Never a Gentleman (40 page)

He shook his head, certain that would mean something soon. “No. My place is here. She’s going to be very sick, isn’t she?”

“I think so. But I don’t think she wants you to see her that way. Give us a chance to take care of her for a change. You spend
your energies where you’re good: plotting, scheming, and investigating. Until we can untangle this mess, Grace is still in
danger. All of you are.”

He kept running the backs of his fingers down Grace’s ashen cheeks. She was finally limp, deeply asleep, and he didn’t want
to disturb her. No, to be honest, he simply didn’t want to leave her. He had to help her recover. He had to tell her he loved
her. Most of all, he had to beg her forgiveness for every harsh word she’d heard. He had to make her understand he hadn’t
meant one of them.

“Isn’t it odd?” he asked, once again running his hand down the tangled locks that tumbled over her shoulders. “Her hair actually
looks more red. Is that something the arsenic did?”

Olivia laid her hand on his arm. “We’ll ask later. Come, now, we have work to do.”

In the end, he carried Grace over to her bed, where the women waited like a clutch of anxious nannies. Before he left, though,
he bent down and kissed her, wishing he knew what to do now. How to heal this. How to prove to her that she hadn’t just lost
everything.

“Go ahead and get her ready,” he said. “I’ll be back. Right now I need to contact her staff at Longbridge.” Giving his sleeping
wife a smile, he kissed her and murmured, “We’ll see what this crowd thinks of your Sikh warrior.”

Diccan did come back. And Grace was sick. Deathly sick. So sick that by the next morning Diccan despaired for her life. He
never left, even as they purged her and bled her, even as she cried out with vicious cramps. Even as, deep in the night, she
began to seize.

He had already had her in his arms when it began. She’d never really woken, even as she lost every ounce of fluid they tried
to force into her. And then, suddenly, deep in the early morning hours, her body stiffened, arced, shuddered, right there
in his arms.

“Hold her,” the doctor demanded, for he’d never left. “Gently.”

Shredded with panic, Diccan gathered in her poor, flailing limbs as if he could hold her together. As if he could protect
her from her own body.

“She’s dying!” he cried. “Do something.”

The doctor, looking as calm as a prelate, listened to her racing heart and shook his head. “I was hoping this wouldn’t happen.”

Diccan held her close, her limbs battering him. “What do we do?”

Straightening up, the doctor frowned. “Keep her safe,” he said, sounding less sanguine. “It’s all we can do ’til the poison
works its way through.”

“It doesn’t seem to be doing that,” Kate said from the corner of the room.

The doctor actually shook his head. “I know. To tell the truth, I’ve never seen anyone fail this quickly. I think she’s been
much more ill than any of us realize.”

Diccan felt himself stumble at the edge of a great, dark chasm, even as the seizure began to wane. “What are you saying?”

The doctor met his frantic gaze, then looked back down at the once-again-slack Grace. “I’m saying that she has to be the strongest
woman I’ve ever met to have held off these symptoms so long. But even strong women have their limits. If she’s finally given
up, then she won’t survive.”

Kate huffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Grace has never lacked for courage.”

But Diccan knew it wasn’t about courage. It was about despair.

“She won’t die,” he said simply, his voice threaded with his own despair. “I won’t allow it.”

He didn’t. He fought with her; he fought
for
her, all through the night and the next day. He slept in the bed with her, beset by the fear that if he lost touch with her
he’d lose her altogether. He helped change her when she soaked
nightgowns and sheets with sweat. He cleaned her when she needed it. And all through those terrible hours, he fell more deeply
under her gentle spell. Not the kind of spell a woman exudes to seduce. The kind of spell a courageous woman weaves without
even meaning to.

He wanted to be there when she woke. When she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Oh, that was uncomfortable. But I’m better
now.” But the longer he stayed in that closed, fetid room, the less he believed it would happen. And if it didn’t, he simply
didn’t know how he could go on.

“Please, Grace,” he whispered into her tangled, damp hair, trying so hard to force life into her, to force hope into her.
“Don’t leave me.”

But in all those hours, she never answered.

G
race knew she was sick. She thought she was dying, but it didn’t seem to matter. She just didn’t have the strength to push
away from it. She couldn’t find the desire to. She just wanted to rest, to shut out all the pain and grief and effort that
seemed to wait for her. She wanted to stop hoping.

She thought she came close. In a vague, amorphous sense, she even thought she created more dreams to comfort her passing;
the feeling of warm arms holding her, the rise and fall of voices, one voice. Diccan’s voice, calling her back, exhorting
her to try. And then, deep in the darkness when it seemed an effort just to remind her heart to beat, she was sure she heard
her father.

“What kind of a Fairchild are you?” he barked, as he would when she would cringe from a difficult task. “Fairchilds don’t
quit.”

This one
, she thought, sorry to disappoint him,
would
.

Except for one thing. There was something preying on her mind. Something she should be remembering. Something she had meant
to warn Diccan about.

Something…

•  •  •

Diccan was once again lying in bed next to Grace. The sun had long set and the room flickered with firelight. He was so tired.
He was cold. He was trying to hold onto his last vestige of hope.

“Diccan… Diccan?”

He felt as if his eyes were full of grit and his arms full of lead. “What?”

“There’s something…”

That was when it finally kicked in. That small, scratchy voice was Grace’s. He shot up so fast he almost banged his head against
the bedpost. “Gracie?”

She looked like hell. Even in the soft candlelight, she was waxy white, with deep purple bruising beneath her eyes, and her
hair was a rat’s nest. He thought she’d lost a good ten pounds, just in the last two days. He couldn’t remember ever seeing
anything so beautiful in his life.

“Grace?” he asked, laying a hand against her cheek. “How do you feel?”

She licked dry lips and looked around, as if surprised to find herself in bed. “Is it malaria?”

He hated to even say it. Grabbing a glass of water, he lifted her head to drink. “Don’t you remember? Someone tried to poison
you.”

The faint light in her eyes died a little. “Oh, yes.”

“Grace.” Setting down the glass, he gathered her into his arms. “You aren’t going to quit now. Tell me you aren’t going to
quit. I have so much I need to tell you.”

Her eyes were growing vague, and he could feel the strength waning in her. “What kind of Fairchild would I be?” she asked.

This time, though, when she faded back to sleep, he felt
something different; a kind of peace in her that hadn’t been there before, as if she had finally made up her mind.

“You’d better decide to stay,” he threatened her, pulling her to him so he could listen to her heart beat, so he could share
his heat and will and
want
. To give her what he could while she let him. He didn’t realize that his own tears were now soaking her hair as he wrapped
himself around her.

He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, someone was tapping his shoulder.

“Diccan?”

He jerked awake to see Kate leaning over him. “She’s better,” he said, and looked down at Grace to make sure. She was still
sleeping, but he swore there was more color in her face. He needed to believe there was more color.

“Good,” Kate said, “then you can get a quick wash-up and go downstairs. Biddle is waiting to see to you.”

Carefully disengaging himself from Grace, he climbed to his feet and stretched out the kinks. It was when he realized that
the sun had risen quite some time ago. It warmed the soft yellow and green colors of the room and washed a bit of gold into
Grace’s skin.

“No, thank you,” he said, watching her. “Grace needs me here.”

Kate picked up the jacket he’d discarded three days earlier and held it out with two fingers. “Grace needs you coherent and
smelling a sight better than you do now.” When he moved to balk, she scowled. “Diccan, never in my life could I imagine having
to say this to you, but you stink. You haven’t left this room for three days. Now be a good lad and bathe. You have visitors.”

Diccan finally gave in to a small smile. “Well, she is sleeping…”

He was reaching out to retrieve his jacket when he caught sight of Bea in the hallway, peering intently toward the steps,
as if afraid of what would come up. Diccan felt a sudden
frisson
of dread. “What visitors?”

Bea shook her head. “Gehenna.”

Diccan turned to Kate, who just sighed. “The bishop.”

He felt as if he’d been punched. “What bishop?”

Kate scowled at him. “You know perfectly well what bishop. He and your mother are in the Red Salon doing their best to terrify
Olivia.”

Diccan knew that his brain was sluggish, but he simply couldn’t make any sense out of Kate’s statement. “What the hell are
they doing here?”

“Fire and brimstone,” Bea muttered, not moving.

“Besides that.” Diccan scrubbed at his face, suddenly feeling every unslept hour. “Jack wouldn’t have invited them to the
wedding, would he?”

“Don’t be absurd.” Kate wet a cloth to lay on Grace’s forehead. “They came looking for you. Olivia says your father looks
frantic.”

It infuriated him, but Diccan knew that if he ignored the summons, his parents would wreak havoc on the house party. So he
dropped one final kiss on Grace’s forehead and headed for the dressing room and Biddle’s care.

In the end, it was only half an hour before he presented himself in Olivia’s red drawing room, where the poor woman faced
his parents alone.

“I think Kate needs you upstairs,” he told her, seeing the near panic in her eyes. His parents must be in rare form. It was
too bad for them that he had absolutely no patience left to deal with them.

“Mother, Father,” he greeted them after Olivia fled, “Have you been terrorizing my friends?”

“Your levity is distasteful,” his father said, standing. “This is important or we wouldn’t be here.”

Diccan bent over his mother’s hand. “I don’t see my sisters with you. They are well?”

His mother’s nostrils flared. “I left them with your cousin the duke, at Moorhaven. I know that Catherine is here. I won’t
expose my daughters to that… trollop.”

Diccan quirked an eyebrow. “And Kate always speaks so well of you.”

His mother sniffed. “I refuse to acknowledge that whore’s name.”

“Eloise,” the bishop chastised. “There is no time for that.”

“If you have no time to call Kate names,” Diccan said, settling himself on the gold settee as his father resumed his own seat,
“I imagine the matter is urgent. I am all ears, sir.”

“Don’t act the idiot,” his father snapped, sounding tired. “We’ve come to save your life.”

Diccan refused to show surprise at his father’s rather dramatic statement. “Indeed, sir. And how will you do that?”

He was stunned to see his father return to his feet and pace. The bishop never paced. It was beneath him. “The duke has been
gracious enough to offer his aid,” the bishop was saying, as he walked. “His schooner will meet us at Hove and take you to
Jamaica. The family plantations there are in need of help. We thought that surely you could manage that.”

“Surely I could,” Diccan agreed mildly, even as his heart stuttered oddly. “The question is, why, in all that’s holy, would
I?”

His father stopped short, scowling. “Because the soldiers can’t be far behind us with a writ of arrest. They found the note,
Diccan, although how you could be so careless as to leave it behind, I certainly don’t know. But they have it now, and it
is damning evidence.”

Diccan leaned back and crossed his legs. “Of what?”

“Damme, sir, how can you be so flippant?”

“Undoubtedly a moral flaw. You find me no less confused, though. Exactly what note would that be that so condemns me?”

“The one instructing your footman to murder your wife.”

Grace heard voices. She was unable to respond, though, too exhausted to do more than breathe.

“How could this happen?” Olivia whispered over her head. “He’s your cousin. You must know if there’s any truth to it.”

“Of course there isn’t,” Kate retorted. “After the last three days, how could you even think it? And if those vipers he calls
parents thought at all, they would have known that right away.” She huffed, sounding disgusted. “The very idea. I swear, if
I didn’t know that the two of them would never think of performing a charitable deed, I’d think Diccan had been left in a
basket on their doorstep.”

What was happening? What new problem had arisen? Grace wished she had the energy to think about it. “
Always good at puzzles
,” she heard her father remind her, and she could almost see him grinning at her in that way he had before he set out to fight.
“
Use your brain.
”

But that took too much effort, and she was tired. And
yet, she had the most persistent feeling that she knew something important. Something relevant.

It was, finally, what nudged her awake. She opened her eyes to the golden wash of light from an afternoon sun, the scent of
new-mown grass, the music of voices in the house. For a long while she merely lay where she was, gathering her wits. She felt
as limp as wet linen, and her brain felt battered and useless. But at least her stomach had settled, and the cramping pain
had eased to a dull ache.

Looking around at the pretty, springlike room, she was surprised to find herself alone. Hadn’t she just heard her friends
arguing? She turned a bit farther and saw the lawns stretching out beyond the window, a field of green ringed by trees like
a tonsured head, all tinted with the soft glow of sunlight.