The Earl of Brass (The Ingenious Mechanical Devices Book 1) (3 page)

“I’m so sorry,” Patrick whispered. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Through quavering breaths, he cried, “It wasn’t you. I want to go back to sleep and have all of this be a nightmare. I’m only six-and-twenty. I could die or be maimed for life. How will I write or travel or do anything anymore? My life is ruined, ruined, and it wasn’t even my fault.”

“Sir, you were a victim of chance, but you’ll make it. I know you will. You’ll learn how to do everything, just in a different way. If you still can’t write, you can dictate everything to me, and I’ll write it down,” the butler answered with a smile, hoping one would appear on his master’s face.

He sniffed and sighed, wiping away tears with the back of his hand. “Thank you, Patrick, you’re a good friend.”

“This is the last thing I ever wanted to have happen to you, but somehow I know you’ll be all right in the end.”

Patrick reached into the pocket of his jacket and carefully wiped Eilian’s eyes and bruised cheeks with his handkerchief. Eilian slowly inhaled and exhaled, allowing his body to relax and his mind to quiet. As his muddled thoughts began to clear, his stomach growled, breaking the silence and his concentration.

“Why don’t I make you one of your favorite dishes? It’ll take a while, so you can take a nap and rest until dinner.”

As much as he didn’t want to admit it, crying and yelling had exhausted him. By the clock above the hearth, he could tell he had only been awake for a little over two and a half hours, yet he was already ready for a nap. Eilian inched lower in bed as the butler covered him with blankets until he was safely cocooned within their gentle pressure and warmth.

Patrick once again stood on the threshold, watching his battered friend sleep, but for the first time in nearly a week, he knew he could leave the room and not worry he would never wake again.

Doctors and Dragon Breath

Patrick Sinclair gingerly carried the silver tray of food up the polished stairs, careful not to spill anything onto the new rugs that had been acquired on their trip and laid out before the airship had crossed the English Channel. He lightly rapped on the bedroom door before opening it. Within the folds of the massive mahogany bed, Eilian stirred slightly as the floorboards creaked under the butler’s familiar, light tread. He blinked away the crust from his eyes and slowly pulled himself into a sitting position. The short rest had chased away the lethargy and seemed to dull the ache in his temples. As Lord Sorrell stretched out his back and shoulders just as he did every time he awoke, Patrick’s eyes widened and trailed up to his missing forearm.

“Oh,” he muttered calmly as he spotted the red blotch spreading across the bottom of his bandaged stump, “that’s not good. I guess I popped a stitch or two in my sleep.”

“Sir, I really think you need to be under a doctor’s care, at least until your burns begin to heal. The others didn’t teach me how to properly tend to your wounds before you sent them away.”

“Get James then,” Eilian replied with a sigh. “I at least want someone I know and trust.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to fetch someone closer? It’ll take me over an hour to go to London and back at this hour.”

“I want James Hawthorne. If you go, I know he will come.”

Patrick frowned, unsure if he could spare an hour away from him. “Would you be all right if I left you alone that long?”

“It’s not bleeding very much, but I will probably get worse if you
don’t
go.”

He sighed as the corners of his dusty-blue eyes sank behind his spectacles. “Promise me you’ll stay in bed and eat. No trying to get up yet and nothing strenuous.”

“I will stay still, I promise.”

The butler hesitantly left the room, turning back to take one more look at Eilian’s battered face before heading downstairs to get his coat. Eilian sat very still, listening to his friend’s steps echo through the empty halls. The coat closet door opened and closed, the footfalls stopped, the front door squealed, and then softly clicked shut. For the first time in three weeks, he was finally alone. He sighed contently as he turned his attention to the food piled on the silver tray.

A steaming mug of Turkish coffee sat beside a plate piled nearly two inches high with Tandoori chicken and rice. The fiery, red meat smelled of chili and turmeric, and as he inhaled the spicy aroma, a smile spread across his purpled cheeks. With his aching wrist, he carefully slid the plate from the tray on the nightstand to his lap. Grabbing the utensils, he was poised to dig in when he realized he had two pieces of cutlery but only one hand. Eilian clumsily held the fork and tried to peel the tender meat from the bone, but after several minutes, he had made little progress. He put the fork aside and attempted the same technique with the knife but to no avail. A sigh escaped his lips. How could he grow so tired trying to feed himself?

Eilian’s eyes trailed back to the glinting surface of the knife. His eyes narrowed on their target as he raised the knife above his head like a hunter about to strike. He carefully listened to the rhythm of his breathing, waiting for the perfect moment. Then, between breaths, he slammed his weapon down. The knife hit the china with a sharp clank and sent half the chicken skidding across his bed and onto the parquet floor with a trail of rice following behind on the sheets.

“Well, that was less than ideal,” he murmured as he scooped the rice back onto his plate and stared longingly at the chicken lying beyond his reach on the rug. Eilian tossed the knife back onto the tray and picked up the remaining chicken from his plate and the coverlet. It was spicier than he remembered, but he didn’t care. He was starving. Greedily gobbling his meal, he downed the Turkish coffee to squelch the burning in the back of his throat. Before they left India, he had instructed Patrick to purchase an exorbitant amount of spices, vegetables, and dried fruit to bring back to Greenwich, so his cook could replicate the new dishes he had grown to love.
Thank God my first meal back was not English food
. Eilian gulped down the frothy drink, finished his remaining rice, and checked the clock on the mantle. He had at least fifteen minutes before Patrick and Dr. Hawthorne arrived. The large piece of chicken on the floor would undeniably arouse questions, so he strained to place his plate and glass back on the tray and inched nearer to the edge of the bed, swallowing down the pain in his back.

Eilian rested on his side and stretched his arm as far as it could reach, but his fingertips barely brushed the edge of the chicken and only made it dance farther away. He continued to propel himself closer until his fingers nearly wrapped around the bare bone of the chicken thigh. With one final push, his fingers closed around it, but he lost his balance and slid off the bed with a thud. Eilian lay on the floor stunned. Landing on his left arm, he couldn’t quite figure out how to sit up. If he moved onto his right side, he would undoubtedly injure himself further. As he eased onto his back, lightning pains shot from his jaw to his leg, and the breath hitched in his throat. Rice clung to his face and bandages, leaving saffron stains from the Tandoori seasoning. With one leg, he untangled his feet from the covers and scooted back until he was finally freed.

Never had the bed looked so high. Eilian’s first instinct was to call out to Patrick for help, but the words died in his throat. He was alone. What if he couldn’t walk? He threw the chicken onto the plate and grabbed onto the top of the nightstand. The muscles of his back and shoulder ached under the strain of supporting his weight as he slowly shifted to his knees and then onto his shaking legs. The muscles quivered in the back of his thighs, pushing against the confines of his bandages. He took a step forward, too afraid to let go of the nightstand, as his knees threatened to buckle. Going from post to post, Eilian hobbled closer to the mirror until he could make out his reflection. A half-wrapped mummy with swollen cheeks and sunken grey eyes stared back at him. His raw umber hair was disheveled as usual and stuck out from the gauze encircling the top and right side of his face.

Eilian stared at his arm, running his eyes from his shoulder to the abrupt, bloodied end of his elbow. He teetered on the edge of tears again. They stung and reddened his eyes, but he pushed them back.
I can walk
. His hand finally left the mahogany post. After a momentary tremor, his legs held.
Those pompous bastards are wrong. My convalescence
will
be short
, he thought proudly as he shuffled back to the bed. He reeled in the covers and watched the fire flicker and flutter toward the chimney before dying in the hearth. The room darkened in the waning light, but Eilian sat in the shadows and ate his meal. If he turned on the gas lamps, it would undoubtedly raise questions.

***

Dr. Hawthorne sat in the passenger seat of the steam carriage, gripping the door as Patrick Sinclair haphazardly steered through London’s busy streets, nearly clipping several other steamers and pedestrians along the way. He was certain by the time he made it to Greenwich, he would have a few more grey hairs interspersed with the chestnut ones at his temples. All he had been told was that Eilian was in need of a doctor.
I wonder what disease he brought back this time
, he mused as he listened half-heartedly to the butler continue to ramble on. Despite chattering nonstop since he picked him up from Wimpole Street, he hadn’t told him what actually happened. James Hawthorne and Eilian Sorrell had been friends ever since they were in boarding school together and had remained close ever since. After returning from several trips all over the empire with parasites and illnesses, Dr. Hawthorne had become the one to help him through each bout of vomiting and fever. Now, he had come to expect a call from the harried butler whenever Eilian arrived back on English soil. As the steamer pulled in front of the Gothic great house, Patrick sprung from the driver’s seat to open the doctor’s door. Hawthorne lugged his heavy Gladstone bag out of the backseat and strolled inside past the butler. Man-sized wooden crates stamped with
fragile
in half a dozen languages still littered the foyer and what he could see of the parlor.

“So, Eilian,” Dr. Hawthorne called upstairs as he headed up the stairs towards his bedroom, “what is it this time? Yellow fever? Malaria? Elephantiasis?” He reached the top step and continued down the wood-paneled hall with the butler trailing behind. “You know Eliza wasn’t very happy when I had to leave in the middle of dinner, but she told me to tell you that she sends her best—”

The words trailed off as Hawthorne turned the corner and laid eyes upon Eilian Sorrell. He had expected to see him with his head in a bucket, not sitting in bed under the mahogany and green canopy bed purpled and bandaged. For a second, all professional etiquette escaped the doctor as he froze at the threshold. His dark eyes ran from his bruised face to his bound chest until they finally reached his right arm. He resisted the urge to clean his glasses to make certain he wasn’t seeing things.

“You know very well you can only get malaria once,” Eilian finally replied as he gazed up at his dumbfounded friend. “They are burns this time.”

With a shake of his head, the daze was broken. “How? What happened to you?” Hawthorne’s mind raced to the articles and the growing list of fatalities he had seen all over the papers that week. “Were you in that airship crash?”

Eilian nodded as he motioned for Patrick to turn on the gas lamps with a twist of his hand.

“You already look as if you have been taken care of. Why did you call me? I’m a coroner now, not a surgeon.”

“Who better to stave off death than one who is so well acquainted with it?” He raised his arm to show the growing bloodstain. “Truthfully, my stitches snapped. I trust you, you know I do, and I would like you to take a look at what the others have done.”

The doctor washed his hands in the adjoining bathroom and moved to his friend’s side but froze as his eyes came to rest on his torso. “Are those maggots?” he asked, his voice sharpening with a tinge of panic.

Stuck to his bandages were white flecks. “Oh, it’s rice actually. It was from my dinner.”

He opened his mouth to speak but decided against it. “I won’t even ask. Sinclair, when were his bandages changed last?”

“Last night,” Patrick began. “The doctors were dismissed this afternoon and weren’t able to properly show me how to change them.”

James Hawthorne nodded, rolling up his sleeves. He pulled a small pair of scissors from his bag along with half a dozen rolls of gauze and a squat, glass jar filled with opaque gunk. He carefully clipped the end of the bandage and began to unroll what remained of Eilian’s right arm. The top of his arm near the shoulder was an inflamed red and full of sovereign-sized deflated blisters, but closer to what remained of his elbow, the skin disappeared and what was left was nearer to the consistency of raw meat.

Eilian tried not to look as his arm was laid bare, but the moment he had seen it inside the dying dirigible flooded back. The corporeal devastation and the unforgettable smell of seared flesh had been no hallucination. All the patches of brown and black had been removed by the previous doctors to reveal the inner workings of his limb, except for the bone which was covered over with a patch of only mildly burnt skin. He finally averted his eyes as James passed the needle through the relocated skin that had been torn away and leaked blood. After a moment of cringing and bracing for the pain, he realized he could not feel the needle or thread sliding through the flesh.

“Will the feeling ever return at the end?”

“It may,” the doctor replied, never glancing up from his work. “Burns are odd and so are nerves. You never quite know what they are going to do. Thus far, your previous doctors did a very thorough job with the debridement, and the skin patch looks like it may survive. You are going to be scarred from this, especially on your arm and chest where the burns are very deep.”

Hawthorne rubbed the slimy ointment down the length of the gauze and began the laborious process of rewrapping. As he turned to work on Eilian’s torso, he frowned. At least four rolls of gauze had been twisted around him in every direction as if he had been attacked by a colony of tipsy spiders. When he finished untangling the mess, he could make out an odd shaped mark on his ribs amongst the deflated blisters and peeling skin. It was glossy and perfectly round with a skinny, twisted line following it. Small yelps and seething grimaces escaped Eilian’s lips as the ointment was applied directly to the wounds.

“How is Eliza?” Eilian choked out through clenched teeth as he gripped the edge of the covers in his fist and curled his toes.

“As beautiful as always.” James smiled. “She’s talking me into a holiday in Egypt to visit the Great Pyramids again and Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple.”

“You should go. She will love it, and so will you. Egypt is beautiful.”

His mind drifted back to the Hawthornes’ wedding. Everyone seemed so surprised when Eliza married, but Eilian never was. James was liberal-minded and had been raised with four older, strong-willed sisters. He always thought of Eliza as independent and free spirited, but above all else, she was the most intelligent person he knew. She was knowledgeable on nearly any subject but was shunned by the other doctors’ wives for it.