“I shall give you time alone, Dearest. He is stable. No treatments are required. We now wait for his body to do what it does best.”
Violet thanked her, and she left. She turned back to her husband. His eyes were open now, although only partially. He looked at her then his hand tightened on hers.
“Stay,” he said. His voice was a ruin.
She almost laughed. She almost sobbed. She did both, an ugly sound that was neither.
“I am not going anywhere,” she said. “Neither are you.”
His eyes closed, but his hand did not let go.
Violet kicked off her shoes, lay down beside her husband on top of the covers, and pressed her face into his shoulder. She slept.
Chapter thirty-five
The Third Morning
Henry
He came back in pieces. The first piece was pain. A deep, interior ache that sat behind his ribs and would not be placed. After the pain came thirst, and after the thirst came the awareness that someone was holding his hand.
He tried to open his eyes. The light was wrong, too bright, too white, as though someone had moved the windows. His lids came apart and the room swam and he closed them again. His mouth tasted of metal and chalk. His throat was raw, as though he had been sick many times.
The hand holding his tightened.
“Henry.”
Violet. He knew her voice before he knew the room. He tried to speak. What came out was not a word.
“Do not talk. You are safe. You are in my room. You have been ill for two days.”
Two days. He let that settle. The last thing he could recall with any certainty was brushing her hair. The weight of it in his hand.The sound she had made when his thumbs found the muscle at her neck. After that, the dark had come, and whatever had happened inside it had left his body feeling as though it had been turned inside out and put back wrong.
He slept.
When he woke again, the light had changed. Late afternoon. A different hand was on his forehead, cooler, lighter. He opened his eyes and found Lady Thornwick sitting in the chair beside him, her hair pinned neatly. She was reading a small clothbound book and did not notice his eyes were open until he moved his head on the pillow.
“There you are,” she said, with the same calm she might have used if he had come down late for tea. She set the book aside and pressed two fingers to his wrist. Her lips moved while she counted.
“Seventy-eight,” she said. “You are coming along.”
“What happened?” His voice was gravel.
“You were poisoned. Arsenic. Through your shaving soap.”
He stared at her. The words arranged themselves slowly.
“Your wife found it. She heated the soap over a flame and identified the smell. She gave you egg whites to bind the poison in your stomach, scrubbed every surface the razor had touched, refused to allow the physician to bleed you, and kept you alive until I arrived with the iron water.”
He tried to sit up. His arms shook and failed. Lady Thornwick placed a hand on his chest and pressed him gently back.
“My daughter fought a physician twice her age and three times her confidence, and she won.” The corners of her mouth moved. “You married well, Your Grace.”
A knot formed in his chest. He closed his eyes. Not because he was tired, though he was, but because the picture she was painting, Violet at his bedside, scrubbing arsenic from his skin, was not a picture he could look at directly. Not yet.
“Where is she?”
“Downstairs. Preparing more tincture.”