“Yes,” she said, but his mind was not focused enough to understand to what she was agreeing.
The pain had localized and became a dull pulsing in his shoulder. His tongue felt thick. His breathing was deepening. There was a new warmth along his left side and someone’s small hand was in his.
Lily awoke when the predawn light was graying the room—an unfamiliar room. She felt as if a fire was burning close to her right side. Someone was talking.
Neville was apologizing to Lauren. Then he was telling Sergeant Doyle in marvelously profane language what a damned foolish thing he had done by throwing his body in the path of a bullet intended for someone else. Then he was instructing a whole company of men to stay where they were in the pass, to ignore the murderous French fire from the hills to either side—to search for the marriage papers until they had found them. Then he was telling someone that he was by thunder going to get Lily alone at Vauxhall and just let Elizabeth try to stop him.
He was in a raging fever, with the accompanying delirium.
Lily had opened his nightshirt down the front and was bathing him with cool water when Elizabeth arrived. But apart from raising her eyebrows as she observed Lily clad only in her shift and then glancing at the left side of the bed, which had obviously been slept in, she made no comment. She quietly set about sharing the nursing. She had, she told Lily, made arrangements to cancel all lessons until further notice.
Lily steadfastly refused to leave the room until late in the afternoon. She knew from experience that many more men died from the fever that succeeded surgery than ever died from the wounds themselves. A bullet in the shoulder ought not to be a mortal wound, but the fever might well kill. She would not leave him. She would nurse him back to health or she would be by his side when he died.
But Elizabeth had been right—it was hard to nurse a man when one had an emotional involvement with him. When one loved him so deeply that one knew his death would leave a yawning emptiness in one’s own life that could never again be filled. When one knew that he had taken the bullet intended for her. And when one did not understand why it had happened.
She had never told him that she loved him—or not since her wedding night. Now it might be too late. She could tell him so a dozen times during the course of the day—and she did so—but he could not understand.
She had never told him that to her dying day she would consider him to be her husband no matter what the church and the state had to say to the contrary—that she had never wavered in her fidelity to their marriage.
He caught her wrist in a hot, bruising grip late in the morning. “I should have kept her with me at the head of the line, should I not?” he asked her, his eyes bright with fever. “I should not have entrusted her safety to other men at the center. I should never have done that. I should have died protecting her.”
“You did your very best, Neville,” she told him, leaning close to him. “That is all anyone can ever do.”
“I might have saved her,” he said, “from— Is it true that it is a fate worse than death, do you suppose? I wish I could have died to save her from that.”
“Nothing is worse than death,” she said. “There is always hope this side of the grave. As long as I was alive, I could dream of coming back to you. I loved you. I have always loved you.”
“You must not say that, Lauren,” he said. “Please do not say that, dear.”
Elizabeth finally persuaded her late in the afternoon to return to her own room—with the promise that she would not argue about Lily’s keeping the night watch again. Dolly was waiting for Lily, she said, and was threatening to come and drag her mistress away by force. There was a hot bath awaiting her and a bed.
“I will have you woken if there is any change,” she promised. “He is tough, Lily. He will come through this.”
Lily would have known very well that Elizabeth spoke the truth if he had been anyone but Neville. But she was too desperate for him to live to believe that he would.
She surprised herself by sleeping deeply and dreamlessly for four hours. When she rang for Dolly, her maid informed her that his grace, the Duke of Portfrey, begged a few minutes of her time in the drawing room before she returned to the sickroom.
Lily had very firmly pushed from her mind all thoughts of what had happened at Vauxhall. It was easier said than done, of course, but she had refused to dwell upon the terrifying mystery. She could not afford to do so now. She needed all her emotional strength for Neville. But the terror came rushing back when she learned that the duke was belowstairs—and with it the memory that he had suddenly appeared at Vauxhall between the time she and the others had left for their walk and the time of their return.And he had been wearing a long black opera cloak.
She went down to the drawing room anyway.
He came hurrying across the room toward her, both his hands outstretched. “Lily, my dear,” he said. His handsome face was all frowning concern.
Lily leaned back against the door and clutched the doorknob with both hands behind her.
He dropped his hands and stopped a few feet away from her. “We were unable to catch him,” he said. “I am so sorry. Did you see him, Lily? Did you have a good look at him? Can you remember anything in addition to the dark cloak and the pistol?”
“Was it you?” She was whispering.
He stared at her in seeming incomprehension. “What?” he said.
“Was it you who shot Neville?” She was speaking aloud now.
He said nothing for what seemed a long while. “Why would you think it was me?” he asked her.
“It was you on the rhodondendron walk,” she said. “Was it you in the woods? And you who pushed the stone over the cliff and tried to kill me on the rocks below? Was it you who tried to run me down with your horse in Hyde Park? I know I was the target at Vauxhall, not Neville. Was it you?” Curiously she felt very calm. His face, she noticed, was drained of all color.
“Someone tried to kill you atNewbury?” he asked her. “And in Hyde Park?”
