Page 78 of The Captive Duke
So he crawled.
He’d crawled out of the Château. He didn’t dwell on that memory, but he’d been weak and had beentied tightly to the cot. His extremities wouldn’t do as he’d bid them, and he’d been desperate to regain his liberty.
The door seemed to recede, but by slow degrees, he closed in on his quarry. The mechanism of the lock was devilishly stubborn, particularly because Christian’s hands sported eight and ten fingers apiece as he stared at them. He fell into his sitting room and lay on the floor, swallowing back more dry heaves.
When he could open his eyes, he saw the sitting-room door to the corridor was ajar by a few inches, and he determined he’d shout for help.
He croaked, and the sound of what passed for his voice both scared him and puzzled him. He was afflicted by the notion that because he’d chosen not to speak to another human soul for months, his voice would abandon him when he needed it most.
The fear and fancy in that thought had him mustering his resolve. He organized himself up onto all fours, sat back, and bellowed.
“Gillian!”
She slept across the hall from him—he’d become acutely aware of that lately—in the best of the family bedrooms. They’d argued about it, a room in the family wing as opposed to the guest wing.
“Gillian!”
He would crawl across the room, crawl across the hall…
And then his door flew open, and she pelted intothe room in a black dressing gown sporting embroidery that seemed to dance along its hems.
“Your Grace?Christian?” She was beside him in a dizzying instant, the very scent of her easing Christian’s suffering. “What’s amiss?” Her hands ran over his face. “You’re ill. Let me fetch the footmen to get you…”
He shook his head. “No footmen.”
“But I can’t lift you.”
“Help…me.” He extended one arm but that destroyed his balance, so he almost fell off his knees.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “You’re vertiginous, which means perhaps your ears are ailing as well.”
With Gilly’s aid, he staggered to his feet, then across the bedroom.
“Steps up to the bed,” she warned. His arm was across her shoulders, but he was using her to remain upright, not simply to steady his balance. It took two tries, and he ended up falling facedown onto the bed, but he made it.
“You lost the tea you drank outside. This must be some sort of summer influenza.”
“Gillian, lock the door.”
She sat at his hip, for he’d managed to get himself onto his back.
“Lock the damned door.”
The stench of his own vomit was threatening to start him heaving again, and he knew a profound mortification that she should see him thus.
“You want me to lock the door?”
“Nobody else…” He swallowed and felt the room spinning even as he lay flat on his back in a bed that likely hadn’t moved for two hundred years. “Poison.”
All three of her faces registered the last word. Christian saw that she comprehended what he’d said, and then he promptly lost consciousness.
Gilly refused to let the duke die. For hours, she bathed every inch of him when he was fevered, wrapped him in blankets when he shivered, held the basin while he suffered dry heaves, and let him nigh break the bones of her hand while he cramped and groaned and shook and cursed.
In his lucid intervals, he made her swear not to open the door to anyone, not to allow another to see him in his weakened state. So she sent their excuses down to the kitchen for dinner, locked the door behind her, and prepared to lay siege to his illness.
“I’m not sick,” he rasped shortly after midnight. “This is poison, I tell you.”
“You aren’t fevered anymore,” she said, laying the back of one hand against his forehead. “You haven’t had the heaves for more than an hour. Whatever it is, it’s subsiding.”
