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“Perhaps I had better show you your room?”
“Thank you,” Hester accepted. She would change into a plainer and more practical dress, and return alone to try to get to know Rhys Duff and learn what there was she could do to help him.
Her first evening in the Duff house was unfamiliar and oddly lonely. She had frequently been among people who were profoundly distressed by violence or bereavement, even by crime. She had lived with people under the pressure of investigation by strangers into the most private and vulnerable parts of their lives. She had known people whom dreadful circumstances had caused to be suspicious and frightened of each other. But she had never before nursed a patient who was conscious and yet unable to speak. There was a silence in the whole house which gave her a sense of isolation. Sylvestra herself was a quiet woman, not given to conversing except when she had some definite message to impart, not talking simply for companionship, as most women do.
The servants were muted, as if in the presence of the dead, not chattering or gossiping among themselves, as was habitual.
When Hester returned to Rhys’s room she found him lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide and fixed, as if in great concentration upon something. She hesitated to interrupt him. She stood watching the firelight flickering, looked to make certain there were enough coals in the bucket for several hours, then studied the small bookcase on the nearer wall to see what he had chosen to read before the attack. She saw books on various other countries—Africa, India, the Far East—and at least a dozen on forms of travel, letters and memoirs of explorers, botanists and observers of the customs and habits of other cultures. There was one large and beautifully bound book on the art of Islam, another on the history of Byzantium. Another seemed to be on the Arab and Moorish conquests of North Africa and Spain before the rise of Ferdinand and Isabella had driven them south again. Beside it was a book on Arabic art, mathematics and inventions.
She must make some contact with him. If she had to force the issue, then she would. She walked forward to where he must see her, even if only from the corner of his eye.
“You have an interesting collection of books,” she said conversationally. “Have you ever traveled?”
He turned his head to stare at her.
“I know you cannot speak, but you can nod your head,” she went on. “Have you?”
He shook his head very slightly. It was communication, but the animosity was still in his eyes.
“Do you plan to, when you are better?”
Something closed inside his mind. She could see the change in him quite clearly, although it was so slight as to defy description.
“I’ve been to the Crimea,” she said, disregarding his withdrawal. “I was there during the war. Of course, I saw mostly battlefields and hospitals, but there were occasions when I saw something of the people and the countryside. It is always extraordinary, almost indecent to me, how the flowers go on blooming and so many things seem exactly the same, even when the world is turning upside down with men killing and dying in their hundreds. You feel as if everything ought to stop, but of course it doesn’t.”
She watched him, and he did not move his eyes away, even though they seemed filled with anger. She was almost sure it was anger, not fear. She looked down to where his broken and splinted hands lay on the sheets. The ends of the fingers below the bandages were slender and sensitive. The nails were perfectly shaped, except for one which was badly torn. He must have injured them when he had fought to try to save himself … and perhaps his father too. What did he remember of it? What terrible knowledge was locked up in his silence?
“I met several Turkish people who were very charming and most interesting,” she went on, as if he had responded wishing to know. She described a young man who had helped in the hospital, talking about him quite casually, remembering more and more as she spoke. What she could not recall she invented.
Once, during the whole hour she spent with him, she saw the beginning of a smile touch his mouth. At least he was really listening. For a moment they had shared a thought or a feeling.
Later she brought a salve to put on the broken skin of his face where it was drying and would crack painfully. She reached out with it on her finger, and the moment her skin touched his, he snatched his cheek away, his body clenched up, his eyes black and angry.
“It won’t hurt,” she promised. “It will help to stop the scab from cracking.”
He did not move. His muscles were tight, his chest and shoulders so locked that the pain of it must pull on the bruises which both Dr. Riley and Dr. Wade had said covered his body.
She let her hands fall.
“All right. It doesn’t matter. I’ll ask you later and see if you’ve changed your mind.”
She left and went downstairs to the kitchen to fetch him something to eat. Perhaps the cook would prepare him a coddled egg or a light custard. Accordin
g to Dr. Wade, he was well enough to eat and must be encouraged to do so.
The cook, Mrs. Crozier, had quite an array of suitable dishes either already prepared or easy to make even as Hester waited. She offered beef tea, eggs, steamed fish, bread-and-butter pudding, baked custard or cold chicken.
“How is he, miss?” she asked with concern in her face.
“He seems very poorly still,” Hester answered honestly. “But we should keep every hope. Perhaps you know which dishes he likes?”
The cook’s face brightened a little. “Oh, yes, miss, I certainly do. Very fond o’ cold saddle o’ mutton, he is, or jugged hare.”
“As soon as he’s ready for that, I’ll let you know.” Hester took the coddled egg and the custard.
She found him in a changed mood. He seemed very ready to allow her to assist him to sit up and take more than half the food prepared for him, in spite of the fact that to move at all obviously caused him considerable pain. He gasped and sweat broke out on his face. He seemed at once clammy and cold, and for a little while nauseous as well.
She did all she could for him but it was very little. She was forced to stand by helplessly while he fought waves of pain, his eyes on her face, filled with desperation and a plea for any comfort at all, any relief. She reached out and held the ends of his fingers below the bandages, regardless of the bruising and the broken, scabbed skin, and gripped him as she would were he slipping away from her literally.
