“Here you go.” The housekeeper smiled, setting a mug in front of Rachel. The contents steamed. “It’s some tea.”
Rachel wrapped fingers around the earthenware. Heat seeped into her skin. “Nothing helped, Mrs. Mainprice. Not the spirit of niter or the laudanum I borrowed from you.”
“You cannot expect to perform miracles.”
“I should have been able to save her.” She had failed again to help someone who’d depended upon her. First Mary Ferguson, then Mr. Fenton-Smith, now Molly. Proving one more time there was no point to her trying. She should have clung to the promise she’d sworn to herself and never have bothered to go. “Molly lost the baby and was feverish, but still I should have been able to help. I used to be able to.”
The housekeeper clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Molly had been taking all manner of potions to rid herself of that baby. Who knows what sort of foul concoctions she drank in the past days? As sure as I’m sitting here, it was one of those potions that took her life. Not something that you didn’t do. ’Twas her foolishness that caused this.”
“But Mary Ferguson was not foolish. She was merely poor.”
“Did she have something to do with your trial in Ireland?” Mrs. Mainprice asked gently. “I’m afraid we’ve all heard about it, Miss Dunne.”
“She perished under my care.” Rachel lowered her head. “She had only had a cough, some swelling in her throat. I thought I knew what to do to help. It seems I was wrong, and far too prideful about my abilities.” Clinging to that pride like the last leaf of autumn unwilling to release the tree.
“We all make mistakes, miss.”
“Most people’s mistakes do not end in someone dying.” Rachel pinched her eyes closed. “When they accused me of murdering her, I was shocked. Angry, even. I had tended many of my accusers, too poor to afford even an apothecary’s remedies, yet they were so ready to find me at fault. However, I could not easily defend myself against their accusations. Mary died while I was asleep at her bedside—asleep!—and I could not say precisely what had happened.”
The cruelest blow of all. She didn’t even know what had gone wrong. With Molly, though, Rachel had been awake for every second, watching the girl’s life flow from her like water seeking a drain. The fever had worsened, she had become confused and restless, then she was suddenly motionless. Her friend’s prayers turned frantic. God didn’t listen to her either.
Mrs. Mainprice gathered up Rachel’s hands. Her touch was tender but firm, the skin raspy where her calluses rubbed. “Don’t blame yourself for Molly’s passing.”
“Molly should have been under a physician’s care. Dr. Edmunds should have been there.” Even he knew he should have.
“You think Dr. Edmunds is always successful? You know better, Miss Dunne. It’s killing him. His failures are eating him up, like rats feasting in a corn bin. He couldn’t save his wife. Imagine how that feels.”
Dreadful? Hollowing? Black and frigid as the maw of hell?
Rachel withdrew her hands, dropped them to her lap. “He still believes in God, though. He has not lost all hope.”
Mrs. Mainprice considered Rachel for a long time. She chafed under the woman’s gaze. “Holding on to hope in God is all we ever have in this world, Miss Dunne.”
CHAPTER 23
Rachel’s mouth was dry as a week-old oatcake, and her head . . . the sooner she reached the kitchen and found Mrs. Mainprice’s store of headache powders, the less chance her skull would cleave right in two in the hallway. Rachel groped her way down the stairs. She had been too insensate last night to realize the housekeeper had laced her tea with laudanum. Enough to put down ten women, if the pain in her head was any indication. Without the laudanum, however, she wouldn’t have slept, and sleep had been preferable to reliving Molly’s last minutes on this cruel earth.
Slowly and quietly, Rachel pushed open the kitchen door.
“I was expecting I might see you about now, miss.” Mrs. Mainprice brushed her hands across her apron, retrieved a knife from its storage block, and sliced a loaf of bread waiting on the broad oak table. “I was just preparing a bite for you to eat.”
“I’ve no appetite.” Rachel dropped onto the bench. “Though I could use a generous pinch of headache powder.”
“By itself? Nonsense. You need toast and coffee to fix you right up.”
Mrs. Mainprice poured a cup of coffee as proof and set it in