Three
High society, upon learning that the rotting duke had taken a wife, reacted the way high society always reacted to unexpected things: with collective, loud disapproval. Invitations did not arrive. Neighbors left cards without calling. At a church service in the village, two women in the pew behind Daphne whispered that the new duchess would be a widow before the spring. She smiled at them on the way out; they looked away.
The dismissal had one significant advantage: it left her with a great deal of uninterrupted time.
Tucked behind the medical texts on the library's second floor, she found what most visitors to Blackwood Hall had clearly treated as untouchable: a collection of old apothecary journals bound in cracked leather, filled with cramped handwriting in English and Latin.
Daphne had loved medicine since she was twelve, when her mother's physician visited weekly, and she had read every book he left behind. It was not a fashionable interest; her father had called it peculiar. She had continued anyway.
The journals were slow going. Her Latin was good, but not perfect, and some of the compounds required cross-referencing with three other texts before she understood what she was reading. She began keeping notes in a small leather book, filling it with observations, questions, the names of plants, and their properties.
She worked each morning and each afternoon, and in the evenings, she brought her notes to dinner and asked Arthur questions across the table. He answered with genuine engagement; he had studied some natural philosophy at Cambridge before the war. Their dinners stretched long. She told herself it was because the conversation was useful.
In the fourth week of November, his wound flared.
She heard it first: the rapid steps of Mrs. Holt, the clipped voices of people managing something they did not want to alarm anyone with. She was in the library when it started; she was at his bedroom door in four minutes.
The valet tried to stop her. "His Grace has asked not to be disturbed."
"Yes, I imagine he has," she said pleasantly, and walked past him.
Arthur was in bed, propped against the pillows, pale and sheened with fever, his jaw set in the expression of a man enduring something he had decided not to complain about.
"You should not be in here," he said.
"Almost certainly," she agreed.
She sat down beside him and opened the topmost journal. "How long has it been like this?"
"Two days," said the valet quietly.
"Since before he told me," she said, not quite to anyone, then directly at Arthur: "The physicians who have treated you—what have they used?"
He told her. She listened with the focused patience she gave difficult Latin texts. And as he described the treatments, something tightened in her chest.
The things they had used were wrong—not merely unhelpful, but actively harmful. Certain poultices she had read about, when applied to deep tissue wounds over long periods, could impede the very healing they claimed to encourage. They had been slowing him down for years.
She did not say this yet; she needed to be certain first.
"Sit still," she told him instead, and began unwrapping the outer bandaging with careful hands.
"I do not require—"
"Arthur." She looked up at him. "I am trying to help you. Please cooperate."
He looked at her. Something flickered in his expression—surprise at the use of his name, and then something else, quieter. He sat still.
She worked methodically, inspecting the wound, comparing what she observed against her notes. She rewrapped it cleanly, more firmly than before.
"You should rest," she told him.
"I am already in bed," he pointed out.
"Rest with intention," she said. "Sleep if you can."
She gathered her books.
"Daphne."
She stopped. He rarely said her name; when he did, it had a particular quietness, like he was being careful with it.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked.
She looked at him in the candlelight—at the tired, honest face of a man who had managed his pain alone for years and had not expected help from anyone.
"Because you did not leave me to the earl," she said simply, "and because I don't intend to leave you to this."