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

Chapter 6

The fever broke fully by dawn. Elara was not there to see it. She had been sent back to the scullery before first light, half convinced that what had happened in the night had been some fevered dream of her own. But by mid-morning, the whole house knew of it. And by midday, she had been summoned again — not to a sick room crowded with anxious men, but to the steward’s own office, where Pemberton stood waiting with an expression she could not immediately read.

“His grace is asking for you,” he said. “And when he is finished asking, I have instructions of my own to give you, which you will not argue with.”

She found Alexander sitting up against his pillows for the first time in weeks — pale still, and thinner than she remembered him being before the ambush, but lucid in a way that made him seem, suddenly, far more formidable than any fevered whisper had. Julian Croft was not in the room. Dr. Warren was standing near the window with the particular chastened stillness of a man reassessing everything he thought he knew about his own profession.

“You have done me a great service,” Alexander said without preamble, when she had curtsied and taken her place near the door. “I do not say that lightly, and I do not intend to reward it lightly either.”

“I only did what my father taught me, your grace.”

“Any daughter of his would have known the same. Any daughter of his did not happen to be standing in my sick room for six weeks, watching what twenty educated men could not see.”

His gaze held hers a moment longer than propriety strictly allowed, and something in it made her look away first.

“Pemberton tells me you sleep in the servants’ quarters. Four to a room.”

“It’s no hardship, sir.”

“It is a hardship I no longer intend to permit.” He glanced to Pemberton, who inclined his head, already understanding. “You will be given a chamber on the guest floor. Proper quarters. You will continue your duties as you see fit, but you will not sleep four to a room in a house where someone has already tried to harm me once — and may yet try again.”

Elara’s mouth had gone dry. “Your grace, I couldn’t possibly — ”

“You could, and you will.”

There was no cruelty in it, only the flat certainty of a man used to having his instructions obeyed, softened just slightly by something that might almost have been gratitude.

“Whoever treated that thread did not act carelessly. They will not take kindly to discovering their work undone — nor to discovering who undid it. I would rather you slept behind a door that locks than among girls who might be questioned — or worse — on your behalf.”

It was Pemberton, once Alexander had been left to rest, who put the warning more plainly than the Duke himself had troubled to. He walked with her back down the long gallery toward the guest wing, and his voice was not unkind when he spoke.

“You understand what you’ve done, don’t you?” he said as they reached the door of a chamber grander than any Elara had ever been permitted to sleep in. “Someone in this house, or close enough to it to know its business, arranged for a duke to fail slowly, disguised as illness. That plan has come undone — and it came undone because of you. Whoever arranged it will want to know how. And once they know how, Elara, they will want to know who.”

“I only drew out some thread, Mr. Pemberton.”

“You drew out the one piece of evidence that proves this was never illness at all.” His expression, usually so composed, carried something close to real worry. “Lock your door. Trust no one who tells you it doesn’t matter what you saw. And if anyone — anyone at all — asks after the stitches you removed, or after what you told Dr. Warren that first morning, you come to me before you answer them. Do you understand?”

She said that she did. But as the door closed behind her upon a room finer than any she had slept in in her life, with a proper bed and a proper window and a bolt she was instructed twice to draw fast each night, Elara understood something else as well. Something that settled over her far more heavily than gratitude or relief or even fear.

She had spent her whole life learning how to be unnoticed. Because being noticed had never once brought her anything but harm. And now, in the space of a single night, everyone in this house — the Duke who owed her his recovery, the steward who had trusted her instinct, and, somewhere among the family gathered under this roof, the person who had treated that thread in the first place — knew exactly who she was.