Page 70 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“No,” Octavia agreed. “It is not.”

The market was full, it was a Thursday, and the good weather had brought everybody out. The square in front of the church was solid with stalls and country people from six villages round.

They bought ribbon, a quantity of pears that Diana had wanted with an urgency that alarmed her, and had eaten one of before they were paid for. Octavia haggled with a woman over blue thread with an efficiency that suggested a great deal of practice.

“You are enjoying this,” Diana observed.

“I have not been let out of that house in eleven days.”

Diana turned to the next stall and put her hand out for the linen and the whole square changed its noise.

It came from the top of the hill, and it came fast: the flat hard clatter of a horse at full gallop on cobbles. Behind it a man’s voice shouting something with no words in it, and then the scream of a woman by the churchyard wall.

The animal came round the corner of the inn with its head up and its eyes white. It had no rider on it at all, dragging a broken trace and half a shaft, and the shaft was slewing, bouncing behind it and driving it faster.

And there in the middle of the road stood a child. She could not have been three years old. She had a wooden top in one fist, and she had stopped where she turned toward the noise, and she was not moving at all.

Diana did not decide anything.

She heard Octavia behind her — “Diana—” and then her name again, torn out much louder, “Diana, no—” and she was already off the curb and running with her skirts in both hands. The horse was very close. She could hear the breath in it.

She got both hands under the child’s arms and swung her and she felt the small weight leave her fingers. She heard the child hit somebody and heard somebody catch her.

Then the shoulder of the horse struck Diana across the back. There was no pain in it at all, which she had not expected. There was only an enormous shove, as though the world had turned over on its side. The sky went past, the cobbles came up, and she landed on her hip and her elbow. The noise of the square went far away.

She was looking at the wheel of a cart. It was very close to her face and there was a nail in the rim of it with the head worn flat. Somebody was screaming.

Then there were hands on her, and a face over hers, and the face was Octavia’s. Her hair coming down, her mouth working, and she had Diana’s cheek in one hand and was patting it, hard, too hard.

“Diana. Diana. Open your eyes. Open your eyes and look at me⁠—”

I am looking at you, Diana thought. My eyes are open. Can you not see that they are open?

“—somebody fetch the surgeon, fetch him now, run — Diana. Diana, my dear, stay with me. Look at me. Do not close them. Do not you dare, do not you dare, stay with me⁠—”

The light thinned at the edges, and drew in, and went out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Diana opened her eyes to see that she was in her mother’s bedchamber. She knew the plaster rose above the bed before she knew anything else in the world; she had lain under it with a fever when she was nine.

The market.

It came back all at once, the clatter on the cobbles, the white eye, the child with the wooden top standing quite still in the road. Her hands went to her stomach and she heard her own voice come out of her, thin and cracked and utterly beyond her control.

“My baby—” She got a fistful of her nightgown. “My baby⁠—”

“The baby is fine.” Betsy was at her shoulder in an instant, both hands pressing her back down. “The baby is fine, Your Grace, do you hear me? Fine. Not a thing wrong. Lie still, lie still now.”

Diana lay still. She turned her head.

Arabella was sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up and her face swollen and scarlet. She had both fists jammed against her mouth to keep the noise in, and she was failing entirely.

“Diana—”

“Oh, my darling. Come here.”

She got one arm up, it hurt a great deal more than she expected. She pulled her sister down against her shoulder and held on.