Twice Tempted (26 page)

“A…friend,” Sir Joseph corrected, his voice breathy.

Dr. O’Roarke spun around on him. “Enough from you, sir, until we get that fluid from your lungs and strengthen your heart. Now be quiet so I can listen.”

Unbuttoning the top of Sir Joseph’s nightshirt, the physician pressed one end of the tube against his chest, and the other against his own ear. For a long moment, his eyes closed, he just listened.

“You said that Sir Joseph had had rheumatic fever?” he finally asked.

“And some heart damage,” Alex said.

O’Roarke nodded. Moving the tube twice more, he listened, then took Sir Joseph’s pulse. “I imagine you feel a fluttering in your chest on occasion?”

Sir Joseph nodded.

O’Roarke nodded back. Then, returning his tube to his bag, he straightened. “Tell me the cretins in London have not been bleeding you.”

Sir Joseph offered a dry smile. “They have. I felt some improvement for a bit.”

O’Roarke seemed to love his nods. “Then worse. Feckin’ eedjits. Have they given you any medicine to take?”

Alex handed over several bottles. When O’Roarke read the labels he cursed again. “No wonder you can’t breathe. Well, we’ll change that, altogether. Sir Joseph, I’m not sure what the cretins told you, but the rheumatic fever damaged your heart, specifically damaged the valves that keep the blood pumping in the right direction. It tends to back up now, all right, and for you it’s backing up into your lungs, which is why you can’t breathe. To put it bluntly, sir, you’re drowning. But that is something I will not allow to happen.
So!
” Reaching back into his bag, he pulled out a bottle and two bags of herbs. “If this lovely young lady will help now, we will dose you with a tea made with dandelion leaves. Wonderful diuretic. Be pissing like a racehorse within the hour, breathing better soon after. I also have a tincture of foxglove.”

“But that’s a poison!” Fiona protested. She knew it all too well.

Dr. O’Roarke smiled at her. “Good girl. In the doses I’m going to give, though, it actually strengthens the heart muscle so the blood gets pumped more efficiently. Nature’s fierce amazin’, isn’t it? We should have you feeling better by noon, then, sir. That sound all right to you?”

Fiona knew how stunned she felt by the doctor’s brusque efficiency. She could see Alex’s jaw drop a bit.

As for Sir Joseph, he let loose a bark of laughter. “You mean Alex…doesn’t have to travel all the…way to…St. Petersburg to tell my wife I’ve joined my ancestors…in…the family vault?”

O’Roarke laughed in return. “Not if I can help it. More rest, of course. Your son advised me that you’re harder to hold still than a sheepdog in sight of a herd. Sure, you’ll have to adapt. With the medicine, though, I think we can come about quite nicely.”

Accepting the herbs and instructions, Fiona made for the door.

“I’ll give you a hand,” Alex said, his voice suspiciously gravelly. Stepping quickly forward, he opened the door and saw her through.

Fiona was heading down the hall when she heard the door close, and she turned to see Alex leaning against the wall, his head down. Her heart lurched. She turned back to him.

“It’s all right to cry,” she said, her hand on his arm.

He laughed, his voice a bit wobbly. “Easy to offer that kind of advice, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “Harder to accept it. I know. If you’d like, I will quickly leave so you have no witness to your unmanly collapse.”

She had just taken her hand away when Alex grabbed it. Then he grabbed her and all but crushed her in his arms. She didn’t even hesitate. Wrapping her arms around him, she held on tightly, keeping her silence. He needed no words. He needed someone who understood. Someone who cared what happened back in that room.

Her own heart seemed to swell in her chest, its every beat almost painful with joy. With the dizzyingly new sense of belonging, even for that moment. Mairead turned to her because Fiona was all she had. Alex had a choice.

They didn’t stand there long, certainly not as long as Fiona would have wished. But she had to get downstairs to brew up the tea, and Alex had to return to his father. She had just turned away again when the door opened and Dr. O’Roarke stepped through. Closing the door behind him, he faced Alex.

“I told half the story in there, now.”

Fiona barely kept herself from putting her arm back around Alex. He had frozen in place. “The rest?”

O’Roarke took off his spectacles and rubbed at them with his cravat. “I didn’t lie. He will be breathing better by noon at the latest. But, Alex, he is still a very sick man. Between the pace you said he’s set and the leech-merchants he’s been seeing—”

“The Prince Regent’s physician.”

O’Roarke gave a bark of laughter. “Proves it. They wouldn’t know which end of a scalpel to cut with. The point is, I’ll be stayin’ about for a few days if you don’t mind. Hearts are very dicey things altogether, and his is weak and cranky. I’d hate to do such a good job at savin’ him only to have to bury him after all.”

“Thank you, Michael. I would appreciate it greatly.”

O’Roarke grinned. “Good. Then in gratitude I can expect a nice donation to the orphanage Lady Kate and I manage.”

Alex managed a grudging grin. “Pirate.”

O’Roarke put a hand to his heart. “Philanthropist.”

The two men returned to the room in accord. But Fiona saw something new in Alex’s expression. A caution. A tension that made her think of the stillness that presaged a storm. Dr. O’Roarke didn’t seem to notice anything. But Fiona walked down the stairs feeling as if the easing of his father’s condition had exposed something else that troubled Alex even more. She just wished she knew what it was.

At least, she thought, weighing the bag of dandelion leaves in her hand, she could finally get some sleep.

She was wrong, of course. She had forgotten to factor in Mairead.

*  *  *

Fiona eventually made it all the way to her bedroom and her nightclothes. The sun was edging its way past its zenith, but the dandelion leaves had begun to work so well that she had been forbidden from the room for fear of her seeing Sir Joseph relieving himself. So she had brewed a cup of tea herself and taken it up to bed.

She wasn’t the only one. Alex promised he would also rest. According to Lady Bea, who was in the kitchen experimenting with curry recipes, Chuffy and Mairead had come in from the telescope hours ago. Fiona knew she should check on her sister, just to make sure, but she allowed herself a bit of selfishness. It was her turn to follow her own lead for a change. And her lead said to collapse in bed and not rise until dinner.

She managed two hours before one of the maids shook her awake. “Please, miss,” she said, her cap slipping down over one eye as she pushed at Fiona, “you need to come.”

Fiona groaned and pulled the blankets over her head. “Go ’way.”

“But I can’t. Lady Bea said to get you.…Well, at least I think she did. That little Lennie tyke says so, and ’e seems to ’ave figured her out. Says you need to get into the breakfast room before there’s carnage. Whatever that is.”

“What is my sister doing?” she asked.

It could only be Mairead, after all. No one else had such a diabolical knack for knowing when Fiona’s deepest sleep came.

“Waving a gun around.”

The blankets exploded around Fiona as she launched out of bed. “A
what
?”

The maid looked frightened. “A gun. One o’ the loaded ones the grooms’ve been carryin’. She’s waving it at Master Chuffy and threatening his cods, if you’ll pardon me.”

Fiona groaned again. How could she have thought Chuffy could be good for her sister? Until Chuffy, Mairead had never brandished a gun at another living soul.

“Fine. I shall come.”

She didn’t even bother to change. She just slid into her slippers and robe and threw her braid over her shoulder before following the maid down the stairs.

She could hear Mairead long before she saw her. She could hear Chuffy, too, and Lady Bea and the Chiltons, all shouting over each other as if they were backbenchers in Parliament.

“
What
,” she demanded, bursting in the breakfast room door, “is going on here? Do you even care that there is a very sick man upstairs who does
not
need this kind of nonsense? Edna Mairead Ferguson Hawes, I am ashamed of you!”

Mairead froze midbrandish, her eyes sparkling with tears, her face red, her hair pulled. “He won’t…
listen
,” she protested. She stood on one side of the littered table and the rest of the people huddled together at the other.

Fiona slammed her fists on her hips. “So you thought a weapon would clear his ears?”

Mairead looked at the gun as if it had come alive in her hand. “He wouldn’t…
listen
.”

“I keep trying to tell her,” Chuffy said, his own hair in its odd little peaks. “Those games of hers aren’t games. She needs to hand them over or she might end up in Newgate for obstruction and treason.”

“You can’t do that,” Mairead argued, the gun swinging back toward Chuffy.

Fiona stepped in between them and took hold of the weapon, inserting her finger beneath the trigger so it couldn’t be depressed. “Now,” she said, yanking it from her sister’s hand. “Do you think we might discuss this like adults?”

Mairead curled her hand, as if Fiona had hurt it. “I can’t do it, Fee. I told you.”

“Even after Chuffy spent the whole night helping you with the telescope?”

Mairead glowered. “He doesn’t know a lens from a lemon.”

Chuffy just shrugged. “Told you that in the beginning.”

“Did,” Lady Bea agreed with a sage nod.

“Besides,” Mairead said, pointing, “how can you be ashamed, when you’re the one in her nightclothes? Now everyone will see you.”

Fiona thought that maybe she had had enough. She was dragging her hands through her own hair. “Mairead and Chuffy, sit down. Mrs. Chilton, could we have some tea? Lady Bea, would you rather escape while you can?”

But Lady Bea grinned and sat in one of the chairs. “No.”

Chuffy gathered up some of the pages that littered the table and stacked them in front of his chair. Then, as if he hadn’t just been threatened with a gun, he held out a chair for Mairead as if they were at tea.

Fiona thought she had just about gotten the combatants to go to their corners, when the door slammed open again and Alex stomped through. “What in
hell
is going on down here? You woke my father from a sound sleep. And if you’ve set back his recovery, I will get out a horse whip, I swear to God.”

Fiona looked up at him, and oddly, wanted to laugh. Even his hair was mussed into little points, his shirt shoved untidily into his breeches, his feet bare. They all looked quite deranged. It did her own heart no good that he looked more endearingly handsome than ever as well. How, she thought distractedly, could feet look endearing? But his did.

“We were just about to find out, Alex,” she said, impressed at how calm her own voice sounded, considering the mad thoughts careening through her head. “Would you rather stay or return to your father?”

He looked around to see Chuffy and Mairead faced off and Fiona just taking a seat. “You’re in your nightclothes.”

She did laugh then. There was a gun sitting on the table, and he noticed her night rail. “Yes. I heard about a ruckus and wanted to intervene before they woke Sir Joseph. How is he?”

Alex sat. “Resting. Now, what is going on?”

“I believe,” Fiona said, motioning for Chuffy and Mae to sit, “that we are picking up an old argument about some puzzles my grandfather gave us to work.”

“Ciphers,” Chuffy said, yanking off his glasses.

“Mine,” Mae spat, plumping down on a chair. “Mine, mine,
mine
.”

“Yes, Mae,” Fiona said, patting her sister’s hand. She would have been a lot more brusque if she hadn’t seen real fear spark in her sister’s eyes. Why? “Sweetings, would you rather everyone but you and I leave? I need to know why you won’t give up the puzzles. You really have them? I don’t see how. We’ve been unraveling them for years.”

Mae just stared at her, her hands twisting together. A bad sign. And no one had time for that.

“Did you have a good night last night at the telescope?” Fiona asked carelessly. Both Chuffy and Alex stared at her. Mae blinked.

“It is a lovely piece of equipment,” Mae said. “Four inch. Quite clear.”

“And Chuffy was gracious enough to let you use it?”

Mae hunched down a bit, obviously knowing where this conversation was headed. “It’s not the same,” she said, her voice painfully small. “You don’t know.”

“Then tell me, sweetings,” Fee gently said.

Mairead wouldn’t even look at her. “I can’t.”

“Can—” Chuffy blurted out before Fiona stopped him with a look.

“Do you want to tell me only?” Fiona asked, reaching out to take one of her sister’s trembling hands.

Mairead shook her head, her eyes now squeezed shut.

“Would you rather tell Chuffy?”

Another head shake. Fiona was really confused. Mairead did not do things capriciously. There was something here Fiona wasn’t understanding. But then, she thought, there were a lot of things she wasn’t understanding lately.

“Sweetings,” she said, sliding off her chair to come to her knees next to her sister’s chair. “Chuffy and Alex believe these ciphers to be vital. Chuffy believes that our puzzles may help break the code and save lives. Don’t you think he deserves our help?”

Mae didn’t open her eyes, but she nodded. Fiona saw tears squeeze from beneath her lids. She took her sister’s other hand. “
Do
you have some of the puzzles?”

Mae’s head dropped even lower. She clung to Fiona’s hands like a lifeline. “All.”

Fiona was even more confused. She still couldn’t figure out how. “Mae. You know that we need to share those puzzles with Chuffy.”

Mae didn’t move. Not a nod. Not a head shake. Not a flinch. She remained that way for a solid hour as Fiona exhorted her and everyone else waited, the silence growing thick with emotion and taut with confusion. Fiona didn’t move from where she was, there on her knees. Mae refused to open her eyes. Chuffy refused to back down. Tea came and went, and no one touched it.