nude limbs were nearly indistinguishable from the white sheets, but for the feverish red flush creeping up her torso, over her breasts, and toward her clavicles.
“It’s burning my skin,” she croaked, levering herself up on shaking arms. “Everywhere. Put it out, boy, please.”
Boy. Later, the word would pierce him like a lance.
She made a plaintive sound that sliced his guts open, and made to roll off the bed.
“No, miss. You’re with fever. Lie still. I’ll wake the house.” Without thinking, he reached for her shoulders, meaning to keep her in place.
She stunned him by collapsing back to the pillow in a heap of bliss at his touch. “Yes,” she sighed, clutching at his hands. “So cold. So…better.”
The winter air was frigid and damp this morning and laying the fires had done next to nothing to slake the bone-deep chill from his fingers and toes.
Her skin did, indeed, feel as hot as any flame beneath his palms, leeching whatever comforting cold his hands could offer as she warmed him in kind.
Panic trilled through him, seizing his limbs. As an uneducated boy, he knew very little, but he understood the danger she was in all too well. She was burning from the inside out, and if something wasn’t done, she’d become just another ghost to haunt the void in his heart where his loved ones used to live.
Snatching up her sheets, he carefully swaddled her enough to keep her from doing herself any harm, before tearing out of the room.
He rang every bell, roused every adult from their beds with frantic intensity. The Baron immediately sent him for their doctor, Preston Alcott. Not wanting to waste the time it took for the old stable master to saddle a horse, Titus ran the several blocks to the doctor’s, arriving just as his lungs threatened to burst from the frigid coal-stained air.
Doctor Alcott was still punching his arms into his coat as Titus dragged him down his front stoop in a groggy heap of limbs, and shoved him into a hansom. To save time, he relayed all the details of his interaction with Honoria, noting her feverish behavior, appearance, and answering supplemental questions, such as what she’d had to eat the night before and where she’d traveled to in the past couple of days.
“You are a rather observant lad,” the doctor remarked, peering over the rims of his spectacles. It was difficult to distinguish beneath the man’s curly russet beard if he was being complimentary or condemning, until Alcott said, “Would that my nurses would be half as detailed as you.”
Even though it wasn’t his place, upon their arrival, Titus trailed the doctor up the grand staircase and lurked in the hallway, near an oriental vase almost as tall as he was, doing his best to blend with the shadows.
Through Honoria’s open door, he watched helplessly as Mrs. Mcgillicutty, the housekeeper, ran a cool cloth over Honoria’s face and throat. The Goodes hovered behind her, as if nursing their firstborn was still so beneath them, they needed a servant to do it.
Honoria laid on her back, mummified by her sheets, her lids only half-open now.
Titus thought he might be sick. She’d become so colorless, he might have thought her dead already, but for the slight, rapid rise and fall of her chest.
The doctor shooed them all aside and took only minutes of examination to render the grave verdict. “Baron and Lady Cresthaven, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, have any of you previously suffered from typhoid fever?”
Honoria’s mother, an older copy of her dark-haired daughters, recoiled from her bedside. “Certainly not, Doctor. That is an affliction of the impoverished and squalid.”
If the doctor had any opinions on her reaction, he kept them to himself. “If that is the case, then I’m going to have to ask you to leave this room. Indeed, it would be safer if you took your remaining children and staff elsewhere until…”
“Until Honoria recovers?” the Baron prompted through his wealth of a mustache.
The doctor gazed down at Honoria with a soft expression bordering on grief.
Titus wanted to scream. To kick at the priceless vase beside him and glory in the destruction, if only to see something as shattered as his heart might be.
“I knew she shouldn’t have been allowed to attend Lady Carmichaels’s philanthropic event,” the Baroness shrilled. “I’ve always maintained nothing good can come of venturing below Clairview Street.”
“Is there anyone else in your house feeling ill, Lady Cresthaven?” the doctor asked as he opened his arms in a gesture meant to shuffle