It had been inhuman.
He was still whimpering when she reached the side of the bed, and he was breathing hard, too—the kind of short, shallow breaths people made to ward off pain.
“What happened?” Honoria whispered. This wasn’t the fever.
This was something far more acute.
His leg. She had grabbed his leg.
That was when she realized her hand was sticky.
Still clutching her elbow, she turned her free hand over, twisting until her palm faced up.
Blood.
“Oh, my God.'
With an unsettled feeling in her stomach, she stepped toward him. She didn’t want to startle him; he’d already knocked her down twice. But the blood . . . It wasn’t her blood.
He’d pulled his leg back under the covers, so she carefully lifted the blanket, pushing it back until his leg was bare to the knee.
She dropped the blanket and lurched back, barely able to keep down the contents of her stomach.
“Oh, my God,” she said again, unable to say anything else, barely able to
Her mind spun. He had an infected wound. It must have been when he’d cut off his boot. But he hadn’t said that he’d been cut.
Why hadn’t he mentioned that? He should have told someone. He should have told
“No,” Honoria answered, her voice shrill and panicked. She tried to quell the rising terror within her. She needed to be rational.
She was no help to anyone like this. “His leg. Did you know about his leg?'
“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Wetherby asked, coming quickly to her side.
“His leg. It’s terribly infected. I’m sure it’s the cause of the fever. It has to be.” “The doctor said it was the cough. He—oh!” Mrs. Wetherby flinched when Honoria lifted the blanket to show her Marcus’s leg.
“Oh, my dear heavens.” She took a step back, covering her hand with her mouth. She looked as if she might be sick. “I had no idea.
None of us did. How could we not have seen it?'
Honoria was wondering the very same thing, but this wasn’t the time to point fingers. Marcus needed them to work together to help him, not to argue over who was to blame. “We need to summon the doctor,” she said to Mrs. Wetherby. “It needs to be cleaned, I would imagine.'
The housekeeper gave a quick nod. “I’ll send for him.'
“How long will it take for him to get here?'
“It depends on whether he is out seeing other patients. If he’s at home, the footman can be back with him in less than two hours.'
“Two hours!” Honoria bit her lip in a belated attempt to muffle her shriek. She’d never seen anything like this, but she’d heard stories. This was the kind of infection that killed a man. Quickly.
“We can’t wait two hours. He needs medical attention now.'
Mrs. Wetherby turned to her with frightened eyes. “Do you know how to clean a wound?'
“Of course not. Do you?'
“Nothing like that,” Mrs. Wetherby answered, eyeing Marcus’s leg with a queasy expression.
“Well, how would you take care of one that is smaller?'
Honoria demanded. “A wound, I mean.” Mrs. Wetherby wrung her hands together, panicked eyes darting from Honoria to Marcus. “I don’t know,” she sputtered. “A compress, I imagine. Something to draw out the poison.'
“The poison?” Honoria echoed. Good God, it sounded positively medieval. “Summon the doctor,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “Now. And then come right back.
With hot water. And towels. And anything else you can think of.'
“Shall I bring your mother?'
“My mother?” Honoria gaped at her, not because there was anything particularly wrong with having her mother in the sickroom.
Rather, why was Mrs. Wetherby thinking of it now? “I don’t know.
Whatever you think is best. But hurry.'
Mrs. Wetherby nodded and ran from the room.
Honoria looked back at Marcus. His leg was still exposed to the air, the furious gash facing her like a seething frown. “Oh, Marcus,'
she whispered. “How could this have happened?” She took his hand, and for once he didn’t pull away. He seemed to have calmed down a bit; his breathing was more even than it had been just a few minutes earlier, and was it possible that his skin wasn’t quite so red?
Or was she so desperate for any sign of improvement that she was seeing things that weren’t there?
“Maybe,” she said aloud, “but I will take any sign of hope.” She forced herself to look at his leg more closely. Her stomach roiled dangerously, but she pushed down her distaste. She needed to start cleaning the wound. Heaven only knew how long it would take the doctor to return, and although a compress would be better with hot water, there didn’t seem any good reason not to start with what she had.
Marcus had flung the wet linen she’d been using to cool him across the room, so she went to his bureau and retrieved another pair of his unmentionables, trying not to notice anything about them other than the fact that they were made of reasonably soft linen.
She wound them into a loose cylindrical shape and dunked one end in the water. “I’m so sorry, Marcus,” she whispered, then touched the wet cloth ever-so-gently against the wound.
He didn’t flinch.
She let out the breath she’d been holding and looked at the cloth. It was red in spots from his blood, and yellowish, too, with the infection that was oozing from the wound.
Feeling slightly more confident of her nursing abilities, she adjusted the cloth to a clean area and again pressed it against the wound, applying a tiny bit more pressure than the first time. It didn’t seem to bother him overmuch, so she repeated the procedure, and then again, until there was very little clean cloth remaining.
She glanced worriedly at the door. Where was Mrs. Wetherby?
Honoria was making progress, but she was sure she could do a better job with hot water. Still, she wasn’t about to stop, not while Marcus remained relatively calm.
She went to the bureau and got another pair of Marcus’s unmentionables. “I don’t know what you’re going to wear when I’m through with you,” she said to him, hands on hips.
“Back in the water,” she said to herself, dunking the cloth. “And back on you.” She pressed, harder this time. One was supposed to press on cuts and scrapes to stop the bleeding, this much she knew.
