Page 90 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“Has she been conscious?”

“In and out. She recognized me this morning, but she was confused. She asked something.” Rachel stopped. “She was confused. She kept saying words I couldn’t quite make out.”

He nodded once and opened the door. The room was dim, the curtains half-drawn against the daylight, warm from the fire someone had built up in the grate. Anna was in bed with her hair loose and pale against the pillow, curly and matted with sweat. Her face was the color of the white linen, her eyes closed tight. Frederick crossed to her bedside, unable to stay away any longer.

He stood and looked at her. He watched the shallow rise and fall of her breathing, her hands lying limp and still on the coverlet in a way that Anna’s hands never were. Something in his chest cracked open at the vulnerability, at seeing her like this.

This poor angel…

He sat in the chair drawn up beside the bed. The cloth in the basin beside it was still damp. Rachel had been doing this already. He wrung it out and folded it without being asked and laid it carefully across Anna’s forehead. Her brows drew together faintly at the coolness, but she did not wake. She did not make a sound.

“She needs to drink when she’s able,” he said, noting the cup on the table beside the basin. “Keep the cloth cool. How long between the physician’s visits?”

“I do not know. Like I said, he will come back tonight, sooner if…”

“If she worsens.”

“Yes.”

He nodded again, kept his eyes on Anna, and said nothing else. There was nothing else to say and everything to do. He would not leave her. He would see her through this.

She will be alright.

He heard Rachel sit down in the chair near the window, and for a while the room was quiet except for the fire and the sound of Anna’s breathing. Frederick continued to sit at her bedside and counted the breaths as if it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

“Frederick.”

He looked up. Rachel was watching him closely, and something in her face shifted into recognition. He knew that look, which she had been giving him since she was born. Her eyes moved from him to Anna and back again, and her expression softened.

“You should have told me,” she said quietly.

He held her gaze for a moment. “Rachel?—”

“Sooner. You should have told me sooner.” She wasn’t accusing him. Rachel was too kind and gentle for that. She looked down at her hands. “I was… I have been so caught up in my own…” She pressed her lips together.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been. But I see it now, Frederick.” She looked back at him. “I see it plainly.”

Frederick said nothing. He just looked back at Anna instead. Rachel did not press him further, and they sat in silence. He took the cloth and dabbed her forehead, adjusted her covers when she seemed uncomfortable. After a while, Rachel rose. She moved to the door, and he thought she was leaving to find herself some tea or rest, but she paused with her hand on the frame and turned back.

“When I was small,” she said quietly, “and I was ill. You used to sit with me.” He was looking at her now; her expression was very even, very deliberate. “You used to talk to me. About nothing in particular. What you’d seen in the park, or what you were reading. I don’t know if I always understood what you were saying, but it helped.” She paused. “The physician said that sometimes they can hear, even when they can’t answer.”

She held his gaze for one moment longer. Then she went out and pulled the door quietly closed behind her. Frederick sat in the silence she left, and looked at Anna’s face against the pillow. She had turned on her side and seemed to be pained. It tore at him.

Perhaps my sister is right.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He took a deep breath, and after a moment, he began to speak.

“The park was very crowded yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I went early to avoid it but was detained on the way. I bumped into an associate and when I began my stroll, the fashionable hour began. It was not at all leisurely and I cut it short…” He paused. “Percy has taken up residence on the good chair in the study again. He just won’t stay on the floor, even when I have pillows set for him. It is beneath him I suppose. I have told him three times this week that it is not his chair. He does not appear to believe me. I’m not certain I believe it myself anymore…”

He watched her face. She did not wake. Her breathing continued, shallow and steady.

My Venus.

“There was a boy in the park feeding the pigeons I recall,” he said after a moment. “He threw the bread too hard and fell over, right onto his face. He was entirely unhurt; luckily it was on the grass, but he was furious about it. His governess helped him up, and he stood covered in grass, and I thought?—”

He stopped.