Tempting the Bride (12 page)

“It’s probably a good thing you don’t remember,” said Millie. “It was a horrible accident. My goodness, when I saw you lying in the middle of the street, blood from your head soaking into the stone dust, I thought—”

Her lips quivered. Fitz handed her his handkerchief. “It’s all right. Everything will be all right now.”

“Of course.” Millie wiped her eyes. “Please excuse me.”

Venetia was dabbing at her own eyes. The man named Christian had his hand on her shoulder.

Helena could no longer contain her bewilderment, which was beginning to congeal into a cold, knotted sensation that was not unlike fear. She didn’t know whether she ought to demand the reason why her siblings had aged so much before company, so she asked, “Venetia, Fitz, would you please perform the introductions? I’d like to meet our guests.”

Her request caused a long moment of communal gaping, followed by dismayed glances among the five people surrounding her bed, which only made her stomach clench with premonition.

“We are not guests,” said Millie. “We are your family.”

Helena hadn’t thought she’d
like
the answer she’d receive, but she had not anticipated that it would turn incipient fear into outright fright. She bolted straight up, ignoring the pain in her head and the roiling in her stomach caused by her abrupt motion, and tried to arrive at a logical explanation. Were they distant cousins? Or perhaps…“Did I meet everyone just before my accident? My mind is quite blank concerning that time period.”

“No, no.” Millie shook her head hard, as if the force of her denial could make a difference in the matter.
“We—you and I—met eight years ago at Lord’s, at the Eton and Harrow cricket match.”

Helena’s father had been a cricket enthusiast. The entire family had attended several Eton and Harrow matches with him, but she had no recollection of ever meeting this Millie. “I’m sorry. I must have forgotten. I imagine we have not seen much of each other since?”

Millie looked aghast. Helena felt her heart sink—she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what Millie might say. Millie, it seemed, shared her reluctance. She looked at Fitz, who looked thunderstruck, before turning her gaze back to Helena.

“We have seen a great deal of each other since, Helena. I am your sister-in-law.”

Helena gripped the sheets. But this was preposterous. “You are
married
, Fitz? When did you marry?”

“Eight years ago.” Fitz’s words were almost ghostly in their feebleness.

“Eight
years
ago? What year is it now?”

“Eighteen ninety-six,” said Millie.

Eighteen ninety-six? No wonder Fitz
looked
like a man well into his twenties—he
was
a man well into his twenties. And Helena, born on the same day as he, a woman well into her twenties.

She shook her head, trying to settle her careening, incoherent thoughts. But the movement instead caused a sharp thrust of nausea. She gritted her teeth and turned to Venetia. “Is the gentleman next to you your husband?”

“Yes,” said Venetia quietly.

“And have you also been married a long time?”

“No, we married only this Season.”

An uneasy silence descended. Helena’s agitation began
to scale dizzying new heights as, one by one, her siblings and their spouses looked toward David, who appeared, if possible, even more stunned than they were.

“What about David?” Fitz sounded as if he were pleading. “Surely you remember him—you’ve known him half your life.”

She stared at this David, a tall man with elegant bone structure: etched cheekbones, a sharp jawline, and a nose that would have been almost too perfectly straight if it hadn’t been broken a time or two—a face she would not mind looking at had she encountered it at a gathering. But she didn’t want him
here
, a stranger granted intimacy, a man who expected her to know him.

“And how are
we
related, sir?”

Her stomach churned as she braced herself for the answer.

He glanced toward Fitz. An unspoken message passed between them. He looked back at Helena, inhaled deeply, and spoke with the sort of care one might use to inform a child that her puppy was no more. “The world knows me as your husband.”

Precisely the answer she was hoping not to hear. Her stomach churned even more violently. She clamped down on her lower lip, willing her body to settle down and leave her alone. But the nausea only surged.

She yanked aside her bedcover. “Gentlemen, please clear the room. I’m going to be quite sick.”

W
ith her sister and sister-in-law supporting her, and the nurse trailing behind, Helena made it to the water closet barely in time.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, when she’d finished ejecting the contents of her stomach. She hadn’t felt so physically miserable since the bout of scarlet fever she’d suffered when she was nine. And she hadn’t felt so emotionally miserable since—

She didn’t know what to compare her experience to. It had been terrible losing her parents, but at least she had been able to share her grief with her siblings. But this…this waking up to find that half of her life had been wiped from her mind and that she was now saddled with a husband she could not remember meeting, let alone choosing—she felt utterly rudderless.

“My poor darling,” said Millie as she placed the cover on the blue-enameled commode and pulled the cord to flush.

Venetia was already escorting Helena to the washstand. “Miss Redmayne had said that you might experience nausea and vomiting when you awakened—those are common enough symptoms for people who’ve suffered a con-cussion.”

“Miss Redmayne is our physician,” added Millie helpfully. “She is on her way as we speak.”

A woman physician? Helena certainly approved, but she’d had no idea that there were now enough women physicians for the Fitzhugh ladies to have one.

A mirror hung above the washstand. She recoiled at her appearance: Half of her face was bruised, the discoloration almost greenish in color. Still she couldn’t help staring: She didn’t in the very least
feel
like a child, but how strange—and thrilling, in a way—to suddenly see her own grown-up face.

She covered her mouth. In a gap between the bandaging,
she could clearly see her scalp. “What happened to my hair?”

“Miss Redmayne had to shave it in order to stitch the wound on your head,” answered Millie.

“All of it?” Her question was a whimper. Fate seemed needlessly cruel.

“Your hair will grow back.” Venetia’s eyes reddened. “When I think that you could have died on the spot…”

Millie patted Venetia’s arm. “You mustn’t torment yourself with thoughts of what didn’t happen. You’ll get in a state and it wouldn’t be good for the baby.”

A
baby
? Helena spun around—and had to grip Millie’s shoulder to steady herself. “You are with child?”

“Yes.”

She glanced down at Venetia’s middle. “You don’t look it.”

“I still have months and months to go. In fact, we’d just told everyone the good news the night before your accident.”

The accident.

Abruptly, everything Helena didn’t know about her family closed in around her, a suffocating ignorance. “Do you have any other children, Venetia? Do you, Millie—you don’t mind that I call you Millie, do you?”

Before either one of them could give an answer, a fist of panic struck her. “Dear
God
, do
I
have any children?”

N
ot the most auspicious of new beginnings, is it?” muttered Hastings.

It was as if some part of her remembered exactly who he was and how much she could not stand him.

He and Fitz were alone in the passage outside her door. Lexington had gone to compose a cable to the
Herr Doktor
from Berlin, informing the latter that his services were no longer required, but that he would be compensated for his time and expenses, should he have already started his journey to London.

“Miss Redmayne told us that she’d be prone to nausea and vomiting upon awakening,” Fitz pointed out reasonably. “You know that.”

Hastings supposed he did. He sighed. “At least she is awake now. Thank God for that.”

If only he could quite comprehend the fact that he was now a complete stranger to her.

Millie came out of the room. “How is she?” Fitz and Hastings asked in unison.

“Back in bed, but already asking the nurse when she will be free of medical supervision.”

“She never likes supervision of any sort, does she?” said Fitz. “What about her memory?”

“She was grilling us—she is still grilling Venetia as we speak. She doesn’t remember being a publisher. Or attending university. Or Venetia’s first two marriages. We’ve been informing her of the major events of her life and ours.”

“What about Andrew Martin?” asked Fitz, saving Hastings the trouble.

“She hasn’t brought him up, but I would be quite shocked if she remembered him alone when she has forgotten everything else.”

Hastings wanted to know whether Helena had any questions about him, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask.

Footsteps came up the staircase. Miss Redmayne had arrived. “Lord Fitzhugh, Lady Fitzhugh, Lord Hastings.”

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Hastings.

“Is there anything about Lady Hastings’s current condition that I should know?”

It still gave Hastings pause to hear Helena referred to as Lady Hastings. “She vomited a few minutes after she awakened.”

Miss Redmayne noted it down. “That is normal and not in itself a cause for concern.”

“She has also lost her memory,” Hastings added.

Miss Redmayne raised a brow. “You mean she has no recollection of the accident? That is also not uncommon.”

Hastings shook his head. “I’m afraid her memory loss is more extensive than that. She has no recollection of ever meeting Lady Fitzhugh or myself—and we’ve known her many years.”

Miss Redmayne tapped the end of her pen on her chin. “That is a more extreme case of amnesia than one usually encounters.”

Amnesia. The syllables were ominous. “How soon can we expect her memory to return?”

“There is no fixed schedule of recovery, from what I know of the condition. She could have it back by the end of the day, the end of the month, or the end of the year.” Miss Redmayne paused delicately. “Although there is also the possibility that she may not recoup it.”

“What?” Fitz exclaimed. “That can’t be. We are speaking of years and years of memories here. How can so much recollection vanish into thin air?”

Miss Redmayne’s tone was gentle, almost apologetic. “It has been known to happen, and medical science, unfortunately, has yet to fully understand the condition, let alone
cure it.” She turned to Millie. “Lady Fitzhugh, will you show me in?”

Fitz thrust his hands into his hair. “I can’t imagine it, her memory permanently wiped away. At least Venetia and I still share childhood memories with her, but for you and for Millie—”

“For Millie, especially. They were good friends.”

“Yes, but even for you…”

Hastings shrugged, his own head beginning to throb. There had been no particular friendship between Helena and himself, but to be an absolute stranger to her, after all these years?

“Go get some rest, David,” said Fitz. “I know you’ve slept the least of us all.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.” He was wide-awake, an almost painful alertness, as if he’d consumed several gallons of coffee. “I’ll wait here with you.”

What was a few more minutes when he’d been waiting days?

Years.

M
iss Redmayne was about Helena’s age, pretty, smartly dressed, with an air of tremendous competence. “Your brother and your husband tell me you are suffering from a rather dramatic case of memory loss, Lady Hastings.”

It took Helena a moment to realize that “Lady Hastings” referred to herself. So her husband was Lord Hastings. Husband—the very word squeezed the air from her lungs. She didn’t know
anything
about the man. How could she be married to him?

“When I awakened,” she said, striving to sound in charge of herself, “I was surrounded by members of my family. And I recognized fewer than half of them.”

“Of those you do not recognize, whom have you known the longest?”

“Lord Hastings”—she could not bring herself to say “my husband”—“according to everyone else.”

Miss Redmayne glanced at Venetia. “Can you tell me when they met, Your Grace?”

“The summer Lady Hastings was fourteen. Lord Hastings came to visit at Hampton House, our home in—”

“Oxfordshire,” said Helena, grateful to know that much.

“What is the latest in your life you can remember?” asked Miss Redmayne.

She thought hard. “The Christmas after our mother passed away.”

Helena had adored her mother and had been quite disconsolate that Christmas. Venetia and Fitz had persisted in telling her joke after joke until she cracked a smile.

“That would have been shortly before you turned fourteen,” said Venetia. “You missed remembering meeting Hastings by a few months.”

Helena wanted to remember meeting him—and every day of the past thirteen years of her life—but particularly him. She could not be a wife to a stranger. “Please tell me I’ll be able to regain my memory.”

“I can make no promises,” said Miss Redmayne. “Amnesia is an unusual condition, typically accompanying far more severe brain damage than is your case.”

She jotted a few things down in her notebook. “If I recall correctly, you studied classics while you were at Lady Margaret Hall?”

Helena nodded, still shocked by the fact that she’d attended university. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, but how had Colonel Clements, their guardian, ever agreed to such a thing? She’d have thought that she’d needed to not only come of age, but come into control of her small inheritance before such a feat became possible.

“Were you educated in Latin prior to that?”

“I remember Helena teaching herself some Latin from Fitz’s schoolbooks,” Venetia answered for her. “But that was when she was a little older. Sixteen, perhaps.”

“Qui caput tuum valet?”
asked Miss Redmayne.
How does your head feel?