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“Of course I am me. Who else would I be?” he scoffed.
I shook my head. “Did the infection recede?” Perhaps his body had fought it. That could happen, could it not? He was strong and relatively young. He could fight an infection.
Not an infection like that.
I told the cynical voice in my head to be quiet.
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
“I feel wonderful! Better than I have in months.”
“Well, you were shot a few months ago, so that is not saying much.”
“I mean it, Darcy,” he said, ignoring my negativity. “I feel amazing!”
He looked at me with a beaming smile, then shifted his eyes to look about the room. “Darcy, if I tell you something, will you promise never to repeat it to another soul?”
Suddenly worried, I nodded. “I promise.”
“I saw an angel.”
“What?”
“An angel. Right here in this room. Her hair glowed in the sunlight, and she had the most beautiful smile.”
He had been delirious with fever. It was not unexpected that he had imagined a beautiful girl. He had thought I was my dead father when I first came in.
“She sounds lovely, Richard,” I said placatingly.
“No, Darcy, do not do that. You are only saying that to get me to stop talking. She was real, I tell you! I felt her. I touched her hand. I heard her voice. She was singing to me.”
“What was she singing?”
“I don’t know! What does it matter what she was singing? She was an angel in my room. Do you not see how miraculous that is?”
For a horrified moment, I wondered if he had seen an angel, and she had come to escort him to heaven and he was even now dying, and this was some sort of pre-death burst of energy.
“What did she say?”
“She did not say anything, really. She sang to me, then she looked at my wound and sighed, then she looked right at me. Directly into my eyes.”
“And she did not speak?”
“She gasped, and then she made a shushing noise and ran out the door.”
“The servants’ door?” I asked, suspicion filling me.
“No, the main door. I think. It all happened so fast. But she was real, Darcy. She was. She healed me!”
“Richard, you must not go around saying such things or they will put you in Bedlam.”
“I am not ‘going around saying them.’ I am saying them to you!”
I sighed and looked to the ceiling.
“You don’t believe me?” he cried. “Look!”
He pulled back the counterpane and moved his leg into view. The bandage was dangling over the wound, but above and below it, the skin looked healthy and normal, no longer bruised and swollen.
