Page 25 of Lady in Ruby
Chapter 10
Caroline came to and blinked as voices echoed around her. She was still cold—so, so cold—but she was no longer out of doors. However, she seemed to be moving? Her mother’s voice instructed servants to heat water and bring it up. Snowdon was saying something in a low tone, and her father sounded frantic.
The yowls of Mittens echoed down the hall, the cat made alert and anxious by the scene.
“Mama, I need a bath,” Caroline said, half dreaming.
“Yes, my darling,” her mother’s voice came in comfortably close, warm and protective. “You’ll be in a warm bath very soon. A lukewarm bath first though. We can’t shock you. Right in here, thank you, my lord.”
Snowdon didn’t reply, but he lowered Caroline in her sodden gown onto the bed. He carried me to my room, she thought hazily. He got me all the way through the woods. And after I accused him of being a thief.
Snowdon immediately left, and not a moment too soon. Her mother and the maids stripped her of her gown. Red dye dripped from the half-frozen folds of fabric. Her thin shift clung to her limbs, somehow making her even colder.
“Cut it away,” her mother ordered Maggie. “She needs to be put in the bath now.”
Caroline was led, stumbling, to the bathtub. She put one foot in but cried out, “It’s burning!”
“It’s lukewarm, my love. You’re so cold that we dare not put you in a hot bath. Now get in!”
She endured the supposedly lukewarm bath for a while, her body still convulsing, making the water ripple like a miniature ocean. The numbness of her limbs gave way to a burning sensation. She reached up to touch her neck. Why did it feel especially tender there?
The maids started dumping hot water into the bath, filling it to the brim. Mittens paced around the tub, mewing at her, but unwilling to brave the water to explore further.
“I’ll be out soon,” she told the cat. “I don’t want to be wet any more than you do.”
Caroline sat in the steaming bath for half an hour, and then she was toweled off, swaddled into a woolen nightshift, and tucked into bed, where hot stones wrapped in cloth had already been placed near her feet. Mittens leapt on the bed and stretched across her over the puffy coverlet.
And yet, she still shivered. Somehow the ice had got into her core. And she wasn’t feeling sharp mentally either. All she wanted was to sleep.
Her father came in so quietly, Caroline hardly noticed. “How is she?” he asked his wife.
“She’s not improving!” her mother said in a tone Caroline wasn’t meant to hear. “It’s like she’s been frozen all the way through. The bath and the blankets and the hot stones are only getting to the surface.”
This was how those soldiers in the winter campaign died, she thought. The cold outside seeped into their bodies and never let go. There was only one way out of this, unless…
“Papa,” Caroline gasped through chattering teeth. “The new formula. Use it. On me.”
Her father looked stricken. “My daughter! I can’t risk it, not with the formula still untested!”
“Papa, please!”
He groaned and nodded. “Give me one moment.”
Her father returned a little later with a small bottle. He measured out a few drops of bright ruby liquid into a silver spoon by Caroline’s bedside. He leaned over her, bringing the spoon to her mouth. Then he hesitated. “I can’t. What if it harms you?”
“You made it to save people,” she got out. “Let me be the first.”
He nodded once and gave her the dose. A myriad of tastes hit her tongue: cassia, pepper, a deep bitter note, and all of it riding upon the taste of alcohol so strong as to practically evaporate on her tongue. She nearly choked in surprise at the flavors and the effect of imbibing the concoction.
“How do you feel?” her father asked anxiously.
“Like a rag on wash day,” she gasped. “I could breathe fire after drinking that.”
“Well, such an effect would mean your belly’s warm,” he said wryly. “Relax, child. And tell me the moment you feel anything, good or bad.”
She lay back. Warmth was spreading out from her stomach, waves of it rippling over taut and tired muscles clenched too long as her body attempted to defend itself against an enemy it could not fight. Now she didn’t have to fight—the cold retreated under the influence of the formula, releasing Caroline from its grip. She gave a huge sigh, and her mother heard it first, somehow recognizing that it meant the worst of the danger was over.
“I’m warming up,” she told her parents. “At last.”
