The Physicians Gave Up on the Duke’s Only Son – The Herbwoman They Scorned Stayed the Whole Night…

Chapter 2

It was the fifth night after the twentieth physician’s departure, and the house had gone quiet around her. Only a skeleton watch kept in the sick room, in case the fever turned in the night. The attending physician had stepped out to consult his notes by better light, leaving Elara alone with the Duke for the length of a candle’s guttering.

Alexander was not fully lucid. He drifted, murmuring things she did not try to make sense of, his brow slick, his good hand gripping the sheet as though it were a rope keeping him from falling. Elara knelt beside the bed to change the dressing herself, as she had done a dozen times now under the physician’s brusque instruction. And as she peeled back the linen, the smell rose up to meet her.

It was not the smell of ordinary infection.