“Ah!” the housekeeper said, as if it had been cleared up sufficiently as to why she was seeing the family on the drive. “The little lady did very poorly for twenty-four hours, I can tell you it was a fright, but she turned a corner and she is as jolly as she ever was. We’re still being careful, mind, but the doctor says she is firmly on the mend.”
The earl nearly sank to the drive. Darden held him up.
“She’s all right!” Juliet cried.
They tumbled from the carriage and all of them surrounded their father. “She’s all right, Papa,” Juliet said, as if to be sure her father understood the matter.
“Let us get you indoors, Father,” Darden said, lending the earl his arm.
They headed toward the doors en masse just as Beatrice came down the stairs.
“You are all here!” she cried.
“Of course, we are here, my dear,” Miss Mayton said. “Where else would we be at such a moment?”
The sisters and their aunt threw themselves at one another as Darden helped the earl to a chair in the drawing room and ordered the footman to fetch him some ale.
The next minutes were a flurry of news back and forth.
“I did write again,” Beatrice said. “After the first letter, I wrote a day later that the danger seemed to have passed.”
“I suppose we missed it,” the earl said. “We set off not two hours after receiving the first.”
“You would never believe how fast we were off,” Juliet said. “There was nothing like it.”
“And we came straight through,” Cordelia said. “We only stopped to change horses—no admiring vistas or ordering plates of ham or anything. I think Sandren rather enjoyed it.”
“Indeed,” Miss Mayton said, “we even ate our meals in the carriage as that fellow barreled along. Quite the mess we made at it too.”
“Do not attempt to spread mustard on bread in a moving carriage,” Juliet said sagely.
“I shouldn’t have written at all until I knew more,” Beatrice said. “But it was so frightening, and I did think she might…you know. I could not talk about it with Van Doren, he just would not hear of the possibility. He was up at all hours walking her back and forth as if his strength would keep her going.”
“Where is he, by the by?” the earl asked, looking a bit restored by a glass of ale.
“In bed with a cold,” Beatrice said with a smile. “He positively wore himself out. Naturally, he argued from here to Sunday about taking a rest but I convinced him to be abed by telling him my nerves could not hold up under another dangerous situation.”
“I’ll bet he’s a cranky patient,” Juliet said.
“The crankiest,” Beatrice said with a laugh.
“Well, if he stayed up all the night long with Lily, I cannot fault him for crankiness,” Juliet said begrudgingly.
“I have sent Genroy to bed as well,” Beatrice said, “as I do not think our butler has properly slept in days.”
“Can we see her?” Cordelia asked. “Would the doctor say it’s all right?”
“Oh, I think so,” Beatrice said. “He’s given me leave to bring her out of doors when the weather is fine and we no longer need isolate her from other people. Though, perhaps this is an awful lot of people at once.”
The earl said, “Beatrice, take the girls and Miss Mayton to the nursery. I feel I must write to Tattleton before another moment has passed. He will have been staring at that second letter and fearing the worst.”
“Poor Tattleton,” Juliet said. “His nerves were stretched enough over Lord Darling.”
“Lord Darling?” Beatrice asked.
“The goat,” Juliet said. “I did write that we’d adopted a goat.”
Beatrice laughed. “Indeed you did. I did not know you named him Lord Darling.”
