She looked older than usual, and tired. “I’ll be back in a minute. Come fetch me if anything changes.”
I nodded, and Aunt Roz left the library and left me alone with Abigail and Bess. For a few seconds, I could hear the heels of her shoes clicking against the wood floors, and then that was gone, too.
A minute passed. Bess babbled and bounced on my hip. Abigail didn’t stir. Then there was the sound of a motorcar outside, and a blue blur shot past the windows. Crispin was back, and hopefully he had brought the doctor.
I heard the car doors slam outside, and then the boot room door opened, and rapid steps crossed the floor of the hallway. “Aunt Roslyn?”
“In here,” I called. “Library.”
The steps headed my way: Crispin’s, and a heavier and slightly slower pair that must belong to the doctor.
I turned towards the door in time to face them, and had the pleasure of seeing Crispin come to a stop in the doorway and rock back on his heels. For several seconds he just stared at me, eyes wide. By then, the doctor had caught up, and shoved him to the side so he could waddle in. “Out of my way, boy. Where is my patient?”
“Hello, Doctor White,” I said politely. “That’s her, on the sofa. She walked onto the lawn earlier, and collapsed. Francis carried her in here. She hasn’t woken up yet.”
Doctor White has been the local doctor for as long as I’ve lived at Beckwith Place. He saw me through the influenza that ravaged the world in the wake of the war—saw us all through it, and well enough that we all survived, too—and has seen me for every other ailment I’ve had in the past dozen years, so he’s practically family. Anyone who has listened to my lungs and examined my chest for rashes is close enough to be considered a relative, I think.
Even so, I didn’t expect the look that traveled from me to Bess and then to Crispin, before Doctor White said, “You two?”
Crispin opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked horrified.
“Hers,” I told the doctor, “actually. Nothing to do with me at all.”
Crispin opened his mouth and shut it again without saying anything. Doctor White grunted. He was peeling back Abigail’s eyelids the same way Francis had been doing earlier, peering intently at her pupils.
“Go fetch Aunt Roz,” I told Crispin. “She went back onto the terrasse, but she told me to fetch her if anything happened before she came back.”
He nodded and turned on his heel, after a last look at the baby. Over on the Chesterfield, Doctor White picked up Abigail’s wrist and checked her pulse before pulling down her lip and opening her mouth. Finally, he listened to her heart before sitting back. At no point did she show any sign of life other than that she kept breathing.
By then, Aunt Roz had come back inside. Without Crispin, so he must have got caught by Laetitia, or perhaps his father. Instead, it was Christopher who tagged along behind his mother. Like Crispin, he stopped in the doorway and looked at me, but instead of behaving as if he’d seen a ghost, a corner of his mouth turned up.
“What?” I wanted to know.
He smirked, and looked astonishingly like his cousin for a second. “I can see why Crispin looked the way he did when he reached the terrasse.”
“Doctor White asked whether there was something going on between us,” I told him. “I’m sure he was appalled and nauseated by the suggestion.”
Aunt Roz gave me a jaundiced look before turning to the doctor “What can we do for her, Gerald?”
“Nothing, Roz,” Doctor White said. “It looks like a mixture of perfectly normal things. Exhaustion, malnutrition, overexertion in the heat…”
Perfectly normal things, were they?
“She’ll be all right once she wakes up and we get some food and water into her. Although there’s no telling when that’ll happen. She could be asleep for a while. I can take her to the infirmary in the village if you’d prefer?”
“That might be best,” Aunt Roz allowed. “We have a full house here, Gerald. Constance is here, as you know, and so is Francis. Pippa and Christopher are visiting. So are Harold and Crispin. And so is the entire Marsden family. I have to put Pippa and Christopher in the same room as it is…”
Doctor White lifted a hand. “Say no more. We can keep her overnight in the infirmary.”
Aunt Roz’s face melted into appreciation. “Thank you, Gerald.”
“It’s what it’s there for, my dear.” He reached out and patted her shoulder. “Now, the child…”
They both looked at me, and at little Bess. And at Christopher, who was standing next to me. We probably looked like a little family, which was a strange thing to contemplate.
“Oh, we can handlethat.” Aunt Roz waved it off as if taking care of someone else’s baby was nothing. Perhaps it was, to someone who had brought up three of her own, plus a niece.
Or perhaps she realized, as I did, that if Bess was here, Abigail would have to come back too, even if Doctor White took her to the village now. Without that, she might vanish again, and then we’d never get the answers we wanted.
