Page 10 of Devil at the Gates
“Rest easy, Maisie. I have need of your assistance. This way.” He led her into the bedchamber and pointed at Harriet. “This is my guest, Miss Russell. We need to get her out of her wet clothes. The doctor has been sent for, but until he arrives, we need her dry and warm. Do we have any of my late wife’s nightgowns?”
“Aye, we do, Your Grace.”
“Good. Fetch one at once.”
Maisie bustled off to hunt down a nightgown, while Redmond carefully began to undress Harriet, starting with her boots. Her feet were small, dainty, and as he unlaced the boots he marveled at her form. She was slender, as he had noticed, but she wasn’t without curves. A pretty form, even when she wasn’t threatening to cut his throat. Redmond couldn’t resist a smile as he set her boots down and began to roll down her stockings. He was glad she was not awake and in a position to claw his eyes out. He draped the stockings over the nearest chair by the fire to dry them out.
Maisie returned, and between them they were able to remove the simple muslin gown, and then he turned his back as Maisie removed the stays as she finished undressing Harriet and helping her into the diaphanous nightgown.
“She’s all warm and dry now,” Maisie announced with satisfaction, and Redmond turned around to see her.
He expected to feel unsettled by seeing another woman wearing a nightgown he had bought for Millicent, but in truth he felt…nothing. At least nothing that turned his heart to stone. Rather, he was strangely content. Yes, that was the word. In the last seven years since Millicent had passed, he’d felt discontented. The empty castle, the sense of something left undone, or perhaps left behind, constantly nagging at the back of his mind. But as he looked at the little hellion in his bed, he felt strangely at ease.
“May I do anything else, Your Grace?”
“No, not tonight. Thank you, Maisie.” He waited for the maid to leave before he pulled back the covers of his bed, and then with a tenderness that surprised even himself, he tucked Harriet beneath the covers and then sat down by the fire to wait for the doctor.
It was nearly an hour before there was a knock at his door. Grindle had brought the doctor to him.
“Your Grace, this is Dr. Axel.”
The doctor was a young man with a great intelligence in his eyes that came with being intimately familiar with illness and death. “Your Grace.”
“Thank you for coming, Doctor. As I’m sure Mr. Grindle informed you, we are taking in a pair of travelers from the storm.”
“Yes, I’ve just seen to the driver of the coach. It was a clean break, and his leg was easy to set.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
The doctor’s eyes strayed to the bed and his brows rose, but he made no comment other than “Now, what ails the young lady?”
“I’m not entirely sure. She’s bleeding a bit from a small wound on her head, and she’s favoring her right shoulder. I gave her laudanum to relax her. She’s unconscious at the moment.”
Dr. Axel set his black leather satchel on the foot of the bed and pulled back the covers. He pressed his head to Harriet’s chest and closed his eyes.
“Heartbeat is steady,” he murmured to himself. Then he looked at Redmond and Grindle. “I need to examine her shoulder. Her gown must be pulled down a little.”
Redmond joined the doctor and unfastened the silk ribbons at the throat of the gown, his hands trembling. Then he stepped back and looked to the doctor rather than Harriet as the doctor bared her right shoulder.
“Ah… ’Tis dislocated. But I can reset it.” He lifted Harriet’s arm in a series of slow motions and then swiftly popped it back into place. The sound made Redmond’s stomach lurch. He was now thankful for having drugged the poor woman. Then Dr. Axel fixed her nightgown and examined her forehead, where he applied salve to a cut.
“She should have this.” He passed Redmond a small blue glass jar. “At least once a day on the cut. The shoulder will need looking after. Should be tender. Use more laudanum if she continues to have pain, but small doses and only when absolutely necessary. No need to create a habit with it.”
“Understood.” Redmond accepted the salve and took an extra bottle of laudanum when the doctor offered it to him.
“If she or the driver should worsen, don’t hesitate to summon me.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Grindle will see you out.”
Redmond turned his focus back on Harriet once he was alone with her. She stirred briefly and murmured broken fragments of sentences that tore at his heart. What had she suffered that had left her all alone and frightened of a man’s touch? A woman her age who was unmarried shouldn’t have been without a chaperone. Something terrible had happened to her, and he would find out what it was.
“Who are you, Harriet? What frightens you?” He reached out to touch her face and paused. After a moment of indecision, he brushed his knuckles over her pale cheek, then settled in his chair by the fire to wait out the long night with only the shadows for company.
“Harriet…” A woman’s voice pulled at Harriet in the quiet darkness of deep sleep, drawing her into a waking dream. Harriet stirred in the large bed, puzzled by the strangeness of it. It was not her bed, not the one she’d slept in at Thursley Manor for the last six years. That bed had been a small piece of furniture with sensible linens and a pale-blue faded coverlet. This was a tall four-poster bed with dark wood and red damask curtains. It was a bed of beauty, of seduction, even. How had she come to be here?
Firelight from a hearth across the room cast shadows on the bedchamber, illuminating the figure lying back in one of the chairs. The man was asleep, his long, muscular legs stretched out and one arm limp over the armrest.
“Harriet…,” the feminine voice called again, and the crackling of the fire seem to slow down. A sliver of moonlight detached itself from the thick milky beams pouring in from the windows.
