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

Chapter 5

The fever broke Alexander’s reason entirely on the seventh night after Elara’s confession. And it was in that broken state, oddly, that he proved sharper than he had been in a fortnight of clear-headed misery.

He had heard from Dr. Warren, haltingly, and from Pemberton, more plainly, what the maid had said. He had dismissed it in his fever as the desperate grasping of men who had run out of proper remedies and were reaching for a servant’s superstition instead. But by the seventh night, with his skin gone the color of old parchment and his good hand trembling where it lay against the counterpane, he had run out of patience for proper remedies himself.

“Bring the girl,” he said when Dr. Warren came to check the dressing and found him awake, eyes overbright, focus flickering but present. “The one who spoke to Pemberton.”

“Your grace, I hardly think — ”

“I did not ask what you thought, Warren. I have had twenty men think at me, and I am no better for their thinking. Bring the girl.”

Elara was fetched from the scullery at an hour when no maid was ever fetched for anything. Her hands still damp from the washing, her heart beating somewhere near her throat, she was led up the back stair and into the sick room she had spent so many weeks trying to disappear inside of.

Julian Croft was there, roused from his own chamber by the commotion, standing near the door with his arms folded and his expression — for once — not quite so carefully composed.

“You’re the one who spoke of the thread,” Alexander said when she stood before him. And though his voice was thin with fever, it carried the unmistakable weight of a man who had commanded men into battle and expected to be obeyed. “Tell me what you told Pemberton. All of it. Do not soften it for my benefit.”

She told him. The bitterness beneath the sickness. The thickened, darkened stitching. Her father. The menagerie. The creature that had struck him once and taught them both, in the worst possible way, what venom smelled like against living skin.

When she finished, Alexander was quiet for a long moment, his gaze fixed somewhere past her shoulder, as though working through a calculation only he could see the terms of.

“Warren,” he said finally. “Fetch the surgical shears.”

“Your grace — I must protest most strongly — ”

“You have had eight days to protest something useful, Warren, and offered me nothing but Latin and apology. The girl has offered me an answer. Fetch the shears and give them to her.”

“To the maid.”

Dr. Warren’s voice cracked upward in disbelief. Even Julian Croft had straightened from his stillness by the door, his composure slipping just enough to show something underneath it — though whether it was alarm at the suggestion, or alarm at something else entirely, Elara could not have said.

“She is the only person in this house who has correctly named what ails me,” Alexander said. “I would rather trust a maid’s steady hand than a physician’s uncertain one. Give her the shears.”

Elara’s own hands, when the cold steel was finally pressed into them, were not steady at all. Not at first. She had drawn splinters and lanced a boil or two among the tenants’ children, nothing more. And the weight of what she was being asked to do settled over her like a physical thing as she knelt beside the bed of a man who could, with one more word, have her dismissed — or worse — should her judgment prove wrong.

“If I’m mistaken,” she said quietly, not looking up from the wound, “matters may grow far worse for you, your grace. I want you to understand that plainly before I cut anything.”

“I understand it,” Alexander said. His good hand found the sheet and gripped it. “I am suffering for it regardless, girl. Cut.”

She cut.

The first stitch came away dark and stiff between the shears, unlike any thread she had ever drawn from a wound. And the smell that rose with it — sharp, bitter, unmistakable, now that she was close enough to be certain — confirmed everything she had feared, and hoped, in equal measure.

Behind her, she heard Dr. Warren’s breath catch. She did not look round.

She worked methodically, the way her father had taught her to work around anything venomous — without haste, without hesitation — drawing each treated stitch free and laying it upon a clean cloth that Pemberton had thought, with unexpected foresight, to bring. Alexander did not cry out, though she knew from the white line of his jaw and the tension in his good hand that the discomfort was considerable. He watched her instead — watched her hands, her face, the careful economy of her movements — with the same weary, assessing focus he had turned on every physician who had failed him.

Except that now, she thought, something in the watching had changed. It was no longer the look of a man waiting to be disappointed.

By the time the last stitch came free, the candle had burned down another inch, and the room was silent but for the Duke’s ragged breathing and the small, precise sounds of Elara’s work.

“It’s done,” she said finally, sitting back on her heels. Her hands were trembling now that there was nothing left to steady them for.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

Then Alexander Blackwood closed his eyes — not this time in the manner of a man surrendering to fever, but in the manner of a man finally permitted to rest — and for the first time in nineteen days, his breathing eased.