Page 23 of Stolen By the Duke of Stone

“I sent for them some time ago, but everyone is asleep.”

“Then I will wake them,” Andrew said grimly, fastening his robe more tightly around himself.

William wore nothing except cloth around his middle, and Andrew came to press the backs of two fingers against the boy’s chest.

Too hot.

“It’s a fever,” he said.

Jessamine closed her eyes briefly. “He can’t…” Her throat bobbed and tightened with a swallow. “Nothing can happen to him, Andrew. It can’t.”

“It won’t.” His voice was grim, but she looked at him as though he were a genie from a bottle, placed before her for the sole reason of granting her wishes. “You may trust me on that.”

“I do,” she said, her voice sounding almost wondering. “God help me, I do.”

“Good. I will arrange someone to come and help.”

“Katherine is sleeping. I told her to get some rest in case the milk…”

Andrew nodded. He knew little enough about the business of producing milk, and he would do nothing to interfere with the process. “We will manage perfectly well between us.”

“Once you’ve called for the physician, you may return to bed if you would like,” Jessamine said, but he held up a hand.

“Don’t insult me, Jessamine. William is as much mine as yours, and we will care for him together. I could hardly sleep now as it is.” He nodded at her and strode from the room, intending to wake up the entire household if need be. They could sleep when daylight came, if by then William was well enough.

He prayed William would be well enough. If he were not, and if Andrew lost Rebecca and her son within the month, he was not fully sure how he would go on.

Jessamine sang to William in a thick voice, forcing back all her worries and anxieties as far as she could. Everything that came to mind, she put to words and a tune. Fragments of half-remembered songs, things her mother used to sing to her as a child, and lilting melodies from her time in Scotland.

And as William continued to scream and writhe in her arms, she moved to a prayer uttered aloud in the form of song.

“You must be all right,” she sang. “See the night through and be well by morning, my darling boy.”

Andrew returned to the room as she repeated the phrase, and although his brows drew together, he said nothing.

Several maids squeezed past with copper bowls and rags that they laid neatly out on the side. Andrew, to Jessamine’s surprise, ordered some tea, and then rolled his sleeves up.

“Place William here,” he said, indicating a blanket in the crib. He lifted the bars away so they had free access. “Let me bathe him.”

Jessamine shivered with a brief, terrible fear that if she let go of William for even a moment, something dire would happen to him.

But Andrew’s expression was implacable, and there was no room for argument in his words. She understood their logic, and so she slowly lowered William’s tiny body to the blankets. Andrew dipped the rags into the water, squeezed, and laid them across William’s stomach.

“This will cool his body faster,” Andrew explained.

“Have you done this before?”

“Not with an infant. But if you think there was never illness in the army, you would be sorely mistaken.”

The army. She never forgot he had been in the army—how could she, with the way he strode about the house, ordering servants about like he was a general and they his army?—but she hadn’t thought of him in this role.

“I thought there were doctors in the army,” she ventured.

“There are. But when there are epidemics, they are hard-pressed to treat everyone. And minor ailments such as fever need no great medical knowledge to treat.”

“Then why did you send for a physician?”

“Because I have no experience with children,” Andrew said, and for a moment, his hands faltered.