“Why did you send Amelia away?” Christine asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I thought you weren’t getting along with her,” he said. He switched to her other leg, gently bending the knee.
“I like her better now,” Christine said. “She gave me a desk and some paper and pens for my writing.”
“Your writing?” He’d had no idea that she enjoyed writing stories.
Christine nodded. “I never told her, but she guessed.”
His daughter had never told him, either, David realized. “Amelia does seem to know many things.”
“I have my own space in the attic now, and the window looks out over the grounds. There’s even a widow’s walk on the roof.” There was a yearning in her voice, as if she’d guessed that she might never go up there again.
“It sounds nice.” He switched to her hand, bending the wrist back and forth. “Can you bend your elbow?”
Christine tried, but she only managed to lift her arm a little. “Not really.”
He continued to work with her other wrist and fingers, and she fell silent. He wanted to converse with her, to say something that would lift her spirits and make her feel better. Inside, all he could feel was rage that something like this could happen to a child. He wanted to lash out at the illness that was stealing her away from him.Please let there be a medicine that will cure her.
But he was afraid to let himself hope.
When Dr. Fraser returned, his wife and daughter were with him. David’s first reaction was to send them away, but he saw that Christine was interested in the three-year-old girl who beamed at her. The child was dressed in pink, with matching ribbons in her plaits, and she held a tiny reticule.
“I brought Grace for a moment,” Lady Falsham explained. “She wanted to cheer up your daughter.”
David wasn’t certain it would work, but he supposed there was no harm in it. “For a little while.”
“Do you want to play?” the girl asked, climbing up on the bed beside Christine. “I could play with you.”
“I can’t play very well,” Christine apologized. “I’m sick, and my legs won’t move.”
“You don’t have to move.” The little girl held up her reticule. “I’m going to brush your hair.”
The wry smile on his daughter’s face suggested that she didn’t think Grace could do very much, but she allowed it.
In that moment, while the child was happily chattering nonsense to Christine, David froze. Seeing the two of them together was like the memory of when Christine had climbed to her mother’s bedside on the day Katherine had died.
Suddenly, he couldn’t breathe. “Forgive me,” David said, pushing his way out of the sickroom. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He needed air, to escape the stifling atmosphere of hopelessness. Outside, the weather had turned cloudy, and he hardly cared. Ignoring the servants, he pushed his way out the front door, heedless of the impending storm.
“David!” He heard Amelia calling out to him, but he didn’t turn to face her. Sympathy wasn’t what he needed right now. He needed to escape all of it, to be alone where he could regain the rigid control over his emotions.
He kept his pace swift, striding down the gravel driveway and toward the open moors. The wind slashed at his face, but he didn’t care. He welcomed the physical punishment, reveling in the prelude to a rainstorm.
Amelia would follow him, he suspected. But when he glanced behind him, he saw that she’d stopped at the front door. Good. The reckless anger coursed inside him, and he would offend anyone who tried to talk with him now.
The rain began to spatter against him, and he kept walking, letting it soak through his clothing. He didn’t care about it at all. Right now, he wished he’d never left Castledon. If another doctor had seen Christine sooner, she might not be suffering this badly.
It was irrational to blame Amelia, for she’d sent for two doctors. But he couldn’t stop his wayward mind from wondering if she’d done everything possible to help Christine.
Ahead, he spied an abandoned cottage that had once belonged to his gamekeeper. It would offer solitude and a brief shelter from the storm. He went inside, shivering from the cold. A sensible man would start a fire in the hearth, but instead he sat down on a wooden stool and stared at the chimney stones.
He didn’t want to go through this again. It had taken years to get over the pain of losing Katherine, and Amelia ought to have a better husband than him. He never should have married her.
Upon a low wooden shelf, he spied a chipped plate. Without thinking, he picked it up, his thumb grazing the edge. Then he threw it against the hearth, watching it shatter like the pieces of his life.
And with that, his thread of sanity broke.
