“Knew you’d come back,” he said softly.
“Yes, of course.” She picked up the cool cloth again.
“How else could you torment me?”
“Exactly.” Laura continued to wipe his face, dampening the cloth again and again. After a time, he quieted and fell asleep.
While James slept, she occupied herself with digging through her father’s papers. She had no luck in his journals, but when she thumbed through the doctor’s correspondence, she found a letter from a doctor in Australia thanking Dr. Hinsdale for his recommendations regarding treatment of men who mined cinnabar ore.
Cinnabar, she remembered, was the ore that yielded mercury. The letter was two pages long and the handwriting cramped, but she waded through it, finding a list of foods the Australian thought helped his patients recover.
Laura wasted no time in giving Simpson the new requirements for James’s menu. That was the easy part, of course. The trouble would come in getting James to eat them.
For two days, things went on much the same. James would be feverish, then chilled. His eyes were usually closed, though she wasn’t sure how much he slept. Sometimes he talked in an eerie one-sided conversation. When he was awake, his eyes were often clouded and confused.
Laura watched over him, never leaving James alone unless Owen was there to help him and Demosthenes to guard him. True to her word, Abigail brought her the bottle of milk thistle under the guise of a call. Laura persuaded James to take it by cajoling or annoying him into it, whichever worked. She even managed to convince him to eat some food.
The members of James’s family trailed in to see him at various times. Laura watched them, hoping to pick up some indication that one of them had planned James’s demise. Claude’s face was almost as difficult to read as James’s. Walter seemed the most concerned. But was he afraid James would die or afraid he would live?
Patricia resented Laura’s constant presence in the sickroom, which made Laura wonder why the woman wanted so much to be alone with James. It might only be Patricia’s dislike of Laura, but perhaps it was something far worse. Laura hated the suspicion with which she lived. But none of it was as bad as the constant, draining worry that James had moved beyond the reach of her help, that he would never emerge from this semiconscious state.
James drifted. He knew who he was. He knew that something had happened to him and he hurt. That much was clear. He was less sure where he was. The sky above him was dark green, but that was wrong. Sometimes he burned and sometimes he was cold to the marrow of his bones. People he didn’t want to see came in and peered at him. His mother cried over him. But, no, she cried because Vincent was gone.
Now and then the dog stuck its square head over the top of the bed and stared at him, frowning. Mags. He smiled to see his first dog. Only she was Dem, too, and that couldn’t be right. But he liked having both of them there.
She was there. He knew who she was, though sometimes her name floated away from him. She gave him bitter things to drink, but her hands were soft and cool. She was lovely and the light glowed on her golden hair. Often her hair was in braids wound around her head, and other times it hung down over her shoulders and back like a waterfall. When he was hot, she bathed his face with cool water, and he felt better. When he was freezing, she held him. And that felt the best. He knew she was Graeme’s. But, no, she was his.
That didn’t make any sense at all. It was so difficult to think. He didn’t really want to think, anyway. There was that dark thing, and it was best left alone.
Then all at once, he would wake, and everything was real. The green above his head wasn’t the sky, but a canopy above a bed, and the room . . . the room was Laura’s. She was his wife. It was Dem who watched him. Mags had died years and years ago. The pain in his body separated into all its various points. And someone wanted him dead.
It was better, really, to drift.
Now and then when he drifted, he wasn’t even here. Once he was standing beside his father’s desk, and it didn’t seem odd that he was only a boy. James showed his father numbers on a piece of paper, but the numbers didn’t matter. What mattered was that his father laughed, and his arm curled around James, enclosing him in his warmth and scent for an instant, as he said, “Who would have thought it would be the cuckoo in the nest?”
Another time, James stood in the doorway of that same study, older now and more wary, watching his father, who sat, head in his hands and a half-empty bottle and glass before him on the desk. James had heard the argument earlier in his parents’ bedroom, and he’d trailed downstairs after his father stormed out, with some vague idea of making things right.