A Love That Never Tires (35 page)

Suddenly, the commotion in the other room ceased. It grew silent. Unsettlingly silent. The men rushed into her room, finding Linley slumped over her cot. She was asleep.

“Someone should be with her at all times,” Patrick told them. “We could do it in turns like we did with the tiger watch.” He glanced from face to face. “Two of us sit up with her at night, the others during the day.”

Linley’s father nodded. “I agree.”

Reginald pulled back the bed covers while Archie helped maneuver Linley back into bed. “Archie and I can take the first watches,” he said. “Bedford and Schoville can take the next.”

“But that leaves me out,” Patrick reminded them.

“Exactly.” Reginald tucked the covers up around Linley’s chin. “I don’t think you should be left alone with her for six hours at a time.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I think you’re somehow to blame for all of this.”

After seeing Linley safe and warm in bed, Archie stood up and looked Patrick in the eyes. “I agree with Reginald,” he said. “Linley is incapacitated. You could try to force yourself on her.”

“For Christ sakes, I am not a rapist!” It took all of Patrick’s self-control not to brawl with Reginald and Archie right there in Linley’s bedroom.

“Enough! Enough!” Sir Bedford said. “Archie, Lord Kyre will take your watch.”

“What? No!” Archie said. “Why?”

“Because you are acting very selfishly right now. I should think you would be able to put aside your differences for Linley’s sake.” Sir Bedford ushered them all out of the room. “The first watch begins at noon. I will take that one. Lord Kyre, your turn starts at six. Schoville will relieve you at midnight, and then Reginald will take up watch the following morning.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Patrick sat by Linley’s bedside. He watched her, even though she had not stirred in over an hour. She had not awakened since she lost consciousness earlier that afternoon. He counted her slow, rhythmic breathing. Linley’s chest rose beneath the covers, and then fell. Rose and fell. Rose and fell.

He told himself breathing was a good sign. The best sign. Thank God Linley was breathing because the rest of her looked dead. She was chalk white and her skin slick with sweat. Sometimes a droplet of blood bubbled in one of her nostrils, and he dabbed it with a wet cloth.

Patrick rested his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands. Seeing her like this tortured him. It reminded him of the way Johnnie had looked when they fished him from the river. He did not want to remember his brother that way, and he did not want to remember Linley that way, either.

Dead.

Her father assured all of them that it was just a fever. A nervous fever, but one Linley could recover from. Patrick prayed it was, and that he was just having another one of those overly cautious spells she liked to tease him about.

Please God, let her wake up and tease him.

But she did not awaken. Linley lay stretched out on her cot just as Reginald and Archie had left her. She still breathed, slow and steady. Patrick watched her chest rise and fall to be certain. He hoped she was not having any nightmares about people taking her brain. To see her in such a panic over something so absurd frightened him.

The whole ordeal frightened him, and Patrick could not help but play the scenario back in his mind, starting with the night they made love. He prayed Reginald was not right, and somehow this was not all his fault. If something happened to her because of him, Patrick would never forgive himself.

***

Sir Bedford Talbot-Martin still refused to believe his daughter was in danger. Patrick begged him to ask the monks for help, but each day the old man told him to wait.

“If she does not get better,” he would say, dismissing Patrick altogether.

Although his money was welcome, clearly
he
was not. Patrick gave up trying. He spent his mornings in meditation, afternoons with the lama, and his evenings in Linley’s room.

One afternoon, he sat with the lama, as usual. They talked of many things, but Patrick really wanted to bring up the issue of Linley. Of course, the lama knew she was ill. Even though the monks could have nothing to do with her, they all noticed her absence. A white woman was, after all, a very rare sight.

“You are troubled,” the lama said. “Your mind not clear.”

“No...” He hesitated to go any further. But he wanted to talk about Linley, and now this was his chance. “My friend is very ill. I worry for her.”

The lama nodded. He said nothing for a long time. He simply nodded at Patrick.

This forced him to elaborate. “She has a high fever. I wondered if there was anything you could do to help her.”

“Sometimes illness necessary,” the lama explained. “Without suffering, how will we know what truly important in life?

“But she could die.”

“Yes. I understand.”

Patrick bristled. “What happened to having compassion? What about not harming any living thing? How am I supposed to believe anything you say when you sit there and show no concern for someone who may be dying?”

The lama grinned at Patrick. “It is good that you question. Question everything. Question yourself.” He wagged a skinny brown finger at his pupil. “Even question Buddha.”

“In my religion, we do not question God. We are taught to have faith and to trust in his will.”

“If your God willed your friend die, would you still believe?”

Patrick thought back to his mother, his brother, and his father. Were their deaths God’s will? Was it in his plan for Patrick to suffer loss after loss? One tragedy after another? To have the only people who mattered snatched away just when he needed them the most?

No. He could not lose Linley.

He would not.

***

Later that evening, Patrick took over watch duty from Linley’s father. He pushed the curtain aside to step into the room, but realized it was already rather crowded. Sir Bedford, Archie, Reginald, and Schoville stood at Linley’s bedside whispering among themselves.

Patrick cleared his throat. “Have I missed something?”

The four men stepped away from each other like naughty schoolchildren, pretending they had not been talking about Lord Kyre behind his back.

Immediately, Patrick knew something was amiss. “How is our Linley today?” he asked them, trying to seem as oblivious as possible to their plotting.

But he did not have to ask. He could see for himself that she was worse. Her body barely made a dent in the mattress she was so thin. Her eyes and cheeks lay sunken into her face, making her look more like a corpse than a girl. Linley was naturally such a thin person—how much more weight could she lose?

“Bedford,” Patrick said. “I think she needs a doctor.”

“Of course she needs a doctor!”

Patrick held his finger to his lips. There was no need to raise one’s voice, especially not in front of Linley, whether she could hear them or not.

Sir Bedford lowered his voiced to an acceptable range. “Of course she needs a doctor.”

“I asked the lama—”

Linley’s father ground his teeth at the words.

“I asked the lama,” Patrick continued. “And he believes there is a missionary camp somewhere southeast of here. It may be a few days walk, but at least there is a chance we could find help.”

“Do you honestly believe she will last long enough for someone to bring back a doctor?” Sir Bedford asked. “That could take weeks.”

Patrick looked at Linley, who lay quiet as the grave in her narrow bed. Her deathbed. “I realize we do not have that much time. I thought we would take her to the doctor.”

“You propose we take a dying girl on a weeklong journey through the Indian wilderness on the off chance we might find a missionary camp?”

He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

Linley’s father snorted. “Preposterous.”

“Why?”

“Because a journey like that is dangerous even for a grown man in perfect health. You do remember the hell we came through to get here, do you not? That was before the rains set in. I would imagine the level of danger has increased tenfold.”

“You are not willing to try?” Patrick looked at every pair of eyes in the room, but he already knew the answer.

“Absolutely not.”

“She will die if you do not help her,” he said, disgusted with the lot of them. “How could you stand there and sentence your daughter to death, Bedford? How?”

Linley’s father grew very still and very calm. “Because she will die either way.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“If we leave with her, she will die in the wilderness,” Sir Bedford explained. “I have seen what happens to dead things left out in the heat and the elements, and I do not in a million lifetimes wish to see my only child rot before my eyes.” He took a few breaths, bracing himself. “At least here she can die peacefully in a safe, warm bed. And she can be given a proper funeral.”

Patrick felt sick to his stomach. He gripped the back of the stiff wooden chair to keep from reeling. The mental image of Linley festering in the forest was too much for him.

But so was the thought of living without her.

“Do you understand now, Lord Kyre? My daughter has suffered enough already. I will not risk hurting her any more.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice too weak to be his own. He swallowed down the tightness in the back of his throat. “I understand.”

Sir Bedford Talbot-Martin and the rest of his team shuffled through the curtained doorway. Their movements were slow, tired. Beaten. Linley’s illness took its toll on all of them, it seemed. And why shouldn’t it? The others knew her much longer than Patrick had. They were like a family. Patrick remembered what death had been like in his family. How it killed them all, little by little.

Of course the Talbot-Martin team was devastated.

Alone in the room, Patrick took a seat on the wooden chair at Linley’s bedside. He watched her chest rise and fall beneath the blanket. He did this just as he did the night before. And the night before that.

And the night before that.

She barely moved. Sometimes her eyes opened, but she stared at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Saying nothing. Hearing nothing.

Patrick reached for a basin and a cloth, dabbing the cool water across Linley’s forehead. He smoothed back a tangle of brown hair from her face. She was almost too hot to touch. He pressed the water to her lips, cracked and drawn across her teeth.

How desperately he longed to kiss her.

But he didn’t. Patrick placed the basin and the cloth down onto the floor. He settled in for the six long hours of his watch. It was agony wondering if each breath she took was her last.

Patrick had been too young to remember his mother’s death, but he remembered Johnnie’s. Remembered hearing his school chums whispering about it. Remembered reading about it in the papers years after the accident.

If only he’d gone swimming with his brother that evening, Johnnie would still be alive and everything would be the way it should have been all along.

Linley stirred, drawing Patrick’s attention down to the narrow cot. Her eyelids fluttered open and she rolled her eyes around in her head. They seemed to move with no definite purpose, bouncing from object to object, wall to wall like a runaway squash ball.

Suddenly, they fixed themselves on the man in the chair at her side.

Did she see him? Did she recognize him? Patrick was not sure.

Her lips parted as if to speak, and she lifted her arm just high enough off the blanket to point a trembling finger. At first, Patrick thought she gestured at him, but then he realized she wanted something else. Something in the corner behind him.

Her pack.

Patrick spun around in the chair and picked up the worn leather bag. He tried to hand it to her, to place it beside her on the cot. She was too weak to speak. Too weak to tell him what she wanted. But it was clear she wanted something, and that something was inside her pack.

He unlatched the flaps and looked inside. He saw nothing out of the ordinary—socks, underclothes, traveling papers, sanitary towels. He dug through the rest of the bag, finding nothing interesting at all. What could she possibly want? He looked down at the stack of traveling papers in his hand. Patrick pulled them out, asking if they were what she needed.

But Linley’s eyes were closed. She’d slipped back into her own little world.

For curiosity’s sake, Patrick untied the twine holding her traveling papers together. He leafed through them, one by one, until something caught his eye. It was a photograph clipped from a magazine. And it was of him.

How on earth did she get it? Patrick remembered sitting for the photograph a year or so before. It must have come out in one of the papers—
Country Life,
or
The Bystander
, or another one of those society magazines. He hardly ever read them, but Georgiana told him he was mentioned often.

He held it between his thumb and index finger, noting there was not a crease, not a wrinkle, not even a torn edge of the flimsy paper image. Linley obviously took great care with it. Treasured it, even. She had carried him with her halfway around the world. Always within reach. He might as well have been tucked in her skirt pocket.

Patrick knew women kept photographs of men they fancied—exactly the same way men kept photographs of beautiful ladies. Back at Kyre, he had a few Winifred Barnes postcards hidden in the drawers of his night table. But, never in his life had he imagined someone kept photographs of
him
.

What did it mean?

The photograph was exactly what Linley wanted him to see. No question about that. Perhaps she wanted him to know how she felt—after all, she did believe she was on her deathbed. People usually confessed that sort of thing, Patrick guessed. He slipped the image of himself back the between the sheets of her traveling documents and retied the twine. Closing the latches on her leather pack, he sat it in the corner just the way he found it.

But then he stopped.

How could he sit there and accept Linley’s death? Watch her die without so much as lifting a finger to help her? She deserved a chance to live, and with everything they’d been through, Patrick knew he owed her that much.