call you Harpy, if we’re going with classical allusions. I’ll endeavor to survive until tomorrow, if only to spite you.”
“Do that,” she said, pushing the curtain aside and preparing to depart.
“Oh, and Miss Harpy,” he called after her.
She glanced back, eyebrows raised in question.
“I’m most definitely not a child.”
He hadn’t told her his name. In the week he stayed at the hospital under Mother Mary Clement’s watchful eye he stubbornly insisted his memory was gone, even as his body grew stronger. When she came in she would go straight to him, to reassure herself that he was getting better, and then she would do her rounds, leaving him for last. He was her reward for the onerous work she did. He looked at her as if she were a mixture of the Madonna and the harpy he’d likened her to, and she chivvied him like he was her younger brother. No, that wasn’t true, because she’d been uncomfortably aware of the niggling pinch of longing he brought out in her.
All would have been well if he hadn’t developed another fever, this one stronger and more virulent than the first. She’d seen it happen in other patients, seemingly strong and recovering. The hospital was a dangerous place, full of illness and disease, and the patients were already in a weakened condition from whatever had brought them there in the first place. It came over him swiftly, and by nightfall, when she was scheduled to leave, he was delirious.
Mother Mary Clement had looked in, clucking beneath her breath. “It’s a sad case, Emma,” the old woman said. “I had hoped he would make it.”
Emma hadn’t looked away from him. “I’ll stay here for a bit if you don’t mind,” she said in a quiet voice. “Do what I can for him.”
“Wake him up if possible. I assign the dying to you, simply so they can see what’s worth living for. Remind him of why he wants to be alive.”
She did look up at her then. The nun knew everything she needed to know about Emma’s history, and she didn’t judge her. Mother Mary Clement nodded briskly. “I’ll leave him to you. Call me if you need anything. Otherwise there’s naught we can do. Either he’ll make it through or he won’t.”
And she’d left them there, together in the gathering darkness, the moans of the sick and dying around them, her young soldier still and silent in his narrow bed.
It was around midnight when she crawled onto the cot with him. He’d begun to shiver, and she put her arms around him, cradling him against her breast like the baby she knew she would never have. He clung to her like a drowning man, and she closed her eyes and slept, knowing that when she awoke he’d be dead, but that at least he would die in her arms, loved, when she never thought she would love any man.
And indeed he was gone the next morning. But not to his heavenly reward, Mother Mary Clement informed her. His family had been putting out inquiries, and they’d finally managed to track him down. They’d only just removed him to his family home while she’d slept on, blissfully unaware. She’d been so exhausted she hadn’t even felt him being taken from her arms, and Mother Mary Clement had let her sleep on.
There was always the chance that he was the scion of an industrialist, or perhaps a highborn bastard. Someone not completely beyond her touch, who looked at her and understood what she had been and hadn’t cared.
But no, life couldn’t be that generous. He was Captain Brandon Rohan. Lord Brandon Rohan, no less, brother to a viscount, son to a marquess. Someone so far out of reach that it would have been better for her if he’d died that night. Then, at least, he would have stayed hers.
And now the vagaries of fate had brought this family back into her life. Her darling boy was no longer a wounded soldier, but from what Melisande had discovered it appeared that his sickness had gone far deeper, burrowing into his soul. It broke her heart, when she thought she was invulnerable.
22
Benedick couldn’t rid himself of a strange feeling of melancholy as he dressed that evening for the Worthingham’s ball, one he ascribed simply to the unsettling effect of having such a whirlwind as Melisande Carstairs thrust herself into his life. He was rid of her now, well rid of her, and her twisted ankle had been