her distress, she found a quivering maid sitting at the very end of the table, moving her potatoes from one half of her plate to the other, her eyes darting every which way. She looked nervous. She looked suspicious.

  She looked exactly like the sort of person who might be bribed into killing the gentleman that paid for the roof over her head.

  Still, Lavinia sent up multiple pleas to God that her suspicions not be confirmed. The maid looked so young and innocent, and yet somehow familiar.

  Where have I seen her before?

  The answer came to Lavinia just as she was finished the last bit of roast beef on her plate. The maid was the girl she had seen running down the stairs and out of the house from the duke’s wrath weeks ago. Lavinia thought the girl had quit her position, but apparently not. Why would she return to a house owned by a gentleman who had given her such a scare?

  The maid would have been easy to persuade into hurting the duke after she herself had been so verbally wounded by him. As Lavinia cleared her plate and left it with one of the girls to clean, she could almost imagine the maid being coaxed back into the house by some dastardly member of the ton out for revenge.

  Who would want to exact revenge on the duke was still a question in need of answering, but before Lavinia could attend to that, she needed to ensure that her suspicions were correct.

  Hiding in the duke’s chambers proved almost too easy. All Lavinia had to do later that night was climb into the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room to his bed and leave the door cracked just enough to see out. She had paced anxiously earlier, waiting for the household to go to bed.