“I thought you wanted her.”
Sébastien grunted. “I do.”
“Well, then, go do the pretty,” Piers said tiredly. Perhaps tonight was the night to have two glasses of brandy, rather than one.
“There’s no point.”
“Merely because my father carted her here from England for me? Nonsense. She needs a husband, and you’ll make a pretty one.” Something twisted, agonizingly, in his stomach at the idea of Linnet with a husband. Another man. Sébastien? Inconceivable. “You can’t live here, though.”
His cousin leaned back against the arm of the sofa, holding his glass of brandy up to the light. “Why not? I’m comfortable here. The castle is big enough, Lord knows. And, like it or not, you need my surgical skills.”
Piers threw him a look. “I won’t have her,” he said, making it clear and simple, so even his romantically minded cousin could understand. “I’m not having her.” Anymore, he added silently.
“And before you start bleating about my father,” he continued, “it’s not that. I see—Linnet made me see—that I’m just making an ass of myself on that front. Prufrock is the king of butlers, and Linnet . . .”
“The queen of women,” Sébastien said quietly.
“But I’m too injured for someone like her. For anyone. I’m too much of a beast, Sébastien. You know that as well as I do.”
His cousin shrugged. “I rather like you, even when you are in a temper.”
“You grew up with me. You had no choice but to get along with me. I can’t pretend to myself that I’m not the utter bastard that I am. Maybe if I were different, if my temper weren’t so fierce, if—”
“If you didn’t indulge yourself by letting it fly,” Sébastian said, dryly.
“You don’t understand.” As if to prompt him, his muscle spasmed, sending a flash of agony up his leg.
“No man in his right mind with a functional tool,” Sébastien said, “would understand. If I had a chance at Linnet, I wouldn’t give a damn how much pain I was in. I’d grab her and get a ring on her finger, and trust that we could work it out later.”
“That’s why you’re no good at diagnosis,” Piers said, trying to ease the muscle by straightening his leg.
“Why?”
“You can’t put symptoms and observations together. One pain-ridden bastard with a wicked tongue—”
He raised his hand when Sébastien opened his mouth. “That’s a good description of me, and you know it. At any rate, someone like me, together with a woman like Linnet, adds up to one thing.”
“What?”
“Unhappiness,” he said flatly, bringing his boot back to the floor.
“Not necessarily—”
“Unhappiness for her.”
Piers let the golden, fiery brandy slide down his throat.
Beside him, Sébastien was silent. Then: “Couldn’t you control it?”
“I am who I am.” He swallowed. “I don’t want to watch her wilt when I’m out of my mind from pain. Or grow afraid, the way my mother did with my father, if I turn to laudanum to relieve it.”
“You never do.”
“I might. It’s always there, the possibility, the temptation, at the back of my mind. Like father, like son, perhaps. I will not put Linnet through that.”
“Damn, you’re in love with her,” Sébastien stated, staring at him.
Across the room, Linnet was chuckling and rapping Penders on the shoulder with her fan. The man was practically groveling at her feet.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Piers said, acknowledging the truth aloud. “Who wouldn’t be?”
Prufrock entered the room, walking swiftly up to the two of them. “The orderly in the east wing feels that the fever patient admitted yesterday has taken a turn for the worse.”
“I’ll go,” Piers said, putting down his glass with a clink. “I’ve no business here anyway.”
“Don’t—” Sébastien said, but Piers lost the end of his sentence in the thump of his cane, the door shutting behind him.
He looked at the stairs before him with some exhaustion. Behind him was a world of fragrant women and golden brandy. But up those stairs was his real world, that of dying patients with their strained faces and terrified eyes.
He started climbing.
The orderly met him at the top of the stairs. “The patient broke out in a rash three days ago, a couple of days after he had the first symptoms.”
“And those were?” The orderly held open the door to the east wing so Piers could limp along beside him.
“It began with a stiff neck and shoulders, but since he’s a miller, he thought he’d simply strained himself moving sacks of flour. Chills came on that night, alternating with fever. He turned, as he described it, red as a boiled lobster within a few days.”
“And now?”
“He hasn’t eaten since admittance yesterday, and vomited after drinking some broth. He’s feverish, complains he can’t breathe. The reason I asked Mr. Prufrock to fetch you is that his skin is blistering terribly. And his lips seem to be blackening.”
“Hell and damnation,” Piers said, with feeling.
Sure enough, when he examined the patient, the inside of his throat was covered with small brown colored specks, and there were swellings behind his ears. “Double damnation. Who’s seen him? Who’s been in the room?”
“Well, Dr. Bitts admitted him yesterday,” the orderly said. “I have, of course.” He looked a bit nervous, but steady enough. “His lordship came by after Dr. Bitts, and said that the man should be kept in a room by himself; Dr. Bitts had directed me to put him in with the patients with petechial fever.”
“It’s not petechial,” Piers said, closing the door as they left. “It’s scarlatina anginosa. Scarlet fever. Or more probably, scarlatina maligna. This means real trouble, unless he’s unique. Where are the two other patients admitted earlier today?”
“Down the hall,” the orderly said. “They’re in a room together, because they’re cobblers who own a shop together, and they became sick at the same time.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Little Millow.”
“Around two miles from here.”
“The first patient is from Aferbeeg.”
“Only about one mile. Did the cobblers say whether anyone else they knew was ill?”
“I asked all three. The miller was delivering grain for the two days before he finally collapsed. He thought he just had a cough and would get over it.”
“Delivering grain . . . likely in a wide circumference around Aferbeeg.” They turned into the room with the cobblers. They both had the rash, the peeling, ulcers in their throats. The miller had stopped by five days ago to have his boots repaired.
“Bad to worse. There’s a good possibility of an epidemic,” Piers said grimly. “The first thing we have to do is protect everyone in this castle who’s not already on death’s door.” He ran the bell for Prufrock, and then went to the top of the stairs, holding up his hand to stop the butler midway.