“You did not scorch it, I trust.”
“I did not.”
“Let me see it....” Lady Celia fingered the fine fabric. “Passably done.” She gestured toward Anne. “This is Miss Loveday, come to torture me.”
Rosa laughed, a sweet musical sound. “I very much doubt that, my lady.” She glanced from her mistress to Anne, eyes shining. “She does not look so fearsome to me.”
“Dr. Marsland asked me to step in as chamber nurse, until another might be found.”
“It is not your usual occupation?” Rosa asked.
“No. Although I worked alongside my father for years. He’s a surgeon-apothecary.”
“It is very kind of you to step in.”
Rosa smiled, and Anne saw with some relief that while her teeth were white and pretty, a few of them were not quite straight. The slight imperfection made the young woman more human and likable in Anne’s view. Perfection would have been difficult to countenance.
“Thank you,” Anne replied. “I like to be useful.”
“So do I.”
“Then why don’t you two stop babbling and do something useful already?”
“Yes, my lady,” the two replied in unison.
With another smile, Rosa turned to her. “Come, Miss Loveday, I shall show you the dressing room, should you need anything in there, and where the water closet is. And perhaps the kitchen too?”
“Thank you.”
“We shall be back soon, my lady.”
The woman harrumphed. “Oh, don’t mind me.”
Rosa led her into the adjoining dressing room. “Here is where I spend much of my time, sewing and caring for Lady Celia’s clothes.”
The room was crowded with deep shelves for bandboxes, a clothes press with built-in gown drawers, and a dressing table. There was also a chair, sofa, washstand, hip bath, and tall mirror. And on the far side, a door stood open to a small closet-like room where the lady’s maid slept on a narrow cot.
Rosa lifted the lid of the hidden commode chair, explaining, “Lady Celia uses this. When she is feeling weak or wobbly, I take her arm to help her over. She insists the exercise does her good and wants to avoid the indignity of a bedpan for as long as possible.”
“I understand and will help her as well.”
Rosa opened the dressing room’s outer door and guided Anne along the side passage to the water closet. She then ledthe way to the main floor and down a second flight of stairs to the kitchen. There she pointed out a pass-through window.
“Lady Celia will be wanting her luncheon soon, and here is where you shall retrieve her trays.”
Rosa introduced Anne to the cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Pratt, as “Miss Loveday, Lady Celia’s new nurse.”
Anne smiled awkwardly in reply. She was a long way from being accustomed to the title or to finding herself in that role—a role she had little wish to take on after the death of her most beloved patient of all. A death she might have prevented.
5
That evening, after administering the nighttime medicines and making sure her patient needed nothing else, Anne sat down at the desk—with Lady Celia’s permission—to write two letters.
Anne wrote first to her father, as Miss Lotty had suggested, to let him know she would be serving as sickroom nurse to Lady Celia Fitzjohn for a few weeks. She asked him to write back with any advice for caring for a patient suffering from dropsy of the chest.
As Anne folded the letter, she thought of Nancy and once again regretted their less-than-amicable parting.
Then she took a deep breath and wrote to her sister.
