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

Chapter 3

She had smelled it once before, years ago, in a tent that smelled of sawdust and animal musk. Her father had been careless with a creature he had handled a thousand times before — a scorpion the size of a man’s hand, imported from some distant colony whose name she had never learned. The creature had struck him on the forearm, and he had spent the night drawing the venom out himself with a blade and a suction cup, teaching her as he worked because there had been no one else to teach.

“This is what it smells like,” he had said, his voice tight with pain, “when venom meets living flesh. You remember this smell, Ellie. You remember it, and you stay away from anything that carries it.”

She had remembered.

Elara sat back on her heels, the linen forgotten in her hands, and stared at the wound as though it might explain itself. It did not, of course. Wounds never did. But something in her, some old, careful, watchful part of herself that had learned very young to notice what others overlooked, would not let the thought go.

She told herself it meant nothing. That grief and memory played tricks on a person, especially at midnight, especially in a room thick with sickness. She told herself this for three more nights. And each night, the smell was there beneath the corruption, patient and unmistakable, waiting for her to stop pretending she hadn’t noticed it.

It was Julian Croft who found her hesitating outside the sick room door on the fourth morning. A basin balanced against her hip, her expression — she realized too late — not nearly careful enough.

“You look as though you’ve seen something troubling,” he said.

His voice was pleasant. It was always pleasant. Elara had noticed in the weeks he had lodged at Blackwood that his voice never seemed to match the stillness of his eyes, and something about the mismatch unsettled her in a way she could not have explained to anyone who asked.

“Is his grace worse?”

“No, sir. The same.”

She dropped her gaze, as was proper, and made to step past him. He did not move to let her pass. Not quite.

“You spend a great deal of time in that room.”

“I’m told to, sir.”

“Of course.” A pause, brief enough that she might have imagined its weight. “It must be difficult, watching a man suffer so day after day, and knowing there is nothing to be done for him.”

“It’s not my place to know anything, sir. Only to carry the basins.”

Something in his expression shifted then, so slight she could not have sworn to it afterward — a loosening at the corner of his mouth that might have been relief, or might have been nothing at all.

“Wise girl,” he said, and stepped aside to let her by.

She did not breathe easily again until she was three corridors away.

That night, alone in the narrow servants’ bed she shared with no one, Elara lay awake, turning the smell over in her mind the way her father used to turn a specimen jar in the lamplight, examining it from every angle before he would trust his own judgment. She thought of Julian Croft’s flat, watchful eyes. She thought of the thickened, darkened stitching she had noticed twice now beneath the dressing — stitching that wept a thin, faintly discolored fluid unlike anything she had seen in a wound before. She thought of twenty physicians, each cleverer and better educated than she would ever be permitted to become, all of them failing to see what her hands had been trained by accident and grief to recognize.

She thought: It is not my place.

And then she thought of the Duke’s voice, rough with fever, asking plainly whether he was in danger of his life, and of no one in that room giving him a plain answer in return.

By morning, she had decided — with the particular terror of a person about to do something entirely against her nature — that she would speak.