Her Highland Fling (13 page)

“I
do
admire him,” she admitted, her mind returning reluctantly to the present. “I just do not want him to see me looking like . . .” Clare glanced down at her grass-stained skirts and picked at a twig that had become lodged in the fabric. “Well, like this.”

Lucy frowned. “I scarcely think his admiration should be swayed by a little dirt.”

“And you didn’t look like that before you dove behind that bush,” Geoffrey pointed out. “Stunning bit of acrobatics, though. You ought to apply to the circus, sis.”

“I didn’t dive behind the bush.” Clare battled an exasperated sigh. She couldn’t expect either of them to understand. Lucy still flitted through life not caring if her hair was falling down. Such obliviousness was sure to give her trouble when she came out next year. Clare herself couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been acutely aware of every hair in its place, every laugh carefully cultivated.

And Geoffrey was . . . well . . .
Geoffrey
.

Loud, male, and far too crude for polite company.

As a child, the pronounced differences between herself and her siblings had often made her wonder whether perhaps she had been a foundling, discovered in a basket on the front steps of her parents’ Mayfair home. She loved her siblings, but who wouldn’t sometimes squirm in embarrassment over such a family?

And what young woman wouldn’t dream of a dashing duke, destined to take her away from it all and install her within the walls of his country estate?

Clare took a step, but as her toe connected with the ground, the pain in her right ankle punched through the annoyance of her brother’s banter. “Oh,” she breathed. And then, as she tried another step, “
Ow
! I . . . I must have twisted my ankle when I fell.”

“I still say you dove,” Geoffrey said with a smirk.

Lucy looked down with a frown. “Why didn’t you say something?” she scolded. “Can you put any weight on it at all?”

“I didn’t realize at first.” Indeed, Clare’s mind had been too much on the threat of her looming social ruin to consider what damage had been done to her person. “And I am sure I can walk on it. Just give me a moment to catch my breath.”

She somehow made her way to a nearby bench, ducks and geese scattering like ninepins. By the time she sat down, she was gasping in pain and battling tears. As she slid off her dainty silk slipper, all three of them peered down at her stocking-encased foot with collective indrawn breaths. Geoffrey loosened an impressed whistle. “Good God, sis. That thing is swelling faster than a prick at a bawdy show.”

“Geoffrey!” Clare’s ears stung in embarrassment, though she had to imagine it was an apt description for the swollen contours of her foot. “This is not Eton, we are not your friends, and that will be
quite
enough.”

“Don’t you have Lady Austerley’s ball tonight?” Lucy asked, her blue eyes sympathetic. “I can’t imagine you can attend like this. In fact, I feel quite sure we ought to carry you home and call for the doctor, straightaway.”

But Clare’s mind was already tilting in a far different direction. This evening’s ball hadn’t even crossed her mind when she had been thinking of the pain, but now she glared down at her disloyal ankle.
No, no, no.
This could not be happening. Not when she was convinced Mr. Alban would seek her out for more than just a single dance tonight.

It didn’t hurt so much when she was sitting.

Surely
it would be better in an hour or so.

“Of course I can go.” Clare struggled to slip her shoe back on, determined to let neither doubts nor bodily deficiency dissuade her. “Just help me home, and don’t tell Mother,” she added, “and everything will be fine.”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

“Y
ou belong in bed, not in a ballroom.”

Dr. Daniel Merial chased this medical opinion with his most impressive glower and prayed his patient would see reason. He’d been summoned to No. 36 Berkeley Square by a furtive note, delivered to the morgue at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He’d come immediately, no matter that he’d been forced to abandon a body lying half dissected on the theater table. The deceased was of unusual height and abnormal bone density, and a cataloging of the body’s physical findings would have lent itself well to a paper on the subject.

But it was an opportunity now lost.

The physician who’d taken over the case had seemed far more interested in helping the students position the corpse into grotesque, suggestive poses than locating a pencil to record his findings. It irked Daniel to turn a perfectly interesting cadaver over to a fool like that, but St. Bart’s was full of pompous young doctors whose positions had been secured by wealthy fathers willing to contribute to a new hospital wing, rather than any clear demonstration of intelligence. Unlike them,
he
needed to supplement his meager instructor’s salary by serving as a personal physician to the wealthy and cantankerous, at the beck and call of London’s elite.

Though this patient, in particular, was proving a very troublesome case.

Lady Austerley’s lips thinned—if indeed, an aging dowager countess’s lip could thin any more than nature already commanded. “Cancelling my annual ball is not an option, Dr. Merial. It is seven o’clock already. Half of London will be summoning their coaches, and the other half will be lamenting their lack of an invitation.” She rubbed her gnarled hands together. “Now, surely you have some more of that marvelous medication. It helped so much the last time you gave it to me.”

Daniel sighed, suspecting this irksome venture could be explained by little more than an old lady’s lonely pride. It had not escaped his notice that he was one of Lady Austerley’s most frequent—indeed, one of her only—visitors. Her husband was long dead, and their forty-year union had not been blessed with children. The cousin who had inherited her husband’s title never came to call. She’d outlived her friends, and now she seemed determined to outlive her heart.

“The belladonna extract is a temporary fix, at best,” he warned, “and may well do more damage to your heart in the long term. What you
need
is rest, and plenty of it.”

“But I
am
resting.” Lady Austerley offered him a smile, one that showed her false ivory teeth in all their preternatural glory. “You see, I am lying down on the bed while my maid curls my hair.” As if offering testimony to this nonsensical thought, the pink-cheeked maid—who’d been casting him dream-filled glances since his arrival—pulled the curling tongs from her mistress’s thinning gray hair with an audible hiss.

“And I promise not to dance,” the countess continued, “if you would but leave a draught or two, enough to get me through this evening.”

Daniel was sorely tempted to leave her laudanum instead, but he wasn’t sure he had the heart to deceive her into sleep. Lady Austerley could be difficult, but she had also been his first substantial client in London. Her remarkable and unexpected patronage had opened the doors of his fledgling practice, and he was only now beginning to attract the occasional notice of other well-connected clients.

But that didn’t mean she actually
listened
to him.

His client might be lying down in bed, but she was also already dressed for her ball, swaddled in a gown of gold brocade that at turns threatened to asphyxiate and dazzle. The room should have smelled of camphor, but instead it smelled of French perfume and the faint, acrid scent of burning hair. “I told you weeks ago you were making yourself ill, Lady Austerley.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “You ought to have cancelled the event then. Instead, you’ve exhausted yourself with preparations.”

“You did tell me my remaining time fell on the side of months, rather than years, did you not?” At his nod, she shrugged her thin shoulders—unapologetically, to Daniel’s mind. “I am determined to make my last days memorable and give them all something they won’t soon forget. What was that bit of Latin you quoted for me?”

Her expectant pause made him want to fidget.
“Quam bene vivas referre, non quam diu,”
he admitted reluctantly.

It is how well you live that matters, not how long.

He’d offered her the phrase soon after it became clear her condition was carrying her surely and steadily toward the grave. But he’d meant to encourage her to reflect on the life she had led. He’d certainly not intended it to be a dictum for how she should go on.

Her frown shifted to a wrinkled smile. “There, you see?” she beamed, quite pleased with herself. “I am just following my doctor’s orders.”

“Lady Austerley, you must know you are shortening the time you have left by the very choices you make now. You could easily suffer another fainting spell tonight, even with the medication,” he warned. “You were fortunate your maid was attending you during your bath this afternoon when the latest one struck, or you might have drowned. This is the second attack you’ve experienced this week, is it not?”

The dowager countess nodded innocently.

“My lady is perhaps forgetting several spells,” the maid piped up. “By my count, it is the fourth such episode since Monday.”

Lady Austerley turned her gimlet glare on the younger woman. “Am I to count higher mathematics among your skills as my lady’s maid now? I cannot believe you bothered our beleaguered doctor with that note. I imagine it had as much to do with
you
wishing to see him again as any need for me to. You’ve been mooning over him for months.”

The poor maid blushed, but not before her eyes darted tellingly in Daniel’s direction. “I was thinking only of your health, my lady.”

“Hrmmph.” Lady Austerley lifted the quizzing glass she always kept around her neck, and he felt the sting of the older woman’s visual dissection. “Not that I blame you,” she added, a wrinkled smile playing about her lips. “He’s a stunning specimen, with all that thick, dark hair and those soulful brown eyes. Makes an old woman’s heart flutter, even one who’s heart is just barely ticking along. Truth be told, he puts these new London bucks to shame.”

Daniel raised a brow, determined to circle this conversation away from the issue of whether or not he was considered attractive to the female species and back around to the medical issue at hand. “Lady Austerley,” he said sternly.

But she was not yet through. She lowered her lens and struggled to a sitting position as the maid plumped her pillow. “It’s his heart that makes him different, though. Heart of gold, to come rushing to an old lady’s aid like this. These young men today can’t be bothered to look further than their phaetons for entertainment.”

Daniel fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“I would have you come to the ball tonight and put my theory to the test, Dr. Merial.” Lady Austerley lifted her quizzing glass again. “Yes, yes, my personal physician in attendance. That would be just the thing to show them all.”

Daniel breathed in through his nose. Show them what, precisely? Her loss of sanity? He was tempted to dismiss her nattering as the beginnings of dementia. But alas, he knew there was nothing at all wrong with Lady Austerley’s head. She was as lucid as a lark.

He might have stood a better chance at changing her mind if she wasn’t.

“It sounds as though your attacks are increasing in frequency, as I predicted they would. Your heart is failing. You should be confined to your bed, if not to ward off these periods of syncope, to at least ensure when they occur you do not risk falling and causing more serious injury.” He took in the dowager countess’s impossibly straight back. “And didn’t I advise against wearing a corset? You cannot afford to restrict your breathing further.”

Lady Austerley waved a fist, the ropey veins crisscrossing the backs of her hands like twisted paths to truth. “I cannot have a ball without a corset, and as I’ve already said, I refuse to entertain the notion of cancelling the event. I must carry on, at least until tonight is behind me. Which is why I need you there, in case I suffer another spell.”

“I cannot prevent these attacks,” he informed her gravely. “I can only advise you on what you must do to reduce their frequency.”

“Perhaps you cannot prevent them, but I will feel better knowing you are there.” She tossed a bemused look at her maid, who was still stargazing in Daniel’s direction. “And if I should be so unfortunate as to feel off balance again, surely if you are already present, we can manage another episode with far less drama than this afternoon’s little spell has entailed.”

The maid blushed further and tucked her head.

Daniel hesitated. He enjoyed spending time with the dowager countess, but he already had plans for this evening, plans that involved patients who actually
listened
to him—namely, the unfinished cadaver he’d left lying prone on the theater table. If he agreed to this farce of an idea, he would need to slip back to his rooms now to bathe and dress instead of returning to the morgue. He’d also planned another phase of his experiment for later this evening, testing varying doses of a promising new compound called
chloroform
with the anesthetic regulator he was developing. Losing valuable hours at a ball was not high on his list of priorities.

Although, if he were brutally honest, tonight’s event might benefit him in the long run. He was very afraid Lady Austerley might not live to see Christmas. He would regret the eventual loss of that income, though not as much as he would regret the loss of her sometimes prickly friendship. Tonight would be an opportunity for introductions to future clients, if nothing else.

The countess leaned back against her mountain of plush pillows, and her hand crept out to grab his own. Her frail touch was a shock. He could feel her thready pulse, beating faintly through her bones, hinting at coming trouble. “I would ask this of you, Dr. Merial. As a favor to a scared old lady whose heart needs to last through at least one more ball.”

Daniel swallowed his misgivings. How could he say no to such a request?

She had no family to speak of, no remaining close friends. She was lonely and ailing, and he’d been unable to refuse the dowager countess anything since their first chance meeting, when she’d fainted dead away in St. Paul’s Cathedral and he’d been the only one with enough sense to come to her aid. He squeezed her hand. “If it would ease your mind.”