Page 95 of Again, Scoundrel

She hurried him to the door. “You found everything?” she asked while she was all but pushing him from Darius’s room.

“Aye,” he replied. “It’s all there. I had to track down my sister for some of it, the birch and yarrow and such. That’s what took so long. She’s a midwife and was out birthing. She has all the same medicines as you do though. Or nearly so. Except for the Warburg’s tincture. I got that from the apothecary.”

Violet nodded. The footman was safely on the other side of the door now, and she had it open just a crack to speak with him.

“She was curious,” the young man went on, “if you were a midwife too, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Violet smiled. “I don’t mind at all. I’d be honored to be counted as a midwife, but alas it isn’t true. I’m a nurse. Thank you again for the supplies.” She shut the door before he could say more.

The footman had been meticulous in his gathering, and Violet nodded her head in approval as she cataloged her new supplies. Everything she asked for was here.

That didn’t surprise her, if his sister was a midwife. Violet had studied midwifery as eagerly as she had the work of surgeons and scientists and found their techniques to be sound. Many in fact had better outcomes than surgeons could produce.

But they were women, so no one ever noticed or adopted their techniques, a situation Violet hoped she could change with her new hospital. She felt a twinge of guilt then for not yet having purchased her passage back to New York. The longer she waited, the longer it would take to build her hospital and the more women would die needlessly from childbirth or other ailments.

She shook her head. That dream would have to wait a little longer. She had work to do here.

She wrapped a linen strip across her nose and mouth, another example of midwifery practice she’d adopted, and then she washed her hands with the lye mixture and the scalding water. That technique she had learned from the writing of a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelwies. The doctor had produced some very interesting studies on the benefits of hand washing while practicing in Vienna, which she’d studied avidly.

Violet tried not to flinch as the lye and hot water turned her hands a bright, screaming red. Handwashing hurt every single time. But it was a small price to pay for any potential benefit to her patients. And then, finally, with a few deep breaths to fortify herself, she went to inspect Darius.

The mid-afternoon sunlight did nothing to improve the look of him. If he had been as hale as Alistair a week ago like Williams had said, the change in him now was shocking. She laid her clean hand across his forehead and felt the heat from the fever ravaging his body. He twisted and murmured in his delirium.

“What’s that you say?” she whispered to him. “Who are you calling for?”

“George.”

It was the only comprehensible word he’d spoken.

“Who is George?” she asked gently.

Darius’s eyes flew open as if he’d been startled but closed again just as quickly. Still, it had been long enough for Violet to see they were the same dark, almond-shape as Alistair’s. And they’d been filled with a look of such pain that it pierced her heart.

“Well,” she said, dipping a cloth into the chilled water and placing it over his forehead. “We won’t say that name again, now, will we? Is he your nemesis?”

She mixed a tea of birch pollen, yarrow, and laudanum and eased Darius’s body to a more upright position to administer it to him.

“This will help you sleep,” she told him as she adjusted his head and torso. He was too light, and it was far too easy for her to maneuver about. A man his size should be nearly impossible for her to adjust, and yet she could drag him around the sickbed like a ragdoll.

“What’s got hold of you, hm?”

But even as she asked the question, she was afraid she knew the answer. And if she was right, Darius would have the fight of his life on his hands.

Chapter

37

Violet cracked open Darius’s jaw and dribbled the slightest bit of the tea down his throat and then softly worked his Adam’s apple to induce a swallow reflex.

“There you go,” she said as she worked slowly and methodically to get the entirety of the tea mixture into his body without choking him. “You’re doing fine. And you’ll appreciate the laudanum once it kicks in.”

She settled him back against the pillows and opened his jaw once more to peer into his mouth and throat, using the light from the window to examine him.

Please, she thought, desperately hoping not to see the thin, gray film that she did indeed see covering his tongue.

Bloody hell!

She steeled her nerves before pulling back the linen coverlet laid across his body. Then she used a pair of shears to gently cut away his dressing gown.