the least of us all.”
“I won’t be able to sleep.” He was wide-awake, an almost painful alertness, as if he’d consumed several gallons of coffee. “I’ll wait here with you.”
What was a few more minutes when he’d been waiting days?
Years.
Miss Redmayne was about Helena’s age, pretty, smartly dressed, with an air of tremendous competence. “Your brother and your husband tell me you are suffering from a rather dramatic case of memory loss, Lady Hastings.”
It took Helena a moment to realize that “Lady Hastings” referred to herself. So her husband was Lord Hastings. Husband—the very word squeezed the air from her lungs. She didn’t know anything about the man. How could she be married to him?
“When I awakened,” she said, striving to sound in charge of herself, “I was surrounded by members of my family. And I recognized fewer than half of them.”
“Of those you do not recognize, whom have you known the longest?”
“Lord Hastings”—she could not bring herself to say “my husband”—“according to everyone else.”
Miss Redmayne glanced at Venetia. “Can you tell me when they met, Your Grace?”
“The summer Lady Hastings was fourteen. Lord Hastings came to visit at Hampton House, our home in—”
“Oxfordshire,” said Helena, grateful to know that much.
“What is the latest in your life you can remember?” asked Miss Redmayne.
She thought hard. “The Christmas after our mother passed away.”
Helena had adored her mother and had been quite disconsolate that Christmas. Venetia and Fitz had persisted in telling her joke after joke until she cracked a smile.
“That would have been shortly before you turned fourteen,” said Venetia. “You missed remembering meeting Hastings by a few months.”
Helena wanted to remember meeting him—and every day of the past thirteen years of her life—but particularly him. She could not be a wife to a stranger. “Please tell me I’ll be able to regain my memory.”
“I can make no promises,” said Miss Redmayne. “Amnesia is an unusual condition, typically accompanying far more severe brain damage than is your case.”
She jotted a few things down in her notebook. “If I recall correctly, you studied classics while you were at Lady Margaret Hall?”
Helena nodded, still shocked by the fact that she’d attended university. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, but how had Colonel Clements, their guardian, ever agreed to such a thing? She’d have thought that she’d needed to not only come of age, but come into control of her small inheritance before such a feat became possible.
“Were you educated in Latin prior to that?”
“I remember Helena teaching herself some Latin from Fitz’s schoolbooks,” Venetia answered for her. “But that was when she was a little older. Sixteen, perhaps.”
“Qui caput tuum valet?” asked Miss Redmayne. How does your head feel?
“Non praecipue iucunde. Quasi equo calcitrata sum, ita aliquis dicat,” Helena replied easily. Not particularly pleasant. As if I’ve been kicked by a horse, one might say.
Miss Redmayne nodded. “It’s an odd thing. Amnesia strips one of memory of events and people. But it tends not to affect grasp of languages and other acquired skills. If you knew how to ride a bicycle before, for example, you won’t need to learn it again.”
“You do know how to ride a safety bicycle,” Venetia said, looking almost optimistic.
Helena tried to reassure Venetia with a smile, but managed only a partial one—the stretching of her facial muscles caused a sensation in her scalp that was part tearing, part burning. She would give up fluency in Latin and prowess on a bicycle immediately if she could have her memory back instead.
Miss Redmayne unwound Helena’s bandaging to check her stitches. Without any hair, Helena’s head felt unsettlingly light—and the air in the room unexpectedly cool against her scalp.
“Your head is no longer bleeding,” pronounced Miss Redmayne, “but the stitches need to remain another few days.”
She asked Helena to get out of bed and walk in a straight line, perform simple computations, and make logical deductions. “Your reasoning is fine, as is your balance—the wobbliness you might experience is caused by weakness of muscles rather than any injury to the brain. The danger now is that there might be some bleeding inside your cranium. I will keep you under watch for the next forty-eight hours.”
Helena inhaled—she’d thought the dangers already past.
“But on the other hand,” continued Miss Redmayne, “if there is no cranial bleeding, then you may consider yourself to be mending and you may gradually resume your normal activities. In the meanwhile you will likely experience headaches, more episodes of vomiting, perhaps even further temporary losses of consciousness.
“Moreover, in the