Page 11 of Baron Bolt

“The lists were wrong,” he replied. “I am here now.”

Edward’s fingers closed hard around his and gripped and shook, and his brother laughed with joy.

Beside him there was a movement. Cards. He flicked a look. The young lady was gathering a pack off the blanket. A plain pack. Worn. No back design he knew. His gaze rose to her face for one measuring instant. She met it without flinching.

“Ophelia.” Edward had not let go. “Give me my brother for a little while.”

“Of course, my lord.”

The curtsy was slight. Correct. Damian rose and stepped back to let her pass. Up close she came only to his chest. Something clean went by him under the sickroom smell, lavender-water and warmth, and her skirts brushed his boots.

“Ma’am.”

Nothing else. The left eye took her a half-beat late. Then the door clicked to behind her, and he was alone with his brother.

He got himself into the chair she had left. Edward’s hand was still fast around his. Solid, Edward’s grip said, without saying it. Alive, he had said, and the word was no cleaner up here than it had been in the hall.

“Too stubborn to die properly.” Edward was laughing now, weakly, the tears sliding sideways into his hair. “You always were. What the devil happened to your face?”

“French artillery. It looks worse than it is.”

“We are a matched pair of horrors, then.” Edward moved one hand an inch to indicate the whole ruin of himself, and smiled, and the smile was so entirely Edward that Damian’s chest produced a pain in a place that should be numb.

“Mother said a fall.”

“Mm.” Edward let his head roll back. When he spoke again, he had dropped the lightness, and he spoke in short measures, spending his breath like a man on the last of his purse. “Three weeks ago. The wet morning after the news of you came. I rode out foul, careless, and I put the gray at the hedge past the mill, and he came down on me. The leg broke. That mended crooked, but it mended. The wound in the thigh did not. It went bad … Then the fever came, and now the corruption is in my blood. I can feel it going about its business. I am told a man cannot, but I can.”

“There are physicians in London⁠—”

“There have been men from everywhere.” It was not bitter. It was worse than bitter. It was settled. “I have had a fortnight to quarrel with it, brother, and I have done quarreling. I mean to spend the breath I have left on better things. Sit still and let me.”

Damian sat.

“You cannot know what it was. The news of you. All my life I had thought, whatever comes, there is Damian. The title was mine and the luck was yours, and if I dropped the family it would land on you and be safe. Then the letter came, and I was going to the ground with everything in my hands, and no one to take care of …” His breath failed. He took another. His eyes were shining. “And now you are sitting in that chair. God has been merciful past anything I deserve, and I mean to tell Him so shortly to His face.”

God had nothing to do with the monstrous thing sitting in this chair.

The knowledge rose in him so hard that his mouth opened on it. The whole black weight of the road pressing at the back of his teeth. The cellar. The storm. The slab. The sutures. Edward, the letter was not wrong. And if there was one soul to whom he could have said it, it was the man in this bed.

“Edward. When they wrote that I fell⁠—”

Edward coughed.

It doubled him and shook him. Damian held his shoulders and got water into him a sip at a time, and it was a long while before Edward lay calm again, gray and gasping, his hand still fast around Damian’s.

Damian looked at him. At what was left of him. At the little store of breath remaining, and the plans he clearly had for every measure of it. And shut his own mouth on the truth forever.

What would it purchase, except his own relief? To hand a dying man a horror, so that the undead thing in the chair might feel less alone in carrying it. Edward was doing the harder work tonight. He would not be made to do Damian’s as well. It felt like his first true cowardice. Perhaps it was mercy. He no longer trusted himself to know the difference.

“You saw her,” Edward said, when he had his voice again. Thinner now. Spent. “The lady who was sitting with me.”

“Yes.”

“Miss Ophelia Clarke. Sir Henry Clarke’s daughter. The lady downstairs is her mother.” A breath. “She is my betrothed.”

Damian said nothing. The gold-haired girl. The one who had looked at his ruined face as if she were analyzing it.

“The mothers made the match in the spring, and I was glad of it. You will think her a pretty piece of propriety. Everybody does. There is a great deal more in the hand than shows on the table, brother. I leave you the finding of it.” The cracked mouth curved. “I liked her. I like her still. It was not a poet’s love, but it was a good bargain honestly struck, and I meant to keep it. I could not stand up in a church for the vows, so I sent a man to London, a week since, for a special license from the archbishop so that I might marry her from this bed. Mr. Pole … the roads … the offices. It is not come.” A difficult breath. “I have been holding on for a piece of paper, Damian. Holding onto life for a piece of paper.”