A Flight of Fancy (14 page)

Mama blinked hard and shook her head. “I am so sorry, my dear, but Cassandra is quite ill. She seems to have taken a chill, and one of her burn wounds—what are you doing?”

“Getting out of bed.” Heedless of the coverlet, Whittaker shoved the tray onto the mattress beside him and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “You should have told me straightaway.”

“You cannot go down there. You are not well enough yourself.” Mama grasped his arm.

He extricated himself from her hold and grabbed at the bedpost until the dizziness left his head. “I can. I shall.” Thinking of the rain that had brought him around from the blow to his head, made him conscious enough to get help, he knew how Cassandra had gotten her chill—standing in the rain awaiting her aeronaut friends.

The other men in her life.

He released the bedpost and headed for the door. “This is all my fault.”

“No, Geoffrey, you must not.” Mama grasped his arm to stop him. “She—well, the apothecary is considering bringing in a surgeon to—to—she somehow caused an inflammation in one of her . . . burns, which he fears may grow gangrenous if not tended to at once.”

A smooth, dry hand brushed the hair away from Cassandra’s face. A palm lingered against her cheek, too broad for Honore’s
or Lady Whittaker’s. Too hard for the apothecary’s doughy flesh. Too familiar for an apothecary’s too, but definitely belonging to a male.

A male in her sickroom. Perhaps they had brought in a physician. The apothecary said something about one of her burns not quite healed—

A surgeon. Oh no, they had sent for a surgeon to remove her leg.

“No, no. You cannot.” The protest emerged in a croak. Her eyes flew open, tried to focus in a room lit by firelight.

“Cannot what, my dear?” the man responded.

If ears could blink in surprise, hers did. She must be mistaken. The congestion in her head had caused a roaring in her ears for days, muffling all sound around her from voices to clinking china. He would not dare come to her bedchamber in what must be the night. Her fevered imagination had created his voice out of the surgeon’s.

She peered up at the face above her, shadowed by a fall of sleek, dark hair and light behind him. “Please, do not amputate my—my leg. It got well before. It will get well again. Please. It was the rain, the wet—”

“Hush. No one is going to perform surgery on you.”

The touch on her lips brought clarity. Not her imagination.

“What are you doing in here?” She whispered because that did not hurt. “You are half-dead.”

“Nothing of the kind.” Brazenly, he perched on the edge of the bed. She opened her mouth to protest, but he smiled. “Mama is right here too, playing chaperone. Has been for two days.”

“Still improper,” Cassandra murmured. “We are not betrothed.”

“And so I told him,” Lady Whittaker said from somewhere near the hearth. “And he should be resting himself. But I cannot get him to leave here without having the footmen carry him away, for which he threatened to dismiss them, which would be unkind and not worth the trouble.”

“But you would never do that. Dismiss them,” Cassandra said.

Whittaker’s hand returned to her cheek. “You still think enough of me to know that.”

“Of course.” She closed her eyes, too weary to say more, weary enough to fall into the first restful sleep she had enjoyed since the night Whittaker had been wounded. The night of the ascension.

She still knew nothing of her friends. She had awakened the next morning with a raging fever and the realization that one of her burns, the worst one on her right ankle, had rubbed raw against her boot. Through a haze of fever and pain, she recalled the apothecary saying the word
sepsis
. Infection. The danger of burns. He exclaimed over her scars. Lady Whittaker wept, murmuring about not realizing they were so extensive.

“You poor child . . . the pain . . . no wonder . . .” were all phrases Cassandra recalled her ladyship saying.

The final one stuck the most. No wonder what? She had broken off the betrothal? Of course she would. The bride of the ninth earl of Whittaker must not be repulsive to her husband. And she was repulsive, to hear the apothecary speak, and he was a man. A pudge of a man with face and hands like rising bread dough, but still male.

Yet apparently Whittaker, with his mother’s cooperation if not approval, had spent the day beside her bed. He arrived the next day too, this time dressed save for a coat, but with a banyan over shirt and breeches.

“Not drawing room wear,” he greeted her, “but all I can manage with this sling. Can you manage some breakfast?”

“Where is Lady Whittaker?”

“I have no idea,” her son admitted.

“But I am here.” Honore leaned over the bed and kissed Cassandra’s brow. “I shall play chaperone.”

“But it is bright in here. He can see how hideous I am.” Cassandra turned toward the half-open curtains and window through which sunshine streamed like melted butter from a pitcher.

“You are not hideous.” Whittaker lifted a handful of her hair off the pillow and let it slide through his fingers. “A little pale, perhaps, but not hideous.”

“You do not know the whole of it.” Cassandra closed her mouth and her eyes.

She must make him go away. In another minute she might grasp the hand beside her face and hold on as though she did not want to let it go. Having him close, hearing his voice, felt too good, too right, to her heart.

Her intellect gained strength over her heart, and she managed to push him away. “How are my friends? Did you hear of what became of Mr. Sorrells and Mr. Kent?”

Whittaker jerked away so quickly she felt the movement.

“They are quite all right.” Honore seemed oblivious to Whittaker’s reaction, so cheerful did she sound. “They called the next day, but you were sleeping.”

“And no one told me?” Cassandra attempted to sit up with the coverlet clutched beneath her chin. “Honore, you surely realize I would want to know at once how they fared.”

“They are not dead.” The coldness of Whittaker’s tone, the sudden hardness of his jaw, suggested perhaps he wished they were.

“Did it work? Did my sails—” Realizing that she croaked rather than talked, Cassandra shut her mouth again.

Honore, golden and cheerful like the sunshine, approached the bed, a cup in her hands. “Drink this. Hot tea with some honey and lemon.”

“Thank you,” Cassandra said, not moving.

She could not take the cup without sitting up and could not sit up with Whittaker standing there. She flicked a glance at him, willing him to leave.

He took the cup from Honore instead. “Help her to get settled against the headboard, Miss Honore. Miss Bainbridge wishes to remain modest.”

His gaze connected and locked with Cassandra’s. Her cheeks burned as though her fever had not broken. “Swine,” she mouthed, fighting a rush of tears.

“Cassandra.” Honore’s eyes widened in shock. “You didn’t just call Whittaker a swine, did you?”

“Yes, I believe she did, and with reason.” After setting the tea on the table beside the bed, he turned his back on them and strode across the room.

Cassandra held her breath, expecting him to walk out of the room. But he simply strode to the window and faced the garden beyond, one hand braced against the frame. Sunshine glinted off mahogany highlights in his dark hair and limned the breadth of his shoulders. Somewhere in the year and a half she had known him, Geoffrey Giles had grown from a gangly youth into a well set-up man. Her middle quivered despite her illness, and she turned away in time to notice Honore staring at him, her eyes bright with reflected daylight, her lips parted in a secret little half-smile. Cassandra stared at her for a moment, then understood.

Honore, who had treated him like an older brother at best since he began to court Cassandra, now stared at Whittaker with the kind of admiration she had heretofore reserved for men like Gerald Frobisher in the spring and now Captain Crawford—as though he were a potential beau.

12

He was a swine.

Whittaker listened to the silence behind him and decided he would be better off banging his head against the window until darkness claimed him than opening his mouth and teasing Cassandra with reminders of their behavior. In truth, shame, not fright, had driven her from the carriage and into the crowd with its flaming torches. Shame had driven her from him. Yet when she showed more concern toward those two ne’er-do-well gentlemen aeronauts than she had demonstrated toward him as her host, let alone the man who had so recently been her fiancé—who still wanted to be her betrothed, her husband—he could not stop his tongue.

God, I am a fool
, he cried inside his head.
I believe she is wrong in her thinking, but I will not win her back this way. Please show me how.

His soul felt as bleak as the autumn garden beyond the glass—shriveled like the leaves on the rosebushes. His words remained as silent as the Bainbridge sisters behind him. He should leave, apologize to Cassandra for disturbing her, and return to his chamber. Mama had said something about guests. He had paid little attention, but if visitors were expected at the Hall, he needed to get
well. He needed to talk to Crawford and get out of being his spy if the major’s own men could not recognize him enough to keep their pistols aimed elsewhere—preferably not at any of the men at all. The rioters might need to be stopped, but not by lead balls.

He turned from the window in time to catch Miss Honore Bainbridge staring at him as though—his face heated—she liked what she saw. She caught his eye and smiled. He felt a clout to the middle, not a pleasant one. More like his gut, not his arm, had been pistol-shot. He did not need Honore Bainbridge complicating his life any further.

She likely has the same dowry as her sister
, a voice whispered in the corner of his head.

But he loved Cassandra, not her dowry. Cassandra, who had pulled the coverlet over her head like a child hiding from bogles in the night.

“I believe,” he said, “I will return when Miss Bainbridge is more prepared to receive visitors.” Without another glance at Honore or her elder sister, he left the room, able to breathe again once he stepped into the chilly dimness of the hallway.

But his own injuries had taken their toll on his strength, and he could simply walk, not dash off, as he wished to do. Too soon he caught the patter of soft slippers on the floorboards and caught a whiff of a scent he recognized, though if he had been asked a quarter hour earlier, he would not have been able to say he recognized it, nor what the scent consisted of. Something of sweet flowers, rather than the fresh tang of citrus that seemed to hover around his Cassandra.

No, she was not his Cassandra now. Nor did she follow him. Seconds before he reached the door into the great hall, she caught up with him—Miss Honore Bainbridge, all shimmering golden beauty even in the poorly lit passage.

“My lord.” She smiled up at him, touching his arm for the briefest of moments. “Whittaker, a moment of your time?”

“I think not, Miss Honore.” He tried to sound stiff, cold, like her father.

She laughed. “Oh, very good, my lord. Cassie says you never thought to be the earl, but I think you will make a very good one if you can talk like that. But it never works with me when Father cuts up stiff like that—well, not most of the time—and it will not work with me when you do either. Remember, I knew you when you were plain Mr. Giles.”

“I believe I was never quite plain Mr. Giles.” He tried hard not to smile at her brazenness and failed. “I believe there was an ‘Honorable’ in there somewhere.”

“Yes, of course, the Honorable Mr. Geoffrey Giles, whenever someone wrote you a letter.” Miss Honore’s laugh tinkled off the plaster walls.

She was so bright, so energetic and lovely, and with her fragrance she reminded him of spring. He had thought everything was going his way in the spring. The mills were prospering, the rioters had not yet reached Lancashire, and the sheep had given plentiful wool from the winter’s growth. Best of all, he and Cassandra would be wed in June.

Then she saw the balloon ascension and rioters destroyed one of his mills . . .

“We cannot stand here talking, Miss Honore,” he said with more curtness than he intended. “It is improper for us to be alone here like this without a chaperone, and I am ashamed to say I need a chair.”

“Of course you do. So thoughtless of me. Here.” As though she were a gentleman, she rushed forward to open the door to the great hall.

It too was cold, colder than the passage, but a fire burned on the hearth at the far end, where a carpet and chairs made a comfortable place for visitors to wait without freezing on cold days. Despite the sunlight, this was a cold day, and yes, Mama had said something about visitors. She wanted to tell him more, but he had insisted on sitting vigil over Cassandra, ensuring no one amputated her leg unless the wound did go gangrenous. She fretted about it so much she whimpered and muttered in her sleep, crying out in fear. The apothecary insisted. The surgeon insisted. No physician of any repute resided near enough for an opinion, so Whittaker had been using his authority as the head of this household to say no.