Villiers smiled faintly. “You are the one who told me not to pay so much attention to my doctors.”
He had been absolutely right about the house party. The so-called standards of polite society didn’t operate here. Jemma had challenged him to a chess game and he even played a few pieces before he realized that he didn’t care about chess anymore.
Then Jemma got a droopy look around her mouth and looked as if she might cry, so he closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep. Except that closing his eyes was dangerous these days: he closed them and woke up to find that the light had moved straight across the room and it was night. Or the night was gone and most of the day as well.
No one cared if Charlotte sat with him, and she never looked droopy. Sure enough, she was scowling at him. “You’re going to die looking like that?” she said pointedly.
He almost laughed but it took too much breath. “Appealing to my vanity won’t do it. May I use your name, oh sage Miss Tatlock?”
She turned up that long nose of hers. “Private names are far too intimate.”
“I want to be intimate,” he said.
There was a moment of silence.
“Though I won’t be around long enough to marry you,” he added.
“You wouldn’t want to marry me.” She picked up the book again. “Shall I continue?”
“Yes, I would,” he said, saying it because there was no reason not to. “I like you, Charlotte. I thought perhaps I could only love Jemma, but I’m fairly sure I’ve come to love you.”
“Very foolish of you,” she snapped.
“Yes.” But he was watching her under his lashes, and he saw a watery gleam in her eyes. He didn’t mean to make her droopy. The idea made him feel panicked. “So think about that. What a shame I’m dying. You could have inherited a fortune!”
She rallied instantly. “Don’t speak too soon. I might call in a priest and marry you to night.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Now her mouth was definitely wobbling. It was a soft and pink mouth, too. Anything to do with physical intimacy was farthest from Villiers’s mind, but he had noticed her mouth. She said bruising things, but with a sweet little mouth.
“Yes, you would!” she said fiercely. “I would never marry you for your fortune, and don’t forget it!”
“Would you marry me for other reasons?” He watched her from under his lashes. Of course, she would say no. He was a wreck of a man, dying, stupid, foolish, alone. She was—
“And not just because you’re desperate for a wedding ring?” he added. He didn’t have time for social niceties, not here in the very shadow of death.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. She reached out and her warm fingers curled around his.
He felt the tide of exhaustion again. He was so tired of the pain. It was all over his body now, an ache, more than one ache. “Who would think that a foolish little sword wound could come to this?” he said.
Her hand tightened on his. “Don’t die.” She said it quietly. “Don’t.”
But he didn’t think he had a choice. “Do you know what I feel like, Charlotte?”
“No.”
“A torch.Nothing more than a torch borne in the wind.”
And then the blackness came quickly, before he had a chance to say another word.
Charlotte sat next to Villiers and watched him sleep. He was gaunt, his face as white as parchment. And yet she could still see that glorious scrap of life that makes up the soul. It wasn’t hard to grasp how fragile the place was in which the soul resided.
Dautry came in quietly. He had just arrived, having missed supper.