"Stay Out of This, You're Only the Governess," His Fiancée Snapped — The Duke Stood in the Doorway
Chapter 5
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Thomas sat up in his cot with his eyes wide and his lips the wrong color. It was the croup—the thing every mother in England dreaded in a wet March. And the children had been out in the rain gathering flowers, and she had let them."Wake the housekeeper," she said to the nursemaid, "and tell her to send a groom for the doctor. Fourteen miles, and in this rain, so tell him to take the gray. Then bring me every kettle in the kitchen that will hold water."She built up the fire and set the big nursery kettle on the hob. She made a tent of a sheet over the chair beside it, so that the steam from the spout gathered underneath, and sat inside it with Thomas upright on her lap, his back against her chest, and a warm flannel about his throat. She talked to him in a low, ordinary voice about the pebbles in the river and the names of the horses. Charlotte woke and climbed in beside them without a word.It was the housekeeper who woke the Duke, and the Duke who came to the nursery in his dressing gown with a candle and no ceremony whatever."What can I do?" he said.She did not look up. "Keep the kettle full, Your Grace, and keep your daughter warm, because I have only two arms."He took Charlotte onto his lap. He filled the kettle. He fetched the second kettle from the schoolroom and set it beside the first, and for the next four hours, the Duke of Merivale sat upon a nursery stool in his own house and did exactly as he was told by the governess.Once, a lady's maid came to the door and said, in a whisper that was not quite a whisper, that Lady Arabella could not sleep for the noise and asked that the child be moved to the far end of the house."Tell Lady Arabella," said the Duke without turning round, "that the child will be kept where the fire is."The candles burned down and were changed. Somewhere about 3:00, the coughing eased, and Thomas slept, and Lydia did not dare to move. The Duke watched her face by the light of the fire. He had never, in 18 months, looked at it properly."You have done this before," he said quietly."My father was a physician in York, Your Grace. He believed in kettles, and he distrusted lancets for children. He would not have let the doctor bleed him, and I hope you will not either.""I shall not," said the Duke.The doctor came at 6:00, wet to the skin, and found a sleeping boy with an easy breath and a governess who had done everything he would have ordered. He left a draught of ipecacuanha to be given if the cough returned, said that he had never bled a child of five and did not propose to begin, and went down to his breakfast.Lydia had not meant to sleep. She woke in the gray light with her head against the wing of the chair, and a man's coat of dark blue cloth laid over her, and the Duke standing at the window with his back to the room and his daughter asleep in his arms.