Page 72 of Snowy and the Seven Doves
“You should ask her to tell the story.” There had definitely been something wrong with that apple. His mouth felt odd—both numb and burning at the same time, and his stomach heaved.
Ned said something, but he seemed a long way away, and Snowy could not hear him. “Ned. The apple.” He found it hard to move his chest to breathe. He had to do it; had to stop Ned from eating the pie. He flung out an arm toward it, or so he intended, but it was more of a jerk with his shoulder. “Something’s wrong,” he choked out.
“Hal? What is it?” Ned’s voice was shrill with concern.
Snowy saw the darkness coming for him, turned his head with the last of his strength to see his lady. In the narrowing tunnel that was left of his vision, she hurried toward him, her eyes wide with alarm.Love you.He didn’t have the strength to say it. He hoped she knew.
He was glad she was the last thing he saw as the darkness consumed him.
*
Margaret pushed backthe panic that was clouding her mind as she fell to her knees beside Hal. He had stopped breathing, though he still had a pulse. “What happened, Ned? Did he choke?”
She rolled Hal to the floor, on his side so that she could thump his back.
Ned dropped to his knees beside her. “I don’t think so. He wasn’t eating, Margaret. We were talking. He started mumbling. Then he said, ‘The apple’ and ‘Something’s wrong’.”
“Apple?” Poppy said. “We had no apple today. We finished the last of the dried apples and have to wait for the harvest.”
Margaret arranged Snowy on his back and began breathing into his mouth. Mouth-to-mouth expired-air breathing had been known to keep people alive after drowning or suffocation in the mines. Perhaps it would help.
“Snowy had apple pie,” said Petunia. “The girl gave it to him.”
“She’s right,” Pauline said. “See? On the side table behind where Snowy was sitting.”
“Don’t touch it,” Miss Trent warned. “Which girl, Miss Petunia? One of the maids?”
Margaret listened to them talk, hoping they would happen upon something that would let her help Hal. She would not remove her focus from him, taking every moment between breaths to check his pulse—thready but there—his color, and anything else she could think of.
“I didn’t make it,” Poppy insisted, and I’ll be bound Cook Bronson did not, either. She told me she had no apples.”
“It smells musty,” Ned reported.
Musty?“Use a napkin to pick up the plate and bring it to where I can smell it,” Margaret insisted.
A moment later, a piece of pie, with a large chunk out of one end, was lowered in front of her. She gave Snowy another breath, then put her nose near the pie. One sniff confirmed her suspicion. “Hemlock,” she said.
After that, Lily took over, sending for the maids and questioning the one that Petunia identified. Margaret stopped listening. There was no antidote for hemlock, but if she could just keep pushing breath into his lungs, if his heart kept beating, if she could keep him alive until the paralysis wore off…
She was not going to consider the alternative. “Live, Hal. You promised to marry me. I need you. Don’t leave me.”
She continued breathing, continued muttering, continued checking his pulse. Around her, people came and went. She gathered they’d tracked the pie to a delivery that purported to come from the brothel—a small box with a label saying it was just for Henry Snowden.
They’d sent out searchers for the old woman who had made the delivery.
None of that mattered. What mattered was another breath, and then another, as the minutes crawled by and Snowy’s pulse slowed and weakened but never quite failed.
Someone must have sent for Lord Lechton, for an interminable eon later he was there, gently putting her to one side and telling her to rest as he took over. “You have done everything right, Lady Charmain. Now it will be down to how much of the poison he ingested, and how strong he is.”
She refused to leave Snowy’s side, holding his hand as Poppy fed her sips of tea and each of the other foster mothers in turn came to hold her other hand or squeeze her shoulder. She kept talking to him, calling him back to her, heedless of who was listening.
Then Lechton stopped his ministrations.
“No!” Margaret protested. “We can’t stop! Here. Move out of the way. I will do it.”
Lord Lechton put a hand out to stop her. “He is breathing on his own, my lady.”
He was. Light breaths, barely moving his chest, but she could feel the puff of warm air on her palm as she held it over his mouth.
