Page 62 of His Illegitimate Duchess

“My lady is unwell. I think you should send for a doctor.”

Colin looked down and saw his hand holding the door knob. He had no recollection of standing up or walking to the door.

“White!” he yelled through the door he had thrown open. “White!”

Stevenson calmly walked up to the bell pull and rang for the butler.

“What happened? When?” Colin asked Mary angrily.

“Last night, as she got ready for bed, she was… agitated, ” Mary said with a look that told him that she knew everything.

“But this morning, when I didn’t find her in her dressing room, I went into the room, and she was in bed, burning up, and I couldn’t wake her,” Mary’s voice broke with genuine anguish and Colin recognized his anger for what it really was, a twin feeling to Mary’s.

“You rang, Your Grace?” Mister White entered the room, seeming unperturbed by both the scene and the faces of the actors he’d stumbled upon.

“Go in the carriage and fetch Doctor Nathaniel Cooper, tell him my duchess has taken ill, go now!” Colin instructed him and then immediately headed for his wife’s room.

Lizzie was in bed, like Mary had said, shaking her head from side to side on the pillow as her entire body trembled. Her hair was soaked with sweat, and her now-limp curls were sticking to her forehead. Colin gently wiped her brow with his palm.

Another maid came in with a washbasin and other things, which she handed to Mary.

“Excuse me,” Mary told the duke and started wiping her friend’s face and neck with the cold, soaked linen.

“Why haven’t you come to me earlier?” He asked darkly.

“Lizzie,” Mary said, then reddened and averted her eyes. “The Duchess usually gets ready in the morning on her own. I don’t…”

Mary said nothing else.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Talbot said angrily.

He paced the room, uselessly staring at his suffering wife, until Mr White announced that Doctor Cooper was coming in. The Duke immediately felt strengthened by this information.

He turned to the doorway, which was entirely taken up by the Doctor’s broad shoulders.

He had taken his hat off downstairs, so all of his greying hair was visible.

Behind him, barely visible, was the slender form of a much shorter woman.

She followed him in, wearing a no-nonsense day dress, her brisk and purposeful manner of walking so reminiscent of Elizabeth’s that it made his heart ache.

She was introduced as Mrs Mary Cooper, the doctor’s wife.

Unlikely pair , Talbot thought. The duke had always liked seeing Doctor Cooper at the club and considered him almost a friend, seeing as he enjoyed discussing philosophy and new developments in science and industry with him, since the Doctor was the most well-read person among Talbot’s acquaintances, but he knew little about the man himself, and knew nothing about his wife.

“I see,” the Doctor said after Mary told him what she had observed of Lizzie’s condition. “Could you please leave the room so we can examine her?” He turned to Colin, who immediately shook his head.

“I cannot leave her with strangers,” he said firmly.

The Doctor and his wife exchanged a look, and he then nodded. “Very well, you may stay.”

Colin stood at the foot of the bed and silently observed the couple as they worked together on opposite sides of it.

Aside from the difference in size between the married couple, there was also a clear age difference, with the wife being much younger.

They worked side by side in an efficient, practised manner, Mrs. Cooper handing the Doctor the necessary items and instruments out of his bag as needed without his having to ask for them.

Admiration and jealousy warred against each other in Colin’s heart.

“What is that?” He asked as he frowned at a trumpet-like device in the Doctor’s hand.

“It is an auscultation device,” Doctor Cooper explained calmly. “It is, in essence, a hollow wooden tube used to listen to a patient’s heart without placing my ear on their chest or back.”

He demonstrated the technique on Lizzie’s chest. Then, Mrs. Cooper lifted the coverlet from Lizzie’s body and beckoned Mary over to help turn her to the side so that the Doctor could listen to her heart from the other side.

When they moved her, Colin saw the shocking, red, bloody mess under her. He wouldn’t forget the sight for as long as he lived, and would have nightmares of it even decades later.

He heard Dr. Cooper instruct him to ring for another maid, and he did so without being fully aware of it.

Oh God. Oh Lord. Please.

Let her be alright. Let her live. Let her recover.

Why is she bleeding?

I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything.

The crimson against the white sheets.

“ Love lies bleeding ,” he thought, strangely, bizarrely, before he fell to his knees and clutched his head in both his hands, stripped of everything but the innermost core of who he was.

“What is happening to her?” He choked out.

Mrs Cooper, who had started wrapping his wife in a clean sheet, said, “It could be nothing, merely her monthly courses.”

“Or?”

The married couple looked at each other again, and Talbot hated them both in that moment. The husband nodded.

“Or she might be losing a child,” Mrs. Cooper replied.

“Oh, no,” Mary gasped.

Colin felt the ground under his feet sway. A child .

“How can we know for certain?” he managed to ask, the words in his mouth feeling thick and unfamiliar.

“We cannot,” Dr. Cooper told him. “When it’s early in the pregnancy, we have almost no way of knowing.

If she were awake, I’d start by asking her about the last time she saw her monthly bleeding.

The repeated absence of a woman’s courses is what usually serves as the most reliable indicator that she might be with child. ”

Colin frantically tried remembering the last time his wife had informed him of her menses, but couldn’t. He glanced at Mary, and she shook her head helplessly.

He heard the door open and voices around him discussing where to move his wife and how. Stevenson was also there.

“Put her in my room,” Colin said, not lifting his head to look up at anyone.

He was still on his knees, and when they all left, he reached for the bloody sheet Mary and Mrs. Cooper had discarded on the floor.

After staring at it for a while, he clutched it to his chest and, for the first time since his first night at Eton, Duke Colin Talbot let himself cry.

*

Colin spent the night in a chair next to the bed he’d had Robert make for him and Elizabeth because he wanted them to sleep in a bed untouched by others, while Mrs. and Doctor Cooper came in and out of the room every two hours to check on her.

When he returned from his dressing room the next morning, he found the Doctor’s wife spooning some liquid into Elizabeth’s mouth.

“What are you giving her?” he barked at Mrs. Cooper, who remained unperturbed by his behaviour, as if he were merely one man in the long line of grief-crazed husbands she dealt with daily.

Colin found that attitude surprisingly comforting.

“Willow bark tea. It will help with her fever.”

”Is there anything else you can do?”

“Doctor Cooper will perform a cupping later.”

“Hasn’t she lost enough blood already?” Colin felt himself growing agitated again.

“Cupping extracts dirty, unhealthy blood from the body; it’s not the same thing,” Mrs Cooper explained patiently, as one would to a child.

“Very well. I’ll go cancel my appointments for the week. Warn the doctor not to start without me.”

As he flung the door of his room open into the hallway, his cook, Mrs. Clark, took a step back from where she’d clearly been eavesdropping. She was wringing her apron in her hands as she curtsied to him.

“Good morning, Your Grace.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Clark,” he said, with the intonation of a question.

“I just came up to tell you that I have a pot of my special broth going on the fire. My mother raised eight children on it, and we never got sick. I made it special for Her Grace. The secret is fresh ginger root,” the poor woman kept babbling, and Colin, instead of being annoyed (or even affronted) by her taking liberties and eavesdropping at his sick wife’s door, found himself a hairsbreadth away from hugging the dear old woman.

Lizzie is so loved , he thought with a tight throat.

“Thank you, Mrs. Clark. Please go into the room and tell Mrs. Cooper; she will see to it that Her Grace drinks the broth.”

He turned away from his cook abruptly (not because he needed to hide his misty eyes) and rushed to his study.

As Mrs. Cooper uncovered his wife’s back, Colin had to sit on his hands like his tutor used to have him do when he was a vivacious young boy. He could see that Doctor Cooper was careful not to touch Elizabeth’s skin as he arranged the heated glass containers on her back.

Is the heat hurting her? Is the cupping painful? He wondered and grimaced at the thought of causing Lizzie any more discomfort. When he opened his eyes, he was met with Mrs. Cooper’s curious gaze.

“I’ve had this done to me before,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“How did you know what I was thinking about?” he asked in astonishment.

Mrs. Cooper glanced at her husband and then returned her eyes to Lizzie’s back. “I know what I would worry about if this were being done to someone I loved.”

Colin’s love for his wife, acknowledged out loud for the first time ever, sat in the room with them now; more precisely, it loomed – bright and gargantuan and conspicuous.

Elizabeth’s fever seemed to have burned off the last of Colin’s resistance to the truth. He looked at the slight woman who was now stroking his wife’s hair, grateful that she had taken his burden from him and set it down so he could finally rest.

Then, without knowing why, he told her, “She might leave me when she’s well enough to do so. I’ve made some mistakes, you see…” he trailed off, perplexed.