The footmen returned with the hot water and cloths at that moment, trailed by the short, stout butler.
“Set it there,” Temperance directed, pointing to a table by the bed. “Has the doctor been sent for?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the butler said in a sonorous voice.
Small cleared his throat, and when Temperance looked at him, he whispered, “We’d best not wait for the doctor, ma’am. He’s unreliable after seven of the clock.”
Temperance glanced at the elegant gold clock on the bedside table. It was nearing eight at night. “Why not?”
“He drinks,” Lord Caire slurred from the bed. “And his hands shake. Don’t know if I’d let the blighter near me in that state in any case.”
“Well, isn’t there another doctor we can send for?” Temperance asked. For goodness’ sake! Lord Caire was wealthy. He should have plenty of people to look after him.
“I’ll make inquiries, ma’am,” the butler said, and left.
Temperance took up one of the clean linens, soaked it in the near-boiling water, and gently placed it on Lord Caire’s shoulder.
He jerked as if she’d laid a white-hot poker against his bare skin. “God’s blood, madam, do you mean to parboil the flesh from my bones?”
“Not at all,” Temperance replied. “We need to loosen your shirt from the wound so we don’t tear open the stitches when we remove it.”
He swore rather foully.
Temperance chose to ignore that. “Is it true what you said before?”
“What?”
“That all touch pains you?” Terrible of her to take advantage of his condition to quiz him, but she was curious.
He closed his eyes. “Oh, yes.”
For a moment, Temperance stared at him, this wealthy, titled aristocrat. How could the touch of another human being possibly hurt him? But perhaps the pain he spoke of wasn’t purely physical.
She shook her head and looked at the valet. “Is there anyone we should send for? A relative or a friend of Lord Caire’s?”
The valet hummed under his breath and his eyes slid from hers. “Ah… I’m not sure…”
“Tell her, Small,” Lord Caire rumbled. His eyes were closed, but his hearing apparently was quite acute.
Small gulped. “No, ma’am.”
Temperance frowned, rinsing out the linen and applying it afresh. “I know you’re estranged from your mother—”
“No.”
She sighed. “Surely there’s someone, Caire?”
Both men were silent. Oddly the valet seemed more embarrassed than Lord Caire. Caire merely looked bored.
“What about, er”—Temperance kept her eyes on the hot linen she was holding to his shoulder, the heat rising in her cheeks—“a… a female you might be close to?”
Lord Caire chuckled softly and opened his eyes. They were far too bright. “Small, when was the last time you saw a female other than a maidservant step foot in this house?”
“Never.” The valet’s eyes were fixed on his shoes.
“You’re the first lady to cross my threshold in ten years, Mrs. Dews,” Lord Caire drawled. “The last one was my mother, the day I ushered her from my home. On the whole, I think you ought to be flattered, don’t you?”
LAZARUS WATCHED AS pink suffused Mrs. Dews’s face. The color was becoming, and even in his weakened state, he felt a stirring in his loins, a longing that was more than sexual. For a moment, there seemed to be a twinge in his breast, a strange wish that his life, his person, could in some way be different. That he could somehow deserve a woman such as her.
Mrs. Dews took away the cloth from his shoulder, wrung it out, and replaced it, the sharp sting of the heat rousing him from his reverie. His head ached, his body felt weak and hot, and his shoulder was on fire. He wished to simply lie down and sleep, and if he never awakened… well, would that be such a very great loss to the world?
But Mrs. Dews had no intention yet of letting him escape. “You have no one at all to take care of you?”
She touched, whether by accident or design, his hand, and he felt the familiar burning pain. He kept his hand still only with an effort of will. Perhaps with repeated applications, he might become used to the pain of her touch—like a dog so often cuffed he no longer flinched at the blow. Perhaps he might even come to like the sensation.
Lazarus laughed, or at least tried to. The sound emerged more like a croak. “On my word, Mrs. Dews, no one. My mother and I talk as little as possible, I count but one man I could call a friend, and he and I fell out recently—”
“Who?”
He ignored the question—damned if he’d send for St. John tonight. “And despite your romantic notions, even if I had replaced my mistress, I’d not call her to my sickbed. The ladies I employ thus have other, ah, uses. As I’ve said before, I do not bring them into my home.”
She pressed her lips together at that information.
He eyed her sardonically. “I am at your tender mercy, I fear.”
“I see.” She frowned down at him as she took off the cloth and tested the shirt beneath.
He hissed as the material pulled away from his wound.
“It has to come off,” she murmured to Small, as if Lazarus was an infant they were taking care of between them.
The valet nodded and they took off his shirt—an excruciating operation. By the time they’d finished, Lazarus was panting. He didn’t need to look at his bare shoulder to know that the thing was gravely infected. It pulsed and boiled against him.
“Ma’am, the doctor,” one of the footmen said from the door.
Behind him the quack swayed, his greasy gray bob wig sliding off the back of his shaved head. “My lord, I came as soon as possible.”
“Lovely,” Lazarus murmured.
The physician approached the bed with the overly careful gait of a man drunk. “What have we here?”
“His wound—can you help him?” Mrs. Dews began, but the doctor brushed past her to peer closely at the wound.
The stink of cheap wine washed over Lazarus’s face.
The doctor straightened abruptly. “What have you done, woman?”
Mrs. Dews’s eyes widened. “I… I…”
The doctor snatched the bit of rag she’d been using from her fingers. “Interfering with the natural healing process!”
“But the pus—” Mrs. Dews began.
“Bonum et laudabile. Do you know what that means?”
Mrs. Dews shook her head.
“Good and laudable,” Lazarus muttered.
“Quite right, my lord. Good and laudable!” the doctor cried, nearly tipping himself over with his vigor. “’Tis well known that the pus is what heals the wound. It must not be interfered with.”
“But he is feverish,” Mrs. Dews protested.
Lazarus closed his eyes. What mattered the method of physicking as long as it ended soon. He’d let his martyr and the quack argue it out.
“I shall let some blood and thus draw away the heat in his body,” the doctor pronounced.
Lazarus opened his eyes to watch as the doctor fished in his bag. He produced a lancet and turned toward Lazarus, holding the sharp instrument in a palsied hand. Lazarus swore, struggling weakly to stand. Bloodletting was one thing, but to allow a drunk to wield a knife against his person was tantamount to suicide.
Damn it, the room was spinning about him. “Send him away.”
Mrs. Dews bit her lip. “But…”
“Might as well throw me to the lions yourself as put me in his tender mercies!”
“Now, my lord…” The doctor had turned conciliatory.
Mrs. Dews met Lazarus’s eyes, her own worried and unsure.
“Please.” He was too weak, too feverish to enforce his will. She had to do it for him. “I’d rather die by your hand than a drunken quack’s.”
Abruptly she nodded and Lazarus sagged against the bed in relief. Mrs. Dews took the doctor’s arm and with a mixture of firmness and bewitching sweetness got the quack out of the room. She handed him over to the butler and then returned to Lazarus’s bedside.
“I hope you’ve made the right decision,” she said quietly. “I have no training, only the practical skills of a woman who has taken care of many children.”
As he looked into her extraordinary gold-flecked eyes, it occurred to Lazarus that he might very well be entrusting his life to this woman.
He lay back on his bed, his mouth twisted in amused irony. “I have complete faith in you, Mrs. Dews.”
And though his words were said in his usual sarcastic tone, he was surprised to discover that they were true.
TEMPERANCE STARED DOWN at Lord Caire’s infected shoulder, aware that his avowal of trust had caused sweat to break out along her spine. The last man who’d trusted her had had his faith horribly betrayed.
Now was not the time to think of the past, though. Temperance mentally shook herself. The wound was red and puffy, the edges swollen and inflamed with streaks of red radiating from it.
“Have the footmen bring fresh hot water,” she muttered to the valet as she wrung out the cloth again. This time she placed it directly on the wound. Sometimes the infection could be drawn out by heat.
Lord Caire stiffened at her touch, but otherwise he made no sign that he felt what must be awful pain.
“Why does the touch of others cause you pain?” she asked him softly.
“Might as well ask why a bird is attracted to the sky, madam,” he slurred. “It’s just the way I am.”
“What about when you touch someone else?”
He shrugged. “There is no pain as long as I am the initiator.”
“And you were always thus?” She frowned at the cloth, pressing it into the wound. Despite the doctor’s philosophy, she’d always followed her mother’s teachings on wound healing, and Mama had not liked pus, “bonum” or not.
Caire gasped and closed his eyes. “Yes.”
She glanced quickly at his face before taking up the cloth and wiping away the liquid that had oozed from the wound. “You said before that there has never been anyone who didn’t cause you pain.”
The words were a statement, but she meant them as a question, for she remembered his slight hesitation before.
He was silent as she rinsed the cloth in the lukewarm water and reapplied it. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t speak.
Then he whispered, “I lied. There was Annelise.”
Her head jerked up and she stared at him, feeling an odd spike of something that might’ve been jealousy. “Who is Annelise?”
“Was.”
“What?”
He sighed. “Annelise was my younger sister. Five years younger. She took after our father in looks—a plain little thing with mousy brown hair and gray-brown eyes. She used to follow me about even though I told her… I told her…”
His voice trailed away as Small silently replaced the basin of water with a fresh one. Temperance rinsed the cloth in it, the water so hot it reddened her hands. She laid the hot cloth against his wound and pressed, but he seemed not to even notice now.
“What did you tell her?”
“Mmm?” Lord Caire murmured without opening his eyes.
She leaned closer to him, staring at his long nose, his firm, almost cruel mouth. Surely such a sarcastic, nasty man could not be defeated by something as mundane as a putrid wound?
Fear made her belly clench. “Caire!”
“What?” he muttered irritably, half opening his eyes.
She swallowed. “What did you tell Annelise?”
His shook his head against the pillows. “She’d follow me, spy upon me when she thought I wasn’t watching, but she was so much younger than me. I always knew. And she would take my hand, even when I told her not to. Told her not to touch me. Yet her touch never hurt… never hurt…”
