Baron said, famously pragmatic to the point of ruthless, he took his wife by the shoulders and steered her away.
Without a backward glance at his first born.
Doctor Alcott took all of two seconds to dismiss the frantic bustle of the Baron’s household and yanked Titus into Honoria’s bedroom before shutting them in. “Where is the bathroom?”
Titus pointed to a door through which the bathroom also shared a door with the nursery on the other side.
“Does the tub have a tap directly to it, or is it necessary to haul water from the kitchens?”
“It’s a pump tap, sir, but I’ve only just started to boiler and that only pipes hot water to the kitchens and the first floor.
“That’s sufficient.” The doctor divested himself of his suitcoat and abandoned it to a chair before undoing the links on his cuffs. “Now I need you to fill the bath with cool water, not cold, do you understand? We need to combat that fever, but if the water is freezing it’ll cause her to shiver and raise her temperature.”
“I’ll go to the kitchens and have them boil a pan just to make sure it inn’t icy.”
The man reached into his medical bag and extracted an opaque lump. “First, young man, you will take this antiseptic soap and scrub your hands until even the dirt from beneath your fingernails is gone.”
“Yes, Sir.”
It took a veritable eternity for the water to boil, but it seemed he needed every moment of that to scrub the perpetual filth from his hands. Once his skin was pink and raw with nary speck, he filled two buckets as full as he could carry with boiling water and hauled it up the stairs.
The Baron and his wife swept by him on their way down. “We mustn’t let on its Typhoid,” he was saying as his wife plunged her hands into an ermine muff.
“You’re right, of course,” the Baroness agreed. “What assumptions would people make about our household? Perhaps influenza would be more apropos?”
“Yes, capital suggestion.”
Titus firmly squelched the impulse to dump the boiling hot water over the Goode’s collective heads, and raced to the bathroom his arms aching from the load. He instantly threw the lock against the nursery as he heard the high-pitched, fearful questions the young twins barraged their governess with on the other side of the door. He plugged the tubs drain and turned the tap. Cringing at the frigidity of the water, he balanced the temperature as best he could until he could dub the bath cool rather than cold.
That done, he returned to Honoria’s room in time to see the doctor, clad only in his trousers and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, bending over a nude Honoria with his hands upon her stomach spanning above her bellybutton.
Even in her catatonic state, she produced a whimper of distress that fell silent when the doctor’s hands moved lower, his fingers digging into the flesh above her hip bone on the line where her pale skin met a whorl of ebony hair.
An instantaneous primal rage surged through him at the sight. With an animalistic sound he’d never made before, Titus lunged around the bed and shoved the doctor away from her, causing him to stumble into the nightstand, upsetting a music box and her favorite hairbrush.
Titus threw the bedclothes back over her, snarling at the doctor as he placed his body as a shield against the much larger man. “You keep your fucking filthy hands from her.”
Rather than becoming guilty or defensive, the doctor’s shock flared into irritation and then, as he examined Titus, it melted into comprehension. He adjusted his spectacles and retreated a few steps. “Listen to me, lad. I am a man, yes, but in this room, I am only a doctor. To me, this is the body of a dying human. I must examine her.”
Titus narrowed his eyes in suspicion, wondering if this man took him for a dupe. “You don’t have to touch her, there. Not so close to—”
Alcott interrupted him crisply. “Though I am convinced of my initial diagnosis, I would do her a disservice if I didn’t rule out all other possibilities. Internally, many maladies can produce these symptoms, and therefore palpating the stomach will often help me make certain she is not in other danger. You have an organ, the appendix, right here.” He indicated low on his torso to the right side almost to his groin. “If it becomes swollen or perforated it will spread fever and infection through the