Dead After Dark (28 page)

He was already in his stocking feet. She began to undress him.

“I’m perfectly c-capable,” he protested. But he made no move to help her. That frightened her more than anything else. His flesh, wherever she touched it, was burning hot. When she had him naked and tucked under the sheets, she drew up the comforter to quiet his shaking. It didn’t help.

“I’m going to get a doctor.”

He gave a breathless chuckle. “No one will c-come up here at night.”

He was right. Her stupid ghost impersonation had insured that.

“I don’t need a doctor. Besides, I expect he’s b-busy. I think Barton h-had it yesterday at the tavern. A good p-place to spread it.” He dissolved into the cough again.

She came up and stood over him, frowning. “Can you die from this?”

“Only the frail die. I’ll just be a little unc-comfortable for a few days. You’d b-better keep your distance, though.”

“I told you. I can’t get it from you. So,” she said briskly, “I’m the perfect sickroom attendant.” She drew up a chair. Actually, she felt rather helpless. What could she do but watch him shake with fever?

That’s what she did over the next hours. He didn’t complain but the racking cough and the shaking seemed to exhaust him. Finally he subsided into a restless sleep. She lit a single candle and pulled over a book he must have been reading. It was a story about a man named Faustus. She could barely concentrate on the words. Was this what it was like to be human, prey to every sickness, every wound? Her only consolation was that it was only uncomfortable. He wasn’t in any real danger.

He broke out in a sweat halfway through the night. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? She peeled off the comforter and found the bedclothes soaked. So she went down to the kitchen and brought up several pitchers of water and cloths.

When she returned he appeared to be awake. His eyes
were slitted, but they were open. Still, he was nearly insensible. She pulled back the sheet and poured her water in the room’s washbasin. The thunderstorm appeared to have broken the unseasonable hot spell. She opened the windows to the night air, which now held the hint of autumn September should bring. Then she wetted a cloth and wiped him down.

“Better?” she asked when she was done.

He roused himself. “Thank you,” he murmured. “You are kind.”

She touched his forehead to push back his soaked hair and he flinched. “What’s wrong?” This man had undergone torture. What could make him flinch?

He tried to smile. “Headache.” He squinted against the dim candlelight. “I feel like I’ve been put on the rack. Hell, my hair hurts.”

“What does this mean?” she asked, alarmed.

“It means I have influenza.” His eyes closed. “It will pass soon.”

It didn’t. She added blankets when he was shaking, and left him naked to the air as he broke into a sweat. She tried to cool him by wiping him down with a damp cloth periodically, but always he was hot to the touch. Morning came and she closed the draperies against the sun. But the fever wouldn’t let him go. He had periods of insensibility. You couldn’t call it sleep. He refused all food though she made him drink water. He must replace the sweat he was losing. He roused himself to use the chamber pot, though infrequently.

In the late afternoon he opened his eyes.

“How are you?”

He seemed to consider. Then his eyes opened wide. “Damn!” he whispered. “Darley.” He struggled up on one elbow and pulled at the covers. She pushed him back down.

“I’ll feed him. Only tell me what to give him.”

He sighed. “Two flakes of hay and two scoops of oats.”

She turned to the door.

“And water.”

“Of course.” She smiled. “I’ll be back shortly.”

By the second night, she had begun to worry. He had said a few days. Surely a few days included time on the mend, as well. So shouldn’t he be getting better? He seemed to be getting worse. She had to steady him to use the chamber pot at all. His lips were cracked and dry, his eyes glazed and overbright. He still flinched at her touch. And always he was hot.

She laid him back in the bed near morning.

“You’re good to me,” he murmured. There was a softness in his eyes behind the fever.

“Anyone would help you.”

He shook his head ever so slightly. “You’re a generous person.”

“No one has ever called me that.”

“Then they didn’t know you . . .” He closed his eyes.

That startled her. Perhaps no one
did
know her. She had been an anonymous extension of her father at Mirso Monastery. She had the benefit of his position. He was the Eldest, after all. No one dared give her offense. But no one thought of her as anything but his daughter, either. She had always depended on him. He knew everything, having lived so long. And he always told her what to do.

But here she was on her own. And she didn’t know what to do for Drew.

A doctor would know. She’d get a doctor up here today, no matter that Drew said he didn’t need one, if it were the last thing she did.

The village street was deserted, though it was still an hour to sunset. Freya had bundled up in her hooded cape, with gloves and half-boots to protect her from the sun. Still its stinging needles reached her, even through the lined wool.
She lifted the hood and squinted around. Where was she going to find the doctor? Actually, where was everybody?

A sign creaked back and forth in the wind rising on the threat of sunset.
GOOSE AND GANDER
it said. A tavern. Drew thought he had caught this influenza there.

She pushed in through the doors, grateful for the refuge from the sun, and slipped back her hood. The tavern was deserted except for one old man in the corner. Well, that was more people than she had seen anywhere else.

He studied her over an empty glass.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “Can you tell me where I might find a doctor?”

He rose and went to pull another pint for himself. “I expect he’s up to The Maples.”

Freya was fascinated with very old humans. After all, her kind stopped aging at maturity. She had never seen an old person until she left Mirso last year. The wrinkles, the rheumy eyes, the joints she could actually hear creaking and cracking, all held a dreadful attraction. What would it be like to feel death approach as your body failed? This was the fate that waited for Drew.

“Which way is this Maples? I need the doctor quickly.”

“Yer foreign, ain’t ye?” he asked, without answering her question.

Freya went wary. These English were quite provincial. They did not take easily to anything strange. “I am from Transylvania.” He would never know where that was, or what it might mean.

“That would be where th’ Carpathian Mountains are, I’d ’azard. Would ye like a pint? It’s on th’ ’ouse at th’ moment, since Barton’s dead.”

She shook her head. Wait! Drew said he caught this influenza from Barton. She sucked in a breath. “Was this Barton old like you?”

The old man shook his head, sighing. “ ’Earty as a ’orse one day, stiff as a board th’ next. Fever took ’im.”

Freya felt her heart contract. Drew was wrong. He could die from this sickness. “Please, I
must
have a doctor.”

“Someone got th’ influenza? This is a bad bout, certain.” He sat back down. “ ’Alf the county’s down with it.”

How could he be so calm? “Yes, yes,” she said, sitting across from him, leaning forward. She
must
make him understand the urgency. “Mr. Drew Carlowe has this influenza.”

“I thought so. Yer th’ ghost, ain’t ye?”

She went still. Then she mustered a laugh. “Do not be nonsensical.” She touched his hand. The skin was paper-thin. “Quite corporeal, I assure you.”

His pale blue eyes were quizzical. “Then ye’ve been playing ghost. Naughty girl.”

She sighed. Maybe the truth would make him tell her how to get this doctor. She nodded. “I wanted to be alone and in England this is impossible for a woman. I frightened people away.”

“Th’ bites?”

Oh, dear. “Some were more stubborn than others. I pricked them with a knife point.”

He pressed his mouth together and nodded. “Th’ disappearing?”

“People see what they want to see. And I wore a white dress that seemed to float.”

“Red eyes?”

She shrugged and tried to look confused. “Did they say I had red eyes?”

He sipped his ale. “Must ’ave been a shock when Carlowe bought th’ place.”

“Yes, especially since I own it.”

“Ahhh, th’ absent landlord. Or ’is daughter. Guess Melaphont got a little overanxious.”

“He is a greedy man, this Melaphont.” She frowned. “And he has been very bad to Mr. Carlowe.” She was going to take care of Melaphont for Drew, after Drew was well again. She’d start by making him give Drew’s money back for the house. After that . . .

“He’s about to get his due, I expect.”

She couldn’t spend any more time here. “Please, please tell me how to get to this Maples.”

“I doubt th’ quack’ll come. Melaphont’s an important man around ’ere.” She glared at him. He sighed. “Th’ road turns up into the ’ills three miles past Ashland. It’s marked.”

“Thank you, thank you, sir.” She rose. “What is your name, if I may ask?”

“ ’Enley.”

“Mr. Enley, I hope you do not catch this influenza. I would not wish you to die.”

He looked surprised. “Thankee, young lady. I would not wish it, either.”

She curtsied in the English fashion and rushed from the room, pulling up her hood, then hurried behind the tavern, drew her power. She must get to The Maples.

The dusk was settling in as she materialized in the wood at the edge of the road to The Maples. She threw back her hood, freed of the itching pain of the sun at last. The doctor had to come, though it was growing dark, even though he thought Ashland was haunted. She could not compel him because she needed his medical judgment and under compulsion there could be no judgment or creativity. She would just tell him it was she who haunted it, as she had told Henley. He
had
to come. She stepped out onto the road.

The Maples turned out to be even larger than Ashland, with twenty chimneys poking up from a late-sixteenth-century façade of stark gray stone. It stood across a man-made lake, lights blazing from every window, a solid vision
of wealth and power. On one side, a new wing rose, half complete. Its style did not match the rest of the house. Melaphont had no taste. She hurried over a bridge that crossed a stream that fed the lake and crunched up a wide gravel drive to the portico. Up shallow steps, she took the great knocker and banged on the door.

A very severe man with a mouth that turned down opened the door. He said nothing, but stared at her in disapproval.

A woman alone could not be either wealthy or of good character in England. “I must see the doctor,” she panted.

“He is engaged with Sir Melaphont.” The man began to shut the door.

“But there is someone who needs his help!” she pleaded, stopping the door with one delicate hand. She did not wait for another refusal, but pushed past him.

“See here!” he protested.

Twin staircases wound up from the far end of the immense foyer. She couldn’t search this entire pile looking for the doctor. She drew her power even as she whirled on the majordomo. The world went red. “Take me to the doctor. Now.”

His gaze became vague. He nodded and moved off toward the stairs. She followed. In the broad hallway of the first floor a young man paced. He affected a curl of dark hair that he let hang across a pale brow, but there the likeness to a portrait of Lord Byron she had seen in books stopped. His face was pudgy and petulant.

“Grimshaw!” The boy started forward. “The damned doctor won’t let me see my father.”

Grimshaw said nothing of course, because he was under Freya’s compulsion. He just opened the door and ushered her inside.

“Grimshaw! I say—”

The door shut in the young man’s face. The bedroom was huge. A portly man stood with his back toward her, his hand
on the wrist of an immense figure only dwarfed by the great, curtained bed in which it lay. The figure emitted wet, gasping sounds and the room smelled of blood. A basin of it sat on the table by the bed. What was this? The doctor turned at her entrance.

“I said no visitors, Grimshaw.” The doctor glowered.

Freya willed Grimshaw out of the room. He closed the door behind himself. The younger Melaphont could be heard protesting in the hall.

“Who are you?” the doctor said. He was an austere older man with luxuriant mustachios and iron-gray hair swept back from an intelligent forehead.

“Never mind that. Mr. Drew Carlowe needs your help. He is at Ashland.”

“The new owner? It’s influenza, I assume.”

She nodded. Her glance darted to the figure in the bed. This was Drew’s nemesis. He was immensely fat, his jowls dripping down over the collar of his nightshirt. His face looked like it was melting. Still, there were cruel lines about his mouth. She could believe he had lied about Drew and punished him unjustly. Now he was like pale yellow dough, still, his eyes closed. The doctor laid his patient’s hand back on the coverlet.

“And I would come if I thought it would do any good, young lady,” the doctor was saying. “But there’s really no use. Oh, I bleed them, because one must do something. But there is really nothing to be done but make them as comfortable as you can and let the disease run its course.”

Freya was stunned. “You . . . you cannot help him?”

The doctor looked at her with sympathy in his eyes. He shook his head.

Freya felt tears of frustration well up. Her throat closed. These humans were at the mercy of some silly disease that wasted one away with fever? And the doctor only bled them. This would weaken them for their fight with the illness. She
if anyone knew that the blood was the essence of life. One did not drain it lightly. This whole effort had been useless, and she had left Drew alone. The doctor turned back to his patient. A dreadful gurgling sounded then silence.

Freya was stunned. “He is dead?” It could happen, just like that?

“I’m afraid so,” the doctor said. “He was my most important patient, too.”