The Chadwick Ring Read online

  A small boy perched on a stool beside the bed, guarding a basin and a pitcher of tepid water, but it was the figure in the bed that captured Ginevra’s attention, a youth who tossed restlessly in his sleep. His long sandy hair fell over his flushed face while his boy-into-man’s body twitched beneath its sweat-stained nightshirt. “Bysshe, Bysshe,” she murmured helplessly, watching his swollen red tongue lick at his pale, parched lips as he gasped for air. She did not need to touch him to know that he burned with fever.

  The little boy dampened a napkin in the basin and with great care dabbed it at Bysshe’s lips. Ginevra smiled involuntarily at his stern concentration, and she said, “You it must be Jamie. Did your grandmother show you how to do that?”

  The boy jumped up, startled, his eyes wide and questioning. “Are you Ginnie?” he asked.

  Ginevra blinked. “Yes. How did you know?”

  Jamie tilted his head toward Bysshe. “He called for you. I wanted to go fetch you at the big house, but Gran said she needed me to help her here.” He grinned with relief. “I’m glad you’ve come. Gran has been worried.”

  He began to moisten the cloth once more, and Ginevra said, “Here, let me do it.” She sat on the stool and proceeded to bathe Bysshe’s hot, dry face. Some of the buttons of his nightshirt were undone, and beneath the fine sprinkling of new hair on his chest she could see that the trunk of his body was covered with a bright red rash. Scarlet fever. She knew the signs from an epidemic that had begun among the pupils of a dame-school near Bryant House and had then passed to almost every tenant family on the surrounding farms. She had been up for days, nursing the sick, and she knew that there was very little that could be done except to make the patient comfortable—that, and pray that the disease would not become virulent and settle in the ears, or worse, the heart. She glanced at Jamie and quailed as she thought of the risk Mrs. Harrison was taking with her grandson. “It’s good of you to want to help,” she said carefully, “but aren’t you afraid of becoming ill yourself?”

  He regarded her with a look oddly dignified for his six years. “No. Gran says I already had the fever when I was little.”

  Ginevra nodded. Sometimes infants weathered the disease better than anyone else. “That’s good. So did I.” After a moment she continued, “Jamie, I want you to do something for me. Outside the house you’ll find a lady in a green dress. Her name is Emma. Please tell her that I need her. Then go see if your grandmother wants you. I think she has your lunch ready.”

  When the little boy had scampered away, Ginevra returned her attention to Bysshe. She unfastened the remaining buttons of his nightshirt and pulled the soft fabric away from his shoulders. With smooth, soothing strokes she sponged his hot, reddened skin, and she observed with dismay that the water seemed to evaporate almost immediately. As she dipped the napkin into the last of the lukewarm liquid, she wondered fleetingly if she could sell her soul for some chips of ice; at the moment it seemed a fair exchange.

  As she bathed Bysshe, Ginevra thought again how unlike her husband his younger son was. With his fair coloring, short nose, and childishly round face, the boy must resemble his father’s first wife; she could see no sign of the marquess in him. When she tried to turn his soft chin so that she could reach beneath his thick, unruly straight hair, Ginevra noticed with surprise that Bysshe wore something around his neck, some medallion or piece of jewelry. Whatever the ornament was, his throes had caused it to fall beneath him, and the ribbon was cutting into his throat, irritating the rash. She slid one arm under his back to lift him, no easy task now that he had grown so, and with her other hand she pulled the long ribbon free. The pendant, she discovered with a frown, was a large gold locket. She wondered if it contained a picture of his long-dead mother, and curiosity made her unfasten the catch. When she opened the engraved leaves, she found herself gazing at an exquisite miniature painted on ivory, the portrait of a young girl in the first blush of maturity, her honey-colored hair falling artlessly over her bare shoulders, just brushing the rise of her breasts revealed by her low-cut pink gown.

  It was not Maria Glover. Ginevra now recognized the locket as the keepsake she had sent to Tom when their betrothal was officially announced.

  She bit her lip, puzzled and pensive. In the traumatic days following Tom’s death, she had forgotten all about the miniature, even when she sent her ring back to Lord Chadwick. She wondered how Bysshe had come to wear it. Why should he want to? As she pondered, the boy’s lids suddenly flew open and he stared up at her with fever-bright brown eyes. His face twisted into a troubled scowl, and he lifted one hand weakly to stroke her cheek.

  The effort seemed too much for him; his arm fell back to his side. “Ginnie,” he croaked, “this time ... this time you’re not a dream.”

  Ginevra’s eyebrows rose sharply, but she answered quietly, “No, Bysshe, I’m not a dream.”

  He sighed hoarsely and relaxed. “I knew ... you’d come to me,” he murmured, swallowing painfully. “I knew the old woman was ... wrong. You wouldn’t ... you couldn’t be ... with ... with him,” His eyes drooped shut and he drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

  When Emma and Mrs. Harrison appeared at the doorway, Emma picked up the near-empty pitcher and vanished back into the kitchen to draw fresh water. Mrs. Harrison stood twisting her apron nervously. She asked, “Was I wrong to let him stay here, Miss Ginnie? He told me there was some kind of quarantine laid on his school and if he went back there he’d have to stay all summer. Should I have made him go back? It wasn’t my place, and he didn’t seem to think there was any danger, and ... and sometimes it does get lonely here, with just Jamie for company.”

  Ginevra shook her head impatiently. “No, of course you weren’t wrong, Mrs. Harrison. If anyone was at fault, it was Bysshe, for leaving Harrow, although I expect he will fare better here, away from everybody, than he would in a crowded infirmary.”

  “He didn’t seem sick at all when he first arrived,” the woman continued. “He was happy and laughing. He said he hated school and it felt good just to get away, even if it did mean riding through a downpour. But ...” Here she hesitated and regarded Ginevra uncertainly. “The strangest thing happened, I hardly know how to credit it. It must have been some kind of awful mistake. Master Bysshe, he was teasing and joking—it did me good to hear my Jamie laughing at his pranks—then he made some remark about not being anxious to make the acquaintance of his new stepmother, her being a—begging your pardon, miss—a London tart.” She colored furiously at Ginevra’s astonished glance. “I know he didn’t mean anything by it—boys do have the strangest notion of what’s funny—but I lit right into him. I told him I didn’t care if he was a viscount now that his brother was gone, he had no cause to speak that way about a decent woman, especially not since she was an old friend of his. When he asked me who I meant, I said to him, ‘Why, Miss Ginnie, of course,’ and for the longest time he just stared at me as if I was addlepated. Then he stormed out into the rain again, and when he came back two hours later, he was feverish.”

  Ginevra blanched as she listened to this recital. When Mrs. Harrison finished, for a long moment the only sound in the musty room was the rasp of Bysshe’s labored breathing. Ginevra looked down at him and choked, “My God, he didn’t know.”

  “No, miss,” the woman said impassively.

  Ginevra inhaled deeply, too shocked to feel anything beyond an icy numbness. She gazed at the youth lying on the bed. He had grown since she last saw him, he must be close to six feet tall now, but even the loose nightshirt could not disguise the adolescent thinness of his body. Bysshe, her old friend—her new stepson. Why hadn’t Lord Chadwick told him? Was it because he suspected! that his son was no more prepared to accept the altered relationship than Ginevra was? She sighed, “Thank you for telling me,” and she dipped the napkin into the basin again.

  She was still at Bysshe’s side two days later. Emma and the coachman had returned to Queenshaven to fetch the servants and supplies necessary to make Dowerwood h
abitable during Bysshe’s convalescence, but Ginevra did not stir from the room, even to sleep. She drowsed in an armchair and prayed for his fever to break. When it gave: no sign of doing so, and more ominously, when Bysshe began to complain that his ear pained him, Ginevra asked Mrs. Harrison to send someone to the nearest town to find a physician.

  The woman shook her head in disgust. “He’ll not come, miss. He hates to leave the gin shops, even to tend those who need him. And believe me, the young master would be better off without the kind of treatment that one would give him. A real toper, he is.”

  Ginevra said wearily, “We have to try. All I can do is give Bysshe sponge baths and dose him with laudanum if the pain gets too bad. Surely even a bad doctor could do more for him than that.”

  But as soon as the man appeared, Ginevra regretted calling him. He was old and cadaverous, dressed in a rusty black frock coat that reeked of ragwater and strong snuff and other foul odors Ginevra preferred not to identify. As Mrs. Harrison had predicted, he was drunk and unclean and surly because he had been summoned to a “run-down old farm.” The nails of his palsied hands were filthy, and they ran roughly over Bysshe in the most cursory of examinations, terrifying the boy in his weakened state. When the man took from his ancient medical bag a knife to bleed Bysshe for his fever, Ginevra saw with disgust that the blade was still stained with dried blood from his last patient. “Stop!” she ordered, just as he moved to slit the vein. “I don’t want you to touch him.”

  He turned on her with a resentful glare. “If you won’t let me go about my business, why did you drag me here?”

  “There must be some way to treat him without bleeding him. He’s already very weak.”

  “Interfering female,” the man muttered querulously. “Bleeding and purging, that’s the cure for everything. I ought to know: I’ve been a doctor these thirty years and more. I served on the staff of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Do you think I’ll let some silly chit order me about?”

  Behind him Mrs. Harrison snapped, “Mind your tongue, you ... you swill-bellied old cabbage head. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  The physician regarded her balefully; then he turned his bleary eye on Ginevra, noting her stained dress and disheveled hair. He shrugged insolently. “Who’s she? Some young lightskirt, no doubt, hiding away from her keeper. Everyone knows the quality ain’t been near this place in years.” He grabbed Bysshe’s arm again. “Now, let me get on with this, since you’ve dragged me all this way. You ought to be grateful I’ve come, a man with my qualifications.”

  Once again Ginevra stayed his hand. “I want you to leave him alone,” she said quietly but firmly, and unconsciously she straightened her shoulders with a creditable imitation of her husband’s supercilious air. “You’ll be paid for your time, never fear. I shall see that you are recompensed as befits a man of your remarkable ... credentials.” She paused. “St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, did you say? I believe my father told me about it once. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but is that not the place where patients are required to deposit a burial fee of some nineteen shillings, refundable in the unlikely event that they recover?”

  The man’s visage paled, then reddened fiercely. “Just who do you think you are, to talk to me that way?”

  Ginevra smiled coolly, and she was wryly aware of making use of her new rank for the first time. “I am the Marchioness of Chadwick,” she said, “and I serve notice to you now, before witnesses, that in future, should you dare to practice your quackery on any of my people, whether here or at Queenshaven, I will have you hounded from the district like the mountebank you are.” She nodded curtly and turned away. As soon as the door slammed behind the departing physician, she began to tremble.

  From the bed Bysshe regarded her with glassy eyes and chuckled weakly, “You tell him, Ginnie.” Then he tugged at his earlobe.

  After Ginevra had once again forced the bitter tincture of opium down the boy’s swollen throat, she asked Mrs. Harrison, “How does it happen that an incompetent sot like that is able to maintain a practice?”

  The woman sighed in resignation. “The war, milady. We had a good doctor—young he was, and quick—but he died in Belgium, and there was no one to take his place, except ... well, you see what we ended with.” Her faded eyes strayed to the sleeping youth. “I don’t know what’s going to become of him if we don’t get someone soon who can help him.”

  Ginevra nodded, following her gaze. Like most countrywomen of her class, she was skilled enough to bind minor injuries, to treat common ailments, but she had no illusions about her capabilities in the face of life-threatening infection. Bysshe needed a physician, a good one, and he needed him at once. If anything happened to the boy, she would never be able to face his father again.

  She looked up at Mrs. Harrison, and her countenance hardened with determination. “Find me a pen and paper,” she said, “and recruit someone to serve as outrider. I need to send a message to Lord Chadwick.”

  Richard Glover, Lord Chadwick, peeled off his grey chamois gloves and passed them to the drowsy butler, who already held his hat and rain-spattered cape. With a terse nod the marquess dismissed the man and strode impatiently into his study, where he quickly located the brandy decanter and sloshed some of that vivifying liquid into a glass, heedless of the excess trickling down to stain the marquetry of the Chippendale table. He had longed for that drink all evening. He gulped down the brandy and regarded the empty glass ruefully as he flopped into the chair behind his desk. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to become a hopeless tosspot before he was forty, a drunken degenerate without any of the mitigating charms of youth, like some of the highborn louts he had observed tonight at Little Harry’s. As was his practice these days, he had remained aloof from the proceedings, but while he watched the diplomat he had escorted there—bald, belching, his overblown body constricted by tight stays—he had wondered with carefully masked distaste if the same sort of future awaited him; if he would ever find himself sprawled in some garish parlor, his fat sweaty hands groping moistly over the flimsily clad body of some young Paphian whose heavy face paint only partly concealed her disgust at what circumstances forced her to do. No doubt once the ambassador would have denied that he could sink to such depths, just as that girl’s parents would have strangled her in her cradle rather than allow her to become a whore before she was even as old as Ginevra.

  With a shudder of rage at himself and the world, Chadwick flung the empty brandy snifter into the low fire in the fireplace. For just a second the dregs of his whiskey flared and sizzled in the flames, and the bright new gaslight in the room made the shattered glass on the hearth sparkle mockingly at him.

  Nowadays he preferred his dissipations to be ... private, but he had only himself to blame for the continuing forays onto the town. Aeons before, when he was young, just after he was invalided from the Navy, he had been flattered when he was approached by members of the War Ministry, with their request that he help them ferret out the foreign agents hidden among the hordes of genuine émigrés resident in London. He had the perfect cover: he was a rich and aristocratic rakehell with no known connection to diplomatic circles, a man who could drink and wench and still remain alert for any furtive signal or unwary word. He had been seduced by the opportunity to serve his country now that his accession to the title made it impossible to return to the military, and he had thought privately that the assignment might help him in his quest to spirit his mother out of France. Besides, the job had sounded amusing, without the responsibilities of an official position. Over the years he had performed his duties with reasonable success, cynically aware that most likely he would have lived much the same way even had not the war given him an excuse to do so. He circulated as easily through the cockpits of Charing Cross as he did through White’s or Almack’s, and he listened with affected insouciance to all around him, watching with deceptively lazy blue eyes that missed nothing. Sometimes he had been required to distract suspects by taking them along with him as he m
oved not only among the Carlton House set but also into the haunts of the less savory denizens of the city. He had accepted such tasks as part of his duty to his sovereign, but now that the wars were at long last over and the Pax Britannica had dawned, when the foreign minister requested that he continue to escort visiting dignitaries on those dubious tours, Chadwick felt less like a loyal subject and more like a highborn pimp.

  He was going to have to put an end to it. He was going to have to tell Castlereagh that henceforth he would serve his liege in the accepted fashion by occasionally assuming his seat in the House of Lords; that he intended to settle down to a life of pompous mediocrity as a country squire, devoting his attention to the growing of crops and the welfare of his tenants, living in unremarkable domesticity with his young wife.

  Chadwick leaned back in his chair, booted feet resting on the edge of the desk, and he rubbed the bridge of his long nose and thought of Ginevra. A week had passed since he left her crying on her bed, a week during which he had cursed first her and then himself, for not turning back at the door to comfort her. How much less there would be to regret if only he had not left her! He was haunted by the memory of her wide gold eyes as she asked him timorously whether he would be seeing his mistress, and he despised himself for the ease with which he had wounded her with his taunting reply. She was not a worthy opponent. She was a confused and frightened child, trying desperately to cope with the situation she had been flung into, and he had been less than a man to take pleasure in hurting her.

  He could not understand his reactions. He had never deliberately harmed a woman before, not even Maria, who had certainly given him justification; he had never cared enough about any woman to want to strike out at her, no matter what she did to him. Whenever a relationship had soured, he terminated it and dismissed the woman from his mind.