Carla Kelly (8 page)

She shook her head. “Poor man! I wonder how much in his life he has been solitary. He looks so wretched, sir, as though he were used to seeing himself through difficulties alone.” She searched for understanding in the doctor’s face, and found it. “No one should be alone in desperate situations.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said the doctor. “He sleeps soundly now. Try turning loose.”

Libby did as he said, and the merchant slumbered on.

“I could sit with him now, Miss Ames,” Dr. Cook said.

She leaned back in the chair, free of the merchant, but shook her head again. “No. You keep far worse hours than I do.” Libby twinkled her eyes at him. “Besides, Dr. Cook, I would not forgive myself if you could not return to your house and rumple up another suit.”

“Silly nod,” he said mildly.

Libby was surprised at this side of the staid, clumsy Dr. Anthony Cook. Lydia will be amazed when I tell her that Dr. Cook is human, she thought.

After a long moment spent in idle contemplation of her face, which should have discomfited her, but did not, the doctor turned to his patient again. “Has he eaten anything, Miss Ames?” he asked, his voice all business again.

“No, nothing. I asked him this evening when he was lucid, and he said he feared he would throw it back up. I did not press him.”

“He is probably right. It is often that way with drunks,” the doctor said.

“Oh, pray don’t call him that,” she said quickly.

The doctor regarded her again. “Oh, and has our mysterious candy merchant taken your fancy?” he asked. “That is what he is, my dear, a drunkard, and destined to remain so unless we can dry him out.”

Idly, he placed his fingertips against the merchant’s neck for another check of the pulse. “And so he will remain, more like. I wonder what it was that started him drinking? He appears to be a merchant of some substance, if one can credit the quality of his suit.”

“A merchant at very least,” said Libby. “Sir, you should have heard him order me about. He sounded like a duke. Or at least a sergeant major.” She laughed. “How he reminded me of Papa’s sergeants, especially if I did something to disturb the calm of the regiment.”

“You miss those days, don’t you?” Anthony Cook asked as he pulled up another chair and sat beside her.

“Oh, I do,” she said, the animation unmistakable in her voice. “I miss the marches, the cantonments, even the food sometime. And the sound of Spanish, and the little children, the smell of camp fires . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked at the physician shyly. “But I am boring you.”

“You couldn’t, Miss Ames, you couldn’t,” he murmured. He touched her wrist, his fingers going to her pulse without his even being aware of it. “When the gypsies arrive for the hop-picking this summer, you will have to visit their camp fires.”

“I shall,” she said, and moved slightly. He was sitting too close.

The physician remembered himself and laughed softly. “Good, steady rhythm! Beg pardon, Miss Ames. It is a habit. I suppose I would feel for the Prince Regent’s pulse, if I were ever to shake his hand.”

She smiled in the dark, charitable toward the hulk of a man who seemed so at ease beside her. “Well, it is comforting to have a professional opinion that my heart beats.”

“Yours and others, too,” he said enigmatically, and then proceeded directly onto another tack. “I have been asking in Holyoke about our candy merchant. No one in the public houses or the food warehouses has heard of our own Nesbitt Duke, although all are familiar with Copley’s Chocolatier. Indeed, the food brokers tell me that as a rule, Copley’s does not venture on selling trips when the weather is warm.”

“How odd.” Libby could think of nothing intelligent to say. She felt a great stupidity settle over her that she could only credit to exhaustion.

The doctor stirred beside her and Libby roused herself sufficiently to remind him that the hour was late and he needed to be home.

In answer, Dr. Cook snapped open his watch and stared at it. “So it is,” he agreed. “I will take myself off if you will go to bed. Tomorrow, our mysterious chocolate merchant should be hungry enough to eat oatmeal. It is what I hope, at any rate.”

He stood up then, the chair protesting as he left it. Dr. Cook shoved his hands deep in his pockets and stared down at his sleeping patient.

“Do you know, Miss Ames, I have wondered if drinking is a disease,” he said.

He looked at her quickly, ready to gauge her reaction. When she made no comment, but only dabbed at the merchant’s forehead, he continued, his voice less tentative.

“You’re a rare one, miss. Most people laugh me out of the room after a statement like that.”

She smiled and shook her head, her heart warming to this strange and open man. “After Joseph’s accident, Papa used to say to me, ‘What a mystery is the human body.’” Libby sighed and leaned back in her chair. “For all that we live in a modern age, sir, there’s much even doctors don’t know.”

She heard his chuckle. The doctor rattled the keys in his pocket and started for the door. “True, indeed, Miss Ames. You need only ask any lawyer and he will tell you how little doctors know.” He sighed and fiddled with the door handle. “Or you need only ask any honest doctor in practice. How little we know about anything. Do get some sleep, Miss Ames.”

He paused again. “I hear that he has snake fever. Despite the lateness of the hour, I was met by a curious little woman who told me to be very careful. I promised her that, I, too, was immune.”

He winked and left the room. In another moment, Libby heard the crash of the little hall table, victim of Dr. Cook’s late-night blundering, followed by a markedly unprofessional oath. Libby clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. Dr. Cook strikes again, she thought.

Libby’s plans to remain at the merchant’s bedside were disrupted an hour later by Candlow, who sat himself down across from her and fixed her with such an expression of sorrowful unease that she bowed to the pressure and retired to her bed. She had only the faintest memory of sinking into the welcome feather mattress.

Her own unease was replaced by optimism with the rise of the sun. Libby lay in bed, hands clasped behind her head, and thought of her father. “I disremember anyone ever made so glad by the mere rising of the sun,” he had declared to her on more than one occasion. “How simple you are, child.”

He was right, of course. She felt her spirits rise higher as she went to the window, leaned her elbows on the sill, and gazed out on as perfect a morning as Kent ever lavished on its inhabitants.

She sat in the window then for a moment, relishing the sun’s warmth. Perhaps the merchant would agree to some nourishment today. Perhaps he would disclose something about himself. And even if he did neither of those things, Libby knew she had the heart to get through the day, because the morning was so fair.

She dressed slowly, taking more time with her hair than her usual quick twist of the heavy braid and poking of pins here and there. She stood in thought a moment, a generous handful of shining brown hair in her hand, and wondered if she ought to take a deep breath and cut it. “You’re dreadfully far from the mode,” Lydia had told her only days ago as she patted her own shorn locks and coaxed the little curls around her fingers.

But the weight of it felt good on top of her head. She decided to postpone the event and wait until Lydia returned from Brighton with new ideas about what was fashionable and what wasn’t. “For all I know, if I wait long enough, I will be
à la mode
again,” Libby said to the mirror. “Not that it matters.”

Her toilet quickly accomplished, she paused outside the door to the guest room, knocked, and then pressed her ear at the panel.

“Come in,” said the merchant, and he sounded remarkably clear.

She turned the handle.

“On one condition.”

She stopped.

“Sir?”

“Promise me that you do not have any oatmeal. I hate oatmeal.” His tone was conversational and there was a bantering quality to it that was new to her.

“Cross my heart and hope to die, sir,” she said.

“Then you may enter.”

The room was still gloomy, the draperies pulled, but Libby saw the merchant sitting up in bed. His face was pale and unshaven, but his eyes were open and alert.

She approached the bed, her hands behind her back. “How do you feel, Mr. Duke?” she asked cautiously.

He frowned at her. “Rather like someone has used my body to beat out a camp fire. Not that it’s any interest of yours.”

“My, but you’re a rude one,” she declared, secretly pleased right down to her shoes that he was not shaking or crying.

“I certainly am,” he agreed, “and I’ll get a great deal more rude if you don’t bring me . . .”

He paused. Libby held her breath and crossed her fingers behind her back.

“Some tea and toast.”

Libby exhaled her lungful of air and clapped her hands together. The chocolate merchant winced and she put her hands behind her back again and started to edge out of the room.

“I’ll be only a moment, sir,” she said.

“You’ll be less time than that, Miss,” said Candlow behind her, and she whirled about to see the butler in the doorway, bearing a covered tray. “I was here before you, miss.”

Candlow was dressed impeccably as usual, but there were dark smudges under his eyes and his well-lived-in face had settled further.

Libby eyed him, her hands on her hips. “I would suspect, Candlow, that you were here all night.”

“He was,” said the duke, a touch of irritation mingled with amusement in his voice. “Is no one ever left alone in this house to suffer in silence?”

Libby considered the question in some seriousness before her own good humor surfaced. “I suppose not, Mr. Duke.” She came closer and gave the merchant the full force of her smile. “Be grateful that Mama is not here. It would have been hot bricks at your feet, a poultice for your chest, and possibly a leech or two, if Joseph had been prevailed upon to visit the pond.”

The merchant shuddered in mock horror. “And chamomile tea and sal hepatica?”

Libby nodded. “You obviously have a mother, sir.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” quizzed the merchant. “Although I do not know that she would have done those things . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Who, then, sir?” Libby asked.

“Oh, others,” he replied vaguely.

Her eyes wide, Libby hurried to his side. She touched his arm. “Oh, sir, I never thought. You have a wife. Only tell me her direction and I will inform her of your accident. Candlow, why didn’t we think of that? I am distressed.”

The merchant reached over and stopped the agitated movement of her hands by grabbing one in a firm grip. “There is no one to tell, Miss Ames, no one.”

Libby let him hold her hand. “Surely there is someone, Mr. Duke. Everyone has someone.”

The duke eyed her thoughtfully in silence, as if he were considering all those near and dear. Libby watched his face.

“There is no one really too interested in me, my dear,” he said finally.

Libby felt tears welling in her eyes. She looked away and brushed at them.

The merchant tightened his grip on her hand. “See here, Miss Ames, are you really that concerned?” he asked, his voice soft. He leaned back against the pillows and attempted a joke. “I suppose that the emporiums I supply with chocolate would miss me.”

Libby sobbed out loud and dabbed harder at her eyes. The chocolate merchant stared at her in amazement.

Candlow cleared his throat. “Miss Ames has a soft heart,” he said.

“So I gather,” Benedict murmured. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “You can’t imagine the compliment you have paid me,” he said.

Startled, Libby withdrew her hand from his and wiped her eyes. “Heavens, Mr. Duke, you must think I am a silly nod,” she said.

“You certainly are,” he replied. “Now, where is my tea and toast?”

His bracing words, delivered with a wink, dried her tears and recalled her to the business at hand. Libby rose, curtsied deep, and flourished her hand toward the butler. “Very well, sir, since you are waxing imperious again, ta-dah, breakfast!”

With a flourish of his own, Candlow settled the tray across the chocolate merchant’s lap and whisked off the lid.

“Well done, indeed, Candlow,” said the duke. “You’re as good as any I have seen in noble houses.” He paused, cleared his throat, and recovered. “Or at least, what I imagine those butlers to be like.”

“Indeed,” said the butler.

The chocolate merchant gagged on the toast and only sipped at the tea, but there was a grim, determined look in his eyes that encouraged Libby more than she would have thought possible, considering the paucity of his intake.

“That will do, Candlow,” he said finally when the toast—after a second attempt—proved insurmountable. “Just leave the tea, please.”

“As you wish, Mr. Duke.”

“I would still prefer a cordial,” he complained when the butler closed the door behind him.

“You’ll not get it in this house,” Libby said. “And I shall not return your trousers, either.”

“When I am old and gray, eh, madam?” he murmured. “I may be forced to wrap a sheet about my middle and set off that way to seek my fortune, if you will not oblige me with my pants.”

Libby laughed out loud at the thought, and was rewarded with an answering smile. “Sir! Whatever would the neighbors think?” she teased.

“Who cares? I am sure I do not.”

“Sir, you may spout off like a duke if you choose, but here in Kent we must behave ourselves to suit the neighbors.”

“What did you say?” he asked suddenly, his eyes intense.

Libby stared back in some confusion. “Oh, I don’t know. Something about coming on the lordship. Nothing that signifies. And you do have that air about you, sir,” she concluded, and then rushed on. “And I have to wonder how you manage to sell much chocolate that way.”

“Sell much . . . Yes, yes, it is a deplorable way I have,” he agreed. “I suppose there are many far better merchants.” He paused a moment and then perjured himself without a blink. “How fortunate that I am the nephew of Charles Copley.”

Libby nodded. “Aha! That does rather explain the excellence of your suit, Mr. Duke.”