"The compound he describes draws out deep infection from tissue that has become resistant to conventional treatment," she continued. "Which is precisely my husband's situation. The physicians who have treated him have been using the wrong method for the wrong type of infection consistently for eleven years." She looked at Cranbrook. "I will need one week. If, at the end of one week, my husband shows significant, visible improvement, your court order will be built on a false premise, and I will make that clear in any proceeding you bring."
The earl looked at her. He looked at Arthur. Arthur was watching Daphne with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
"Five days," said Cranbrook, needing to win something. "And the physician stays in the house."
She glanced at Arthur. He gave the smallest nod.
"Five days," she said. "Dr. Felton is welcome. The earl and my father are not."
That night, she administered the first application of the compound. Arthur sat in the chair by his fire and let her work without complaint, which she chose to take as a vote of confidence.
"You did not tell me you were working on this," he said quietly.
"I did not want to raise your hopes before I was certain," she said.
"And are you certain now?"
She looked up at him. She thought about three weeks of cramped Latin at two in the morning, about the absolute clarity she had felt when she read that passage for the third time.
"Yes," she said. "I am."
He looked at her for a moment. "All right," he said simply, and turned so she could reach the wound site.
She worked carefully. He was quiet. Outside, the November wind pressed against the windows, and she was aware with every careful movement that the next five days would decide a great deal more than a court order.
She did not sleep much. The compound required twice-daily applications. She charted everything: the wound's appearance, the fever's behavior, the reduction of the persistent heat around the infection site.
By the second day, the difference was clear—not dramatic, not the way cures appeared in novels, but in the specific, measurable way of real medicine: less redness at the wound's edge, the fever lower by evening, his face slightly less drawn.
By the third day, he walked the length of the upper corridor without stopping.
By the fourth evening, he came down to dinner without his cane.
On the morning of the fifth day, Dr. Felton examined the wound in complete silence for four minutes. Then he cleared his throat and said the improvement was, medically speaking, remarkable. That the infection appeared to be responding to a treatment he was not familiar with and would like to examine further. That he would need to note in his records that the Duke was demonstrably not incapacitated.
Daphne thanked him, gave him a copy of her notes and a transcription of the relevant passages from the journal, and went to find Arthur.
Five
She found him in the garden.
She had gone first to the library, then to his study, then to the drawing room, where the chairs now faced the right window. Mrs. Holt told her with a carefully neutral expression that His Grace was in the south garden. Daphne pulled her shawl around her shoulders and went outside.
The late November morning held a thin, pale kind of sunlight that made every edge very sharp and cast long shadows. The frost had melted from the grass. At the center of the south garden's path, half-sheltered by a bare climbing rose that still held a few brown hips, stood a stone bench. It was the same shape as the bench on the Bath terrace, she thought, though this one was older and worn smoother.
Arthur was not sitting. He was standing near it, his weight carried easily on both feet—the constant, careful management she had watched him perform for weeks simply gone. He heard the garden door and turned, and the winter light fell across his face, and she saw what was different.
She had grown used to his face, or thought she had, but what she had grown used to was his face under the weight of his illness: the controlled reserve, the steady endurance of a man bracing constantly against something. What stood in front of her now was the same face with something lifted away from it. He looked like a man who had stopped waiting for the worst.
She walked down the path toward him. Neither of them spoke until she was close.
"Dr. Felton has confirmed what I already knew," she said.
"Yes," he said. "He told me." A pause. "As did Mrs. Holt, and Thomas, who overheard and then told the footman."
"So the whole house knows."
"The whole house has known for three days that you were going to save me," he said. "They were simply waiting for the formality."
She looked at the stone bench. She looked back at him. "Cranbrook and my father?" she asked.
"Left this morning, once the doctor's assessment was clear." Something moved in his expression. "They will not be back. My solicitor is already filing the legal response to any future challenge. Cranbrook has no grounds." He paused. "Your notes, by the way, were extraordinary. Dr. Felton asked if he might share them with the Royal Society."
"He may," she said. "The research belongs to Dr. Holden. I only applied it."