“Might have been. But I was told that him half-foxed was better than all those who care for the king. Oh, and it seems he knows of you.”
“I am sure I have never met him.”
“Well, that is what he said when I mentioned you were tending the woman.”
Dr. Chalmers and the duke walked over. Brentworth introduced him.
“I was just telling His Grace that I know Sir Cornelius Ingram, who told me about you. He speaks highly of your late father, and your own medical interests.” Dr. Chalmers’s smile, indulgent but hardly approving, implied what he thought about women in medicine. “I am relieved to know that if you were here, no harm was done. Now, Your Grace, if your man could bring in my case, I will see the patient.”
Davina walked beside him toward the house. “I allowed no bleeding. No surgeon.” She waited to hear how he reacted to that. If he thought her decision wrong, and wanted to bleed Louisa, he would be on his way back to Newcastle at once.
“She was fortunate you were here to stop it. Barbaric custom.”
Davina immediately had more confidence in Dr. Chalmers, half-foxed though he may be. “When we arrived at first I thought it might be cholera, but there had been no excessive purging. She had refused help and care, so she had not taken enough fluids. I have mainly just endeavored to have her drink, and wiped her body with water so it would cool a little.”
“What made you think of cholera?”
“Sunken eyes. Dry sweats. Very dry skin, wrinkled, on her hands.”
“Ah. You know it well, then.”
“I have had it.”
He turned and eyed her head. “But did not have someone as enlightened as yourself at your bedside, I see.”
She fingered her hair. “Nor would he listen to me when I told him it was pointless.”
Dr. Chalmers followed her into the house. “Well, if we shaved heads completely it might cool them down a little. But just cropping hair—it makes no sense. Now, where is the woman?”
Louisa’s husband had come in after Brentworth. “I’ll take you to her.”
Davina sorely wanted to go up those stairs with them. Instead, she watched the dark at the top of the stairs swallow both men.
Which left her alone with Brentworth. She turned to face him, and immediately memories of that kiss returned. It was there between them, like a veil that changed how she saw him. She wondered if he was going to apologize.
“It appears he approved of your care,” he said.
No apology. “It reassured me that he did.”
“Reassured your confidence in your care, or in him?”
She had to laugh. “In him. Louisa should get the best care available, for what it is worth.”
“That is not very encouraging.”
She sat down, finally. Her whole body groaned with relief. “We are all rather helpless with maladies like this. We don’t know what causes them and can do little else but pray and try not to make matters worse. We are still almost uncivilized when it comes to medicine.”
He smiled. “We, you keep saying. You think of yourself as a doctor.”
“I am painfully aware of my limitations in training and gender. Thewereferred to my father and me. I helped him when he went into the countryside to try to make a difference there, and I learned much in doing so, but I will never be allowed to learn all he did.”
He thought about that. “It seems a waste to me.”
“That is a remarkably open-minded thing to say. I think so too. How sad that we had to send a duke’s carriage to a city in order to find a physician for Louisa.” She looked around the sitting room. It was nicely appointed but not generously so. “Her husband does well enough, but I do not think he can afford Dr. Chalmers’s fee, especially because he came all this way.”
“I sent for Chalmers. I am responsible for his fee.”
Just then, the doctor in question came out of Louisa’s chamber and began down the stairs. He looked at Mr. Bowman, who followed him. “Is your well water good?”
