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

Chapter 4

She chose the household physician first, Dr. Warren, on the grounds that he at least seemed to want an answer badly enough to be humbled in pursuit of one. And the household steward, Mr. Pemberton, a broad, graying man who had run Blackwood’s staff for twenty years and whom Elara trusted cautiously not to have her dismissed on the spot for insolence.

She found them together in the small study off the sick room. Dr. Warren bent over his notes with the particular fury of a man rereading work that had failed him. Pemberton stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back.

“Begging your pardon,” Elara said, and her voice came out smaller than she had intended.

Both men turned. Dr. Warren’s expression settled immediately into irritation. Pemberton’s, more usefully, into simple surprise.

“This isn’t the time, girl,” Dr. Warren said. “Fetch whatever’s needed and go.”

“It’s about the wound, sir.” She made herself keep speaking, though every instinct she owned told her to curtsy and withdraw. “I don’t think it’s an ordinary infection. I don’t think the stitching’s ordinary either.”

Dr. Warren’s irritation sharpened into something closer to contempt. “And what precisely would a chambermaid know of surgical stitching?”

“Let her speak, Warren.”

Pemberton had not moved from the window, but his voice carried an authority that stilled the room. He had known Elara for four years. He had never once caught her in a lie, nor in idleness.

“Go on, Elara.”

She swallowed. “The thread’s thicker than it ought to be, and darker. I’ve watched you dress the wound a dozen times now, sir, and I’ve seen ordinary stitching before when the tenants cut themselves at harvest. This isn’t that. It weeps something that isn’t blood, and isn’t ordinary matter either. And there’s a smell beneath the sickness. A sharp smell. Bitter.”

She hesitated, and then — because there was no point in half a confession — went on.

“My father worked a traveling menagerie, sir. Handled the venomous creatures — serpents, scorpions — for near fifteen years. I helped him from the time I could walk steady. I know that smell. I’ve smelled it on his own arm once, when a creature struck him and he had to draw the venom out himself before it took hold. It’s what I smell now. On his grace’s shoulder. I’d stake anything I have that it isn’t fever alone troubling him. It’s whatever’s in that thread.”

The silence that followed was long enough that Elara’s courage began quietly to fail her.

“That is a serious claim,” Dr. Warren said at last, his voice gone careful in a way it had not been a moment before. “You are suggesting the wound was deliberately — ”

“I’m not suggesting anything about who, sir. Only what. I don’t know who stitched him first, or why the thread might have been treated so. I only know what my nose tells me. And my nose has never lied to me about venom before.”

Pemberton had gone very still. “The first physician to attend his grace after the ambush,” he said slowly, “was a Dr. Mercer. Sent for from the village, as he was nearest. He left Blackwood the morning after, and has not been sent for since, on account of Dr. Warren’s arrival.”

Nobody said anything further for a long moment. Dr. Warren’s jaw had tightened. Whatever pride had bristled in him a minute earlier was giving way visibly to something closer to unease.

“I could be wrong,” Elara said into the silence, because it seemed suddenly that she ought to say something to soften what she had done. “I’m no physician. I have no learning at all beyond what my father taught me by a campfire. But I thought — I thought someone ought to know before it’s too late to matter.”

“You did right to speak,” Pemberton said, though his eyes were troubled. “Go back to your work, Elara. Say nothing of this to anyone else in the house. Do you understand me? Nothing.”

She understood him very well. She curtsied and left, and did not see the look that passed between the two men once the door had shut behind her — a look that carried, in equal measure, alarm and the particular dread of men who suspect they have just been handed a truth too dangerous to hold.