blood. If this were the case with Miss Goode, an immediate operation would be needed, or she’d be dead before noon.”
Noon? Titus swallowed around a dry lump, peering over his shoulder at her lovely face made waxen by a sheen of sweat.
“Your protection of her is commendable. But it is my duty to keep this girl alive,” the doctor prodded, venturing closer now. “That obligation takes precedence in my thoughts and my deeds over anything so banal as modesty, as it must in yours now as you help me get her into the bath. Do you think you are capable of that?”
Titus nodded, even as a fist of dread and pain knotted in his stomach.
The doctor reached out and patted his shoulder. “Good. Now help me get the sheet beneath her and we’ll use it as a sort of sling.”
She fought them as they lowered her—sheet and all—into the bath before suddenly settling into it with a sigh of surrender. After a few fraught moments, her breath seemed to come easier. The wrinkles of pain in her forehead smoothed out a little as her onyx lashes relaxed down over her flushed cheeks.
Alcott, his movements crisp and efficient, abandoned the room only to return to administer a tincture she seemed to have trouble swallowing.
“What’s that?” Titus queried, eyeing the bottle with interest.
“Thymol. Better known as Thyme Camphor. It’s has anti-pathogenic properties that will kill the bacterium in her stomach, giving her greater chance of survival.”
“The doctor gave us all Naphthalene,” Titus remembered. “It helped with the fever, but…then they all got so much worse.” The memory thrummed a chord of despondency in his chest with such a pulsating ache he had to press his hand to his sternum to quiet it.
Alcott snorted derisively, his skin mottling beneath his beard. “Naphthalene is more a poison than a medicine and, while less expensive and more readily available, it is also little better than shoving moth balls into your family’s mouth and calling it a cure. I’d very much like a word with this so-called physician.”
Would that he had known before. That he could have perhaps asked for this… Thymol. “I don’t know why I didn’t get so sick as them. I did everything I could for their fevers. Yarrow tea and cold ginger. I couldn’t lift them into a bath, I was a boy then, but I kept cold compresses on their heads and camphor and mustard on their chests.”
Alcott’s features arranged themselves with such compassion, Titus couldn’t look at him without a prick of tears threatening behind his eyes. “You did admirably, lad. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, death wins the battle and we are defeated.”
To assuage both his curiosity and his inescapable anxiety, Titus questioned the doctor about bacterium, pathogens, medications, dosages, appendixes, and any other organs that might arbitrarily perforate until Alcott deemed that Honoria had spent long enough in the water.
It was difficult to maintain the sort of clinical distance Doctor Alcott seemed capable of as they maneuvered her back to the bed, dried and dressed her in a clean night rail. Titus did his best to avoid looking where he ought not to, touching her bare skin as little as possible.
But he knew his fingertips wouldn’t forget the feel of her, even though it dishonored them both to remember.
The doctor left her in Titus’s care while he went to administer Thymol and instruction to the maids, both of whom were afflicted with the same malady but not advanced with high fevers or this worrisome torpor.
Once alone, Titus retrieved the hairbrush and, with trembling hands and exacting thoroughness, undid the matted mess that had become her braid. He smoothed the damp strands and fanned them over the pillow as he gently worked out the tangles. The texture was like silk against his rough skin, and he allowed himself to indulge in the pleasure of the drying strands to sift in the divots between his fingers. Then, he plaited it as he sometimes did the horse’s tails when they had to be moved en masse to the country.
He even tied the end with a ribbon of burgundy, thinking she might approve.
His efforts, of course, were nothing so masterful as Honoria’s maid’s, but he was examining the finished product with something like satisfaction when the appearance of Dr. Alcott at his side gave him a start.
The doctor, a man of maybe forty years, was looking down at him from eyes still pink with exhaustion, as if he’d not slept much yet