They wiped her down for more than an hour, taking turns, until just after three o’clock in the morning, George felt her forehead, her chest, and her hip near the bandage. “It’s down. Let’s pray it stays down.”
“She’s so weak,” Marcus said as he fetched a clean nightgown and put her in it. “It’s like she isn’t really here.”
“She’s here, my lord, and here she’ll stay, we’ll see to it. She won’t die, I swear it. I expected the fever. Now, you get some rest and I will stay with her and call you in the morning. The last thing I want to have to do is rub you down with ice water. You’re too big.”
She was dreaming: a lovely dream really, filled with flowers, all sorts of flowers, brilliant in both scent and color. She was sitting there in the midst of all the flowers, singing one of the ditties she’d written, the one about the sailors, which was a bit more than racy, actually, but it had sold the best of the lot so far. Mr. Dardallion at Hookhams had told her that it was so popular amongst the naval men he didn’t think it would ever be forgotten. She thought of being immortal through a song, and it made her smile. Then she was back firmly in the meadow, amid all the daisies and the lilies. She turned to stroke her fingers over a velvet red rose petal when suddenly from behind the rosebush came a strange creature that looked for all the world like a tonsured, robed monk, but he was shriveled and shrunken, and he looked older than the barrowed hills behind him, and he said to her, “I was near the well, keeping a close watch, but you never found me. I waited and I waited, for hundreds of years I’ve waited but you never came. You’re stupid, no imagination, not like me or my brothers when we decided what we’d do.
“He was Baron Dandridge then, just a simple baron was Lockridge Wyndham, but he helped us, tried to save us, but he couldn’t, no one could, and we decided then that we would take care of him as best we could in case he lost everything. Aye, and that miserable king did strip us and our abbey to the bones, he and that miserable Cromwell and his bully boys. Then the baron did die, too soon, poor man, before his son knew what was what, but all the clues were there and several more generations spoke of the treasure and then even that stopped. All the Wyndhams have been ignorant and stupid. Even now you’ve given it up. So I had to come to you. Now, what do you see?”
And she said slowly, “I see a nine. I see another nine, but it’s backwards.”
“Do you now, Countess? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. You write those little songs, aye, they’re clever, so why aren’t you clever about this? Don’t be so blind, or the next time I come to you, you’ll regret it. Monsters never die, they live on and on. Don’t you forget that.”
And the shriveled old monk was gone and she was left in the midst of the flowers, but then they were wilting, turning brown, shriveling just as the monk had been shriveled, and the clean, clear air darkened and it became cold and colder still. Then she cried out, wanting now only to get away from all the rot and the devastation.
“Hush, love, it’s all right.”
His voice jerked her awake. She opened her eyes to see him standing over her, a white bandage around his head.
“You look like a pirate, dashing as the devil, ever so rakish. I wish you could capture me and carry me away with you. I’d fight you, but I wouldn’t mean it.”
“All right, I’ll carry you away, but first, you’ve got to get completely well again. I’ll tell you, Duchess, I’m damned tired of your being hurt.”
“No more so than I am. You must have a black patch, Marcus. And your shirtsleeves need to billow out more. But you’re so beautiful, yes, take me with you, to a pirate’s island far away, perhaps beyond China but south where it’s warm and we could just lie about and—”
She stared up at him then blinked and blinked again. “Perhaps I’ve gone mad.”
“No, that’s a fantasy I would gladly give to you if I could. Now, how do you feel?”
She fell silent for a moment, querying her body. “My side hurts, but I can stand it. I feel heavy and dull otherwise, it’s strange, as if everything were going more slowly than it usually would. How does your poor head feel, Marcus?”
“My poor head is harder than a walnut, you know that. Now, about this heaviness you’re feeling.”
“And your hand. What happened to your hand?”
“The bastard who shot us hit me in the head, then you, madam, like Saint George, jumped all over me and then he shot you in your side and my hand when I pulled you against me. All in all we were both very lucky.”
“Who did it, Marcus?”
“I don’t know, but Badger left this morning for London, to see if our precious Colonial Wyndhams are there.”
“Surely Aunt Wilhelmina couldn’t have shot us.”
“No, but she could have hired someone. Badger will discover the truth. If he needs help, he’ll hire a Bow Street Runner. I don’t want you to worry, all right?”
She nodded. “You called me love.”
“Yes, I did.”
“This was the second time you called me ‘love.’ ”
“Many more times than that, Duchess, you were just too far under the hatches to hear me.”
“I like it, Marcus. If you’d wish to say it again, I won’t be disagreeable about it.” She paused just a moment, saw that he was frowning, and was afraid that he hadn’t meant it, had just said it because he thought she was going to die. She said quickly, “You woke me up from the strangest dream. I was sitting in this field of flowers . . .” She told him the scents and the incredible colors of the flowers, of all the beauty that surrounded her, then about the ancient monk and what he’d said and how he’d been angry with her.
“So it could be Janus-faced nines or not. The monk said maybe yes, maybe no, the miserable lout. He said the monster lives on and on. All of it just more of a muddle. Now, Duchess, how did you know the name of that Wyndham ancestor?”
“Lockridge Wyndham,” she said. “I don’t know. The monk said he was the Baron Dandridge, then he said his name. It wasn’t scary until the end, when all the beautiful flowers wilted and browned and rotted, all in the space of a few moments. But the monk and what he said to me, Marcus, I don’t understand that.”