“Of course you are.” He leaned forward, this time his kiss lingering on her forehead, leaving a circle of warmth pressed into her cold flesh. “But you should have broth first. You can doze until I come back with it.”
She sank deeper into her pillow after they left, relieved to be free of questions and words. She needed to piece together the tattered fragments of the last days.
“What day is it?”
“Sunday,” Aunt Wilcox answered more gently. “The twenty-third. You didn’t miss Yuletide.”
She’d arrived Friday afternoon. Her brow contracted with bleak memories of the first night: struggling to nurse Aunt and Miss Pritchard, finally collapsing on the floor when the cramps and evacuations overtook her.
“Is Miss Pritchard—”
“Daniel got here just in time,” Aunt interrupted. “You were far gone.”
Nora recalled the ice-coated world into which she’d sent her mother-in-law to fetch him. “Sarah saved us.”
“I suppose there’s praise enough to go ’round.” Aunt sniffed. “Daniel’s a fine doctor.” She paused, her jaw clenched. “But you seem to know a few things even he did not.” It was a difficult concession. Aunt’s lips barely allowed the words passage.
Torrance’s treatment. The infusions of Latta’s solution.
“I was lucky,” Nora admitted. “Experiments fail all the time. But the article sounded plausible when I read it.”
Aunt grimaced, visibly galled to be part of any medical experiment deemed onlyplausible. “Be that as it may, I’ve had time to think while you slept. Daniel says your midwives are running the hospital in your absence.” Aunt trailed her neat hands over her bedding. “I may have been hasty in my opinions.”
Nora hesitated, but if she was ever going to speak her mind, surely there was no better time than now. “They won’t be allowed to help much longer. Not if the colleges ban them.”
Aunt waited so long to reply that Nora feared the conversation was spent. Then: “Agnes didn’t live.”
The words slammed into Nora’s aching head. “Miss Pritchard?”
Aunt nodded slowly, turning away and fixing her gaze on the ash-stubbled coals in the hearth. “Agnes was my nursery maid, barely older than I was. She came with me when I married Colin. I only called herPritchardwhen others were with us. She was always Agnes to me.”
Guilt seared up Nora’s chest like heartburn. She’d never given Pritchard the transfusion, thinking the uncomplaining woman was doing well enough to avoid the risk. And then,when Agnes must have been worsening, she’d been too ill to reach her.
“We decorated this nursery together. Agnes had a knack for it. But the children never came. And six years after we married, Colin drowned.”
Nora froze. The formidable woman she’d feared for months was a grieving widow, convalescing in a gaily decorated graveyard of shattered dreams. She’d known the same heartache as Julia.
“I didn’t know,” Nora whispered.
“That was long ago,” Aunt replied gruffly, inhaling a fresh breath of courage. “But I’m quite broken up about Agnes.” Aunt’s cheeks burned red with determination as she fought back the emotion behind her stiff words.
“I wish I could have helped her,” Nora admitted. “I should have done—”
“You were dying yourself. Like a good number of doctors have. But you were right. If the midwives were trained to nurse, and one had been with Agnes…”
A careful attendant could have made the difference. But…“Dr. Adams won’t allow it if he has his way. He’s gathered hundreds of signatures. He’s already petitioned MPs.”
“Leave Dr. Adams to me.” Aunt spoke with the force of a lineman hammering steel spikes. “That man left me to die. I believe he owes me a favor.”
***
“Broth,” Daniel announced, returning with a tray, his mother close behind.
“Thank the Lord,” Sarah said as she looked between Nora and Aunt Wilcox.
Her mother-in-law had never before looked relieved or happy to see her. Nor had she ever imagined Aunt allied with her cause. Nora wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t still delirious.
“I’ll help Fenella, and you feed Nora,” Daniel’s mother ordered him, her usual authority restored with her clean clothes and combed hair. “I’ve found a plain cook willing to start tomorrow,” she informed Aunt. “And your father is bringing Joan now that the danger is past.”
