“Don’t speak,” Hart said, his voice incredibly gentle.
“I’ll get a doctor.”
She shook her head, her smile weak. “It’s all dark now. I can’t see your face.” She groped blindly for him. “Hart, hold me.”
“I’m here.” Hart gathered her against him, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I’m here, love. I won’t leave you.” Ian didn’t even look at them. He had his eyes closed now, rocking Beth. Beth tried to say, “I knew you’d find me,” but darkness closed on her, and her lips would no longer move. She slid into unconsciousness just as Mrs. Palmer’s last breath rattled through her throat.
Ian used Hart’s opulent carriage to take Beth home to the ducal mansion on Grosvenor Square. Hart’s house was always staffed, always at the “ready for any business the duke might want to conduct in town. Ian carried Beth inside, and the well-trained servants scrambled to obey his frantic commands.
Ian carried Beth to the bedchamber set aside for his use. A doctor came to clean Beth’s wound and sew it closed, but Beth wouldn’t wake up.
Cameron had stayed with Hart and Inspector Fellows at the church while Fellows fetched who he needed to fetch and tried to make sense of what happened. Ian didn’t care what had happened. It was over, Mrs. Palmer was dead, and Beth had nearly died herself trying to put everything right. Fellows could do as he liked.
Beth lay in a stupor, feverish and sweating. No matter how much Ian bathed the cut in her side, it swelled and reddened, and fever set in.
Ian stayed by her all night. He heard the others return, Cameron’s gruff voice and Hart’s quiet replies, the deferential voices of the servants. He pressed a cool cloth to Beth’s forehead, wishing he could bring the fever down by force of will.
He heard the door open behind him and Hart’s heavy tread, but Ian wouldn’t look up.
“How is she?” his brother asked in a low voice.
“Dying.”
Hart came around the bed and looked down at Beth, unmoving on the sheets. His face was white, strained. Beth was so hot. She groaned with it, tossing her head from side to side. She whimpered when her wound touched the bed, as if trying to find release from haunting pain. Ian glared at Hart. “You and your f**king women. You made them your tame animals, and now they’ve killed Beth.”
Hart flinched. “Damnation, Ian.”
“You thought Beth wanted my money, our name. Why should she?”
“I did at first. I don’t any longer.”
“Too bloody late. She never wanted anything for herself, never demanded anything from us. You don’t know what to do with people like that.”
“I don’t want to see her die, either.”
Hart put his hand on Ian’s shoulder, but Ian jerked away. “You took me to that house to be your damned spy. You used me, like you’ve use me for every other scheme in your life. You released me from the asylum so I could help you, but you’ve never believed I wasn’t mad. You just needed what I could do.”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” Hart said, tight-lipped. “It’s close enough. You thought I was insane enough to kill Sally. I did what you said because I was grateful to you, and I wanted to protect you. I admired you and worshiped you just like your tame sluts.”
Ian was breathing hard, but he gentled his hand to brush back Beth’s hair.
“For God’s sake, Ian.”
“I’m finished obeying your commands. Your bloody high-handedness has killed my Beth.”
Hart remained still, his eyes fixed. “I know. Let me help her.”
“You can’t help. She’s beyond help.” Ian met Hart’s gaze for a fleeting moment, and for the first time in Ian’s life, Hart couldn’t look back at him.
“Get out,” Ian said. “I don’t want you here if I have to say good-bye to her.”
Hart remained rigid and unmoving for a few moments,’ then turned around and quietly walked from the room.
Over the next week, Ian left the bedroom only to shout for Curry if the man was too slow answering the bell. Beth tossed in the bed, her face pink and sweating, groaning when anything touched her side. Ian slept on the bed next to her, or on the chair beside it when Beth became too restless. Curry tried to get Ian to sleep in the next room, to let a maid or Katie or himself nurse Beth while he rested, but Ian refused. Ian had read every book in Hart’s vast library and plenty of tomes at the private asylum, filing away every modern view of medicine in his head. He put into practice methods of nursing festering wounds, methods of bringing down fever, methods of keeping the patient quiet and fed. The doctor brought leeches, which did help with the swelling a little, but Ian didn’t like his oils and ointments and syringes of suspicious-looking liquids. He wouldn’t let the doctor near Beth with them, which led to the doctor’s loud-voiced complaints to an unsympathetic Hart. Ian washed Beth’s wound every day, wiping away any evils that seeped from it. He bathed her face in cool water, fed her spoonfuls of broth, forcing them into her when she tried to turn her face away. He had Curry bring in ice, which he pressed against the cut to stop the swelling, and used more ice to cool down the water with which he bathed her forehead. Ian wished he could move Beth from London, where coal smoke and soot seeped through every window, but he feared jarring the wound open again. He braided her hair to take the heat off her neck, fearing he’d have to cut off her beautiful tresses if the fever didn’t break.
The doctor clucked his tongue and proposed experimental treatments that involved serum from monkey glands and other such wonders. He was developing them in conjunction with specialists in Switzerland, and if he could save the sister-in-law of the Duke of Kilmorgan, he said, it would make his name.
Ian ran him off with threats of violence.
By the sixth day, the fever still had not come down. Ian sat by Beth’s side, his hand loosely clasping hers, and tasted fear. He was going to lose her.
“Is this what love feels like?” he whispered to her. “I don’t like it, my Beth. It hurts too much.”
Beth didn’t respond. Her eyes were cracked open under swollen lids, a blue glitter that saw nothing. He hadn’t been able to feed her today.
Ian felt sick, his stomach roiling, and he had to leave the room to vomit bile. When he returned, there was no change. Her breathing was hoarse and a struggle, her skin painfully hot.
She’d come into his life so suddenly, only a few short weeks ago, and just as suddenly, she was departing it. The sense of loss terrified him. He’d never felt it before, not even with all the loneliness and fear he’d experienced at the asylum. That fear had been self-preservation; this was an emptiness that hollowed him out from the inside. Sitting in this dark room facing the worst brought memories back to him. Ian’s perfect recall played them all clearly, little dimmed by the seven years between now and his years at the asylum. He remembered early morning baths in cold water, taking supervised walks in the garden, where a man with a long walking stick followed him about. The sheepherder, Ian had always called him, ready to beat patients back indoors if necessary.