Joe was talking—Neville did not know what about. The doctor was still busy with his shoulder and apparently Elizabeth was assisting him. Neville watched Lily as she worked quietly and efficiently, as she had always done after a battle or skirmish, dipping the cloth, squeezing out the excess water, pressing it lightly to his face or his neck. He made a cocoon of his pain and hid deep inside it.
'Was he caught?' he asked finally. He had suddenly remembered being at Vauxhall, kissing Lily in one of the darker alleys, considering the very indiscreet act of moving her back father into the trees so that they could take their embrace farther, and then recognizing the strange prickling feeling along his spine as the type of sixth-sense warning of danger he had developed during his years as an officer. He had heard the snapping of a twig, perhaps, without even realizing it. He remembered seeing a cloaked figure lurking in the trees at the other side of the path, aiming a pistol at them. He remembered leaping sideways to shield Lily and taking the bullet that would surely have killed her. 'Did someone catch the bastard?' He remembered Elizabeth's and Lily's presence too late.
'Harris and Portfrey went charging off in pursuit,' the marquess said, 'as did a small army of other men, Nev. I would wager Vauxhall emptied out faster of ladies and everyone else than in its whole history. I doubt anyone found the gunman, though. A man in a dark cloak, Lily said. There were probably fifty men there to answer the description, Portfrey and myself among them.'
'You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Neville,' Elizabeth said coolly. 'There, Dr. Nightingale is finished. Perhaps you would see him on his way, Lily, while Joseph and I get Neville out of the rest of his clothes and into a nightshirt.'
'No,' Lily said, 'I am staying.'
'Lily, my dear—'
'I am staying,' she said.
Neville gathered that it was Elizabeth who saw the physician out. For him there followed a nightmarish few minutes—which felt more like a few hours—while Lily and his cousin undressed him and somehow got him, wounded shoulder and all, inside someone's nightshirt, and hauled him off the bed so that the towels on which he had been lying could be removed and the bedclothes properly turned back. Then there was all the difficulty of lying down again. He had suffered his share of wounds during his war years. Every time he found that he had not quite remembered the full extent of the physical agony.
He could hear the rasping of his own breathing. If he concentrated on the rhythm of it, he thought, he could impose some sort of control over the situation.
'We should not have put him on his back.' That was Joseph.
'No.' That was Lily. 'He will be better thus. Neville, you must take this laudanum that the doctor left.'
'Go to hell,' he said, and his eyes snapped open. 'I do beg your pardon.'
Her lips were quirking into a smile. 'I will support your head,' she said.
He had always fought against taking medicines of any sort. But he meekly downed the whole dose of laudanum as punishment for what he had said to her.
After that everything became a blur of pain and gradual, blessed fuzziness. He thought Elizabeth and Portfrey were in the room, though he did not open his eyes to see or take any particular notice of the report that no trace had been found of any suspicious character with a pistol. And then there were just Elizabeth and Lily in the room, arguing over who would stay with him during the night. At least, Elizabeth was arguing—she would take the first watch, the housekeeper the second. It was unseemly for Lily to be alone with him in his bedchamber—if only he could climb out of the depths of himself, he would find something decidedly funny in that argument. She would tire herself out. She was too emotionally involved to make a good nurse—they could expect a fever, and then calmness and a certain detachment would be essential.
Lily put up no argument at all; she simply refused to leave.
He was sinking fast into lethargy by the time they were alone together, but he opened his eyes to confirm his impression that they were. She was standing beside the bed, gazing down at him. She was still wearing the elegant gold silk and gauze evening dress she had worn to Vauxhall.
'You are not going to sit beside the bed all night while I sleep,' he told her—it sounded to his own ears as if his words were slurring. 'If you are intending to stay, take off that dress and lie down beside me. You are my wife, after all.'
'Yes,' she said, but his mind was not focused enough to understand to what she was agreeing.
The pain had localized and became a dull pulsing in his shoulder. His tongue felt thick. His breathing was deepening. There was a new warmth along his left side and someone's small hand was in his.
***
Lily awoke when the predawn light was graying the room— an unfamiliar room. She felt as if a fire was burning close to her right side. Someone was talking.
Neville was apologizing to Lauren. Then he was telling Sergeant Doyle in marvelously profane language what a damned foolish thing he had done by throwing his body in the path of a bullet intended for someone else. Then he was instructing a whole company of men to stay where they were in the pass, to ignore the murderous French fire from the hills to either side—to search for the marriage papers until they had found them. Then he was telling someone that he was by thunder going to get Lily alone at Vauxhall and just let Elizabeth try to stop him.
He was in a raging fever, with the accompanying delirium.
Lily had opened his nightshirt down the front and was bathing him with cool water when Elizabeth arrived. But apart from raising her eyebrows as she observed Lily clad only in her shift and then glancing at the left side of the bed, which had obviously been slept in, she made no comment. She quietly set about sharing the nursing. She had, she told Lily, made arrangements to cancel all lessons until further notice.
Lily steadfastly refused to leave the room until late in the afternoon. She knew from experience that many more men died from the fever that succeeded surgery than ever died from the wounds themselves. A bullet in the shoulder ought not to be a mortal wound, but the fever might well kill. She would not leave him. She would nurse him back to health or she would be by his side when he died.
But Elizabeth had been right—it was hard to nurse a man when one had an emotional involvement with him. When one loved him so deeply that one knew his death would leave a yawning emptiness in one's own life that could never again be filled. When one knew that he had taken the bullet intended for her. And when one did not understand why it had happened.
She had never told him that she loved him—or not since her wedding night. Now it might be too late. She could
