“You need to get dry,” Eloise said, pulling away from him. “And now I do, too.” She looked ruefully down at her dress, now soaked through the front from Phillip’s wet clothing. “You’ll end up in no better a state than Charles.”
“I’m fine,” Phillip said, brushing past her as he came to the little boy’s bedside. He touched his forehead, then shook his head and glanced back at his parents. “I can’t tell,” he said. “I’m too cold from the rain.”
“He’s feverish,” Benedict confirmed grimly.
“What have you done for him?” Phillip asked.
“Do you know something of medicine?” Sophie asked, her eyes filling with desperate hope.
“The doctor bled him,” Benedict answered. “It didn’t seem to help.”
“We’ve been giving him broth,” Sophie said, “and cooling him when he grows too hot.”
“And warming him when he grows too cold,” Eloise finished miserably.
“Nothing seems to work,” Sophie whispered. And then, in front of everyone, she simply crumpled. Collapsed against the side of the bed and sobbed.
“Sophie,” Benedict choked out. He dropped to his knees beside her and held her as she wept, and Phillip and Eloise both looked away as they realized that he was crying, too.
“Willow bark tea,” Phillip said to Eloise. “Has he had any?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“It’s something I learned at Cambridge. It used to be given for pain, before laudanum became so popular. One of my professors insisted that it also helped to reduce fever.”
“Did you give the tea to Marina?” Eloise asked.
Phillip looked at her in surprise, then remembered that she still thought Marina had died of lung fever, which, he supposed, was mostly true. “I tried,” he answered, “but I couldn’t get much down her throat. And besides, she was much sicker than Charles.” He swallowed, remembering. “In many ways.”
Eloise looked up into his face for a long moment, then turned briskly to Benedict and Sophie, who were quiet now, but still kneeling on the floor together, lost in their private moment.
Eloise, however, being Eloise, had little reverence for private moments at such a time, and so grabbed her brother’s shoulder and turned him around. “Do you have any willow bark tea?” she asked him.
Benedict just looked at her, blinking, and then finally said, “I don’t know.”
“Mrs. Crabtree might,” Sophie said, referring to one half of the old couple who had cared for My Cottage before Benedict had married, when it had been nothing more than an occasional place for him to lay his head. “She always has things like that. But she and Mr. Crabtree went to visit their daughter. They won’t be home for several days.”
“Can you get into their house?” Phillip asked. “I will recognize it if she has it. It won’t be a tea. Just the bark, which we’ll soak in hot water. It might help to bring down the fever.”
“Willow bark?” Sophie asked doubtfully. “You mean to cure my son with the bark of atree?”
“It certainly can’t hurt him now,” Benedict said gruffly, striding toward the door. “Come along, Crane. We have a key to their cottage. I will take you there myself.” But as he reached the doorway, he turned to Phillip and asked, “Do you know what you are about?”
Phillip answered the only way he knew how. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Benedict stared him in the face, and Phillip knew that the older man was taking his measure. It was one thing for Benedict to allow him to marry his sister. It was quite another to let him force strange potions down his son’s throat.
But Phillip understood. He had children, too.
“Very well,” Benedict said. “Let’s go.”
And as Phillip hurried out of the house, all he could do was pray that Benedict Bridgerton’s trust in him had not been misplaced.
In the end it was difficult to say whether it was the willow bark or Eloise’s whispered prayers or just dumb luck, but by the following morning Charles’s fever had broken, and although the boy was still weak and listless, he was indubitably on the mend. By noontime, it was clear that Eloise and Phillip were no longer needed and in fact were getting in the way, and so they climbed into their carriage and headed home, both eager to collapse into their large, sturdy bed and, for once, do nothing but sleep.
The first ten minutes of the ride home were spent in silence. Eloise, astonishingly, found herself too tired to speak. But even in her exhaustion, she was too restless, too tightly wound from the stress and worry of the previous night to sleep. And so she contented herself with staring out the window at the dampened countryside. It had stopped raining right about the time Charles’s fever broke, suggesting a divine intervention that might have pointed to Eloise’s prayers as the young boy’s savior, but as Eloise stole a glance at her husband, sitting beside her in the carriage with his eyes closed (although not, she was quite certain, asleep), she knew it was the willow bark.
She didn’t know how she knew, and she was quite cognizant of the fact that she could never prove it, but her nephew’s life had been saved by a cup of tea.
