Page 86 of Ne'er Duke Well
“Selina,” Thomasin said, and the tone of her voice sent ice crawling down the back of Selina’s neck. So calm. So perfectly even. “Freddie has taken ill. I’ve sent a footman around for the carriage.”
Selina dropped to her knees beside the older woman. “Taken ill? Why—he seemed—”
She thought of Freddie—his cheeks flushed pink, his hand trembling as he held the apple. His face still burned with hectic color as he lay in Thomasin’s lap, his eyes barely open.
“I’m all right,” he said, his voice thready.
Selina brushed a hand over his hair, and she felt his fever—sohot—straight through her gloves.
“What do we do?” she asked Thomasin. Her own voice was somehow unaffected as well, though she felt dizzy with sudden fright.
“Take him home,” said Thomasin. “Put him to bed. Cool cloths for his forehead. I always liked to use lavender essence when you and Will were small.”
The crisp, calm instructions steadied her, and she rose, turning to Peter. “Shall we go to the—”
Her words died in her throat.
Peter’s face was stricken. His brown eyes were unfocused, almost dazed, and his skin had taken on a strange, unhealthy pallor. He lookedthroughher, through Freddie, into some distant place she could not follow.
“Are you well?” she demanded. “Peter?”
“He was warm.” He sounded puzzled. “I thought he felt warm. When I helped him feed the apple to the pony. I thought… his coat. I thought he might need new clothes.”
Selina licked her lips, her mouth dry, her throat tight. “All right. Can you go ’round and wait for the carriage? I’ll get Lu.”
“Lu,” he breathed. He looked at Selina, abruptly intent. “Don’t frighten her. I don’t—want her to be frightened. Tell her… tell her everything will be well.”
“Everythingwillbe well.” She said it as much for herself as for him. “In a day or two. Children take ill often.” Nicholas and Daphne’s boys certainly did—earaches and coughs and small head colds.
“Yes,” said Peter bleakly. “They do.”
Chapter 22
Lyd—can you find Gabe and send him here? Right away, if you can. I don’t like to write it but—I’m frightened.
—from Selina to Lydia, sent with a footman to the Hope-Wallace residence
Freddie was still sick the next day.
They’d brought the children home, and Peter had stood, dazed and helpless, as Selina tucked Freddie into the bed they’d acquired from Barrett’s. She’d produced a folded linen and a crystal cup full of water and violets.
“When we were children, it was lavender,” she’d told Lu with sturdy cheer. “But I always thought lavender a most unpleasantly potent scent.”
She’d dipped the linen and then laid it against Freddie’s brow. She’d had tea sent to the sickroom, and then—when Freddie began to toss and turn uneasily—she’d ushered Lu out the door.
When she came back, she’d thrown open the windows andtold Peter that Lu was to be sent to Rowland House, for fear of contagion.
But really, Peter thought, she didn’t want Lu to see her brother like this. Little, in the big rosewood bed. Sweaty and miserable as he twisted in the white bedsheets. Peter thought perhaps she didn’t want Lu to feel as helpless as he felt, sitting pointlessly beside the bed and watching his brother cough and cough and cough.
It had been a long night in the sickroom. Selina had tried to persuade him to come to bed—“Emmie will watch him, or Humphrey”—but he couldn’t make himself leave. He didn’t trust his own legs.
And when the sun cracked the horizon, nothing had changed. When the shadows lengthened with the afternoon, Freddie had taken two sips of beef tea, Selina had gone through an ewer of cool water and half a dozen linens, and the room, despite the open window, smelled sour with sickness. Peter remembered that smell.
“All right,” said Selina. “I don’t like this. I’d like to call a physician, if you don’t mind.” She laid a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Do you mind?”
He should have done that. He should have managed it himself—the linens, the water, the physician. He should have realized Freddie was ill and kept him home. He had known he would fail them, in some critical moment, when it mattered the most. He had known he would not be enough.
“Yes,” he said. “Call the physician.”
