She was learning what she was made of. She wondered if it was perhaps steelier stuff than was strictly thought ladylike, although she wasn’t certain she wasn’t still a little blessedly numb from the lingering shock of her recent life events.
Her life had been pocked with violence since she was born, but today’s shock and terror had been met at once with an explosion of love and breathtaking competence.
Men could do such terrible harm.
And yet it was clear they could love so powerfully well.
She was glad she now knew.
And if she weakened at all, self-pity could set in that the sort of man she’d nearly married was the first kind.
On his way out the door, the apothecary, Mr. Waxworth, had stopped in to report that Mr. Bellingham was alive, if unconscious. And that he’d been dosed with laudanum and a remedy from the Orient meant to ease fevers, then slathered with Saint-John’s-wort ointment and properly bandaged.
“And have you any Saint-John’s-wort salve for wounds to care for him after today? Some comfrey salve, perhaps? Some linen for bandages?”
“Of course!” Helga said, almost but not quite bristling. “What kind of house would we be if we did not? I’ve me own recipes. Why, just have a look.” She gestured grandly to her shelf of herbs and the apothecary made appropriately appreciative noises.
“Splendid. But I think he was unwell before he was assaulted, poor sod. He has a fever. He ought to be looked in on at intervals today and I think he ought to be watched and tended throughout the night. It could be a near thing.”
A stricken silence followed. As the thing that he could be near was obviously death.
“I will look after him tonight,” Aurelie said at once, before she realized she was even forming the words.
She suddenly couldn’t bear the idea of him being alone in the dark. Perhaps awakening frightened and bandaged in pain in a strange place, with no memory of what happened to him, where no one would hear him call out for help. Her heart balled into a tight fist at the notion.
She realized everyone in the kitchen regarded her with a sort of cautious, gentle sympathy.
Perhaps imagining her caring for her fictional dead husband, Thomas.
She again felt a bit of a bounder for absorbing the unearned sympathy.
“Mrs. Gallagher... while that is tremendously kind and so brave of you to offer, we do not want you to think you’ve any obligation at all,” Mrs. Hardy said gently. “You are our guest, and he isourresponsibility. As you suggested, we are all rather stalwart.”
“It is no trouble,” she said firmly. “You have already done so much for him. I want to help. I know how to do it. I will do it.” She sounded a bit queenly, she realized. Perhaps more so than a Mary Gallagher might.As though she were someone unused to being countermanded.
But what she said wasn’t precisely a lie. When she was younger, she had once been gravely ill. She had been tended by a nurse throughout the day and night; a doctor had been called in. She remembered the cool cloths on her head and the mustard plasters and the gentle voices. She supposed there had been kindness and tolerance in her life but so little of anything that felt like tenderness and real care and she wanted an opportunity to give it.
It seemed this, somehow, was the secret to survival. The point of anything.
She’d said it so unequivocally that everyone was silent in the face of her conviction.
“Very well,” Mrs. Durand said. “Thank you, Mrs. Gallagher. The rest of us will look in on him throughout the day.”
“You can lay damp cloths on his forehead and chest, Mrs. Gallagher, if he seems warm. Refresh them at intervals,” Mr. Waxworth told her.
She had not considered that she would be draping cloths on a slightly or possibly completely bare man. But certainly, it was something she could do.
“Willow bark,” Helga said suddenly. She leaped up to shake some out of the jar as she measured it. “Mr. Bellingham will want it for pain when he can drink a tisane.”
So far everyone was speaking as though Mr. Bellingham was going to live. But they’d all known someone who had died from an infection and it was a whistling-in-the-graveyard sort of bravado.
Suddenly they all looked up in surprise.
Captain Hardy had appeared in the kitchen doorway.
He was fully dressed and shaved now. They staredat him, absurdly nonplussed, as if a bear had wandered in. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t welcome there. It was just that no one could recall him, or Lord Bolt, ever before making an appearance in the kitchen during working hours. (Though he had, on occasion, sneaked in very late at night for a slice of cheese.) It was so patently a female domain, the way his ship was a male domain.
He didn’t say a word. He took two steps toward Delilah, gently lifted her hand from where it rested on a potato she’d just peeled. Threaded his fingers through it.