Lady in Rags

Chapter Forty-Three: Enough Carnage

Verity, warned of Jane's visit, had been waiting on the windowsill of Richard's bedroom, which looked out over the front entrance. As soon as she saw Jane and Richard making their way down the front steps, she left the window-seat, and hustled down the hallway to Neil's room to see if Jane's visit had imbibed him with any real spirit.

"They're going to give me laudanum," he said, when she entered. "You shouldn't sit up. It will tire you."

A week ago, Lord Albroke had hired an accoucheur who had had examined Verity – despite her protest and indignity – and commended her health. He prescribed, to her disgust, a regimen of diet hardly more appealing than Neil's, and daily cold baths. Neither diet nor bathing seemed to have any real effect upon Verity or the baby, but she did not wish to incur Lord Albroke's wrath by protesting them. She had to save her protests for more important battles. The accoucheur's third prescription had been his insistence that she not tire herself, and on learning that her activities included helping to nurse Neil, he had been horrified.

"No more than a few hours a day," he had insisted. "Certainly she cannot stay up the night with him!"

That Verity did not feel tired seemed not to matter. The servants, the accoucheur, the midwives, and Lord Albroke were most solicitous of her comfort – in that one regard. She must not tire herself. Even Neil had become concerned by it.

A flush of anger burned through her. Then Jane's visit had tired Neil, and they were going to make him relax, by flushing his spirit with the deadening laudanum, and by the time he was well enough to talk to, she would be pushed back to bed like a grumpy child. And she could see by the sagging slope of his shoulders that he was tired, but that was all – good, honest, tiredness, the kind any ordinary person might be allowed to sleep off. But no – they would dose him with laudanum, and if Jane's visit had done any good for his spirit at all, the memory of it would be bleached out of him by sleepless dreams and drugs, until tomorrow morning he would only look quietly pleased and say, "It was quite nice, I am sure, it must have been quite nice, to see Jane again," and she would have to listen and smile and nod and say of course it must have been, to see such an old friend, because she dared not excite him, dared not breathe a whisper of her loathing and fear of the other woman.

She caught Neil's hand in a silent plea of desperation – desperate enough that for a moment his tiredness became confusion. His palm was cool and dry in hers. No fever today. "Get up," she demanded. "Come with me."

He was unresistant, perhaps even eager. She helped pull him out of bed, and kept her hold on his hand as they stole out of the suite and down the hallway. At one point, she heard footsteps, and she crammed them both behind the curtain of a window nook. Neil was pressed up against her side, one hand against the wall behind her neck, for balance. The proximity sent an unexpected ripple of warm anticipation through her body. His eyes, barely inches from her own, brightened with laughter, and his lips twitched. With her hands trapped behind him, she pressed her lips to his to stifle his laugh. The footsteps – a woman's – reached the nook, and a chambermaid gasped, and tapped quickly onwards. When her footsteps disappeared behind a creaking door, Verity released her hold on Neil's twitching lips.

"Did she see us?" whispered Neil.

"Only the lump we make behind the curtain. I think she thought we were servants."

"Then we're safe."

He was still pressed against her, looking close upon her. She thought he was even trying to close the distance, but it was hard to tell, because she was dizzy with the hope that he was.

In the distance, below, a door opened and shut. Verity remembered the nurse would be returning with the laudanum.

"We won't be safe here – for long," she said, untangling herself from behind the curtain, and looking out into the hallway. "Quickly now."