Page 42 of Tremaine's True Love
When Tremaine had been a boy in the hills of western Aberdeenshire, nothing could have shaken his focus from a plate of meat and vegetables topped with mashed potatoes. Now, investigating the doctor’s antipathy toward Lady Nita eclipsed any interest Tremaine had in the fare.
“That Lady Nita,” Horton said. “She’s not long for this earth, mark me, Mr. St. Michael. Women haven’t the constitution for medicine. They take ill, they blunder, they disregard the learned truths of modern science. Shall we order another ale?”
Such delicate creatures, women, and yet the endless, thankless, wearying burden of nursing invariably fell to the females of the household, particularly in England, where a physician’s calling was plied mostly in the parlor and between the pages of Latin tomes.
“Is Lady Nita frail?” Tremaine asked. Her brother had likened her constitution to that of a donkey, and thank the Almighty that was so.
“She’s skinny,” Horton said, the term an insult. “Don’t have to be a physician to see she needs more meat on her bones. Bellefonte should take her in hand, but the old earl was indulgent of his womenfolk. Never a good idea to allow the females a loose rein.”
“Is Lady Nita medically competent?” Tremaine knew she was, Tremaine’ssheepknew she was, Addy Chalmers’s youngest child knew it best of all.
What Nita Haddonfield lacked was a sense of her own value.
“She reads books,” Horton said, scraping his remaining potatoes into a heap. “I’ll give her that, and she was her mother’s right hand. I don’t begrudge women the company of their own kind at a lying-in, provided a physician is consulted regarding any complicated matters. The better families increasingly expect physicians to serve as accoucheurs as well. Lady Nita would have it otherwise.”
In other words, Nita provided poorer families an alternative to paying for Horton’s services at birthings.
“Then you would have attended Addy Chalmers had she asked for you?” Tremaine asked.
A forkful of carrot hovered before the doctor’s mouth. “Mr. St. Michael, you will think me devoid of Christian charity when I say I would have made no haste whatsoever to attend that birth had the Chalmers woman had the temerity to engage my services. She cannot provide for her young and refuses to abide by the rules of decent society. To bring another child into that household is to perpetuate a problem that has no happy solution. Lady Nita insists on prolonging the misery of all concerned.”
Her ladyship prolonged the children’slivestoo. “Many would agree with you,” Tremaine said, finishing his ale. Perhaps even the Earl of Bellefonte agreed with the physician.
Addy Chalmers’s children were not the results of immaculate conceptions, though. If Addy and the children were to be condemned out of hand, the fathers ought to bear some shame as well.
The carrots met the same fate as the rest of the doctor’s cottage pie.
“You’d best be on your way, Mr. St. Michael. Lady Nita has no doubt been accosted by old Clackengeld, who complains of bilious digestion when what he needs is a good purge and a bleeding or three. He’s usually lurking at the livery and knows better than to trouble me with his ailments.”
Tremaine dropped a few coins on the table, snatched a cinnamon biscuit before the doctor could inhale them all, and picked up the scarf Lady Nita had left draped over the back of her chair.
“I’ll heed your suggestion,” Tremaine said, “and be about my business. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. Horton.”
Horton saluted with his pint, and as Tremaine departed from the common, the physician was helping himself to the food remaining on Lady Nita’s plate.
Tremaine spotted her ladyship with the horses, across the street from the inn. She looked chilly, and she’d managed to get one side of her hem wet.
“You have a habit of leaving necessary items of apparel where they’ll do you no good,” Tremaine said, wrapping the scarf about Lady Nita’s ears and neck. “Did Horton upset your digestion?”
Her ladyship’s expression was serene, as smooth as the inn’s windows, which reflected the gray winter sky and gave away nothing of the roaring hearths and bustling custom within.
Insight struck, like the cold gust of wind that sent a dusting of snow swirling across the barren green: the more composed Lady Nita appeared, the greater her upset.
“Dr. Horton is much respected,” she said. “Shall we go?”
“You don’t respect him,” Tremaine replied, tugging on Atlas’s girth, then taking it up one hole. “I don’t particularly like him.”
Lady Nita relaxed fractionally at Tremaine’s observation. “He’s old-fashioned to a fault,” she said, “and refuses to consider any medical advance that didn’t originate in England, preferably with some colleague he studied beside when German George was on the throne.”
Tremaine had traveled enough on the Continent to understand Nita’s frustration. English medicine was considered backward by Continental physicians, and yet men like Horton toiled away in every shire in the realm, doing the best they could with a science that was far from exact.
“Up you go, my lady. What’s in the sacks?” Two sacks were tied over Atlas’s withers.
“I went around to the kitchen and bought a few things for the Chalmers household.” Lady Nita stepped into Tremaine’s hands and was up on her horse without Tremaine having to exert himself.
Her ladyship wasn’t skinny—Tremaine had reason to know this—but she was fit, and she didn’t lace herself too tightly to draw breath. He rather liked that about her, though he did not look forward to this call upon the wretched of the parish.
He swung into a cold saddle and let the shock reverberate through his system for a moment. To combat that unpleasantness, he summoned the memory of Lady Nita’s soft warmth pressed against him in her nightclothes.
