But he’d retrieved her handkerchief from where it’d floated to the ground in her wake.
From that day on, it was her image painted on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them at night. Even when the scent of rose water had faded from his treasure.
Today, two of the three maids in the household had been too ill to work, and so the harried housekeeper tasked Titus with hauling the kindling into the east wing of the Mayfair manse to lay and light the fires before the family roused.
He’d done the master’s first, then the mistress’s, and had skipped Honoria’s room for the nursery where the seven-year-old twins, Mercy and Felicity, slept.
Felicity had been huddled in bed, her golden head bent over a book as she squinted in the early morning gloom. The sweet-natured girl had given him a shy little wave as he tiptoed in and lit her a warm fire.
Against the mores of propriety, she’d thanked him in a whisper, and blushed when he’d given her a two-fingered salute before shutting the door behind him with a barely audible click. After tending to the hearths of the governess and the second-eldest Goode sister, Prudence, Titus finally found himself at Honoria’s door.
He peered about the hall guiltily before admonishing himself for being ridiculous.
He was supposed to be here. It wouldn’t do to squander this stroke of luck and not take any opportunity he could to be near her.
Alone.
Balancing the burden of kindling against his side with one arm, he reached for the latch of her doorway, then paused, examining his hands with disgust. He flexed knuckles stained black from shoveling and hauling coal into the burner of the huge stove that heated steam for the first two floors of the estate. Filth from the stables and the gardens embedded beneath his fingernails and settled in the creases and calluses of his palm.
A familiar mortification welled within his chest as he smoothed the hand over his shirt, hoping to buff some of the dirt off like an apple before trying the latch and peering around the door.
Titus loved that—unlike the rest of her family—Honoria slept with all her drapes tied open and the window nearest the honeysuckle vines cracked to allow the scent of the gardens to waft inside. It didn’t seem to matter the season or the weather, he’d look up to her window to find it thusly open.
Sometimes he would sing while he worked outside. If he were lucky, the sound would draw her to the window, or at least he fancied it did, when she gazed out over the gardens.
Like the sun, he couldn’t look at her for too long.
And she barely ever glanced at him.
Titus told himself if she closed the casement against the sound, he’d never utter another note.
But she hadn’t.
It was as if she couldn’t bear to be completely shut in. As if she couldn’t bring herself to draw the drapes and close the world out.
On this morning, the November chill matched the slate grey of the predawn skies visible through her corner windows. Fingers of ice stole through his vest and thin shirt, prompting him to hurry and warm the room for her.
Shivering inside, he held his breath as he eased the door closed behind him, taking extra care against waking her as she’d been drawn and quiet for a few days and often complained of headaches.
In the dimness, she was little more than a slim outline beneath a mountain of arabesque silk bedclothes, curled with her back to him. Her braid an inky swath against the clean white pillow.
She occupied the second grandest bedroom, her being the eldest and all. The ceiling was tall enough to boast a crystal chandelier that matched the smaller sconces flanking her headboard. More than one wardrobe stood sentinel against the white wainscoting, containing her plethora of garments and gowns, each to be worn at different times of the day or for varied soirees, teas, and other such events unimaginable to someone like him.
She favored gem-bright hues over pastels, and silks over cottons and velvets. With her wealth of ebony hair and eyes so dark it was hard to distinguish pupil from iris, every cut and color flattered her endlessly.
But Titus knew red was her favorite. She wore it most often in every conceivable shade.
In the stillness of the morning, he could hear that her breaths were erratic and uneven, as if she were running in a dream, or struggling with some unseen foe.
On carpets as plush as hers, his feet made no sound as he tiptoed past the foot of a bed so cavernous that it would have swallowed his humble cot in the loft above the mews, three times over.
Was she having a nightmare?
Would it be a kindness to wake her?
Perhaps. But he’d expect to be summarily dismissed for even presuming to do such a thing.
He dawdled over the fire, laying the most perfect blaze ever constructed. Once the flames crackled and popped cheerfully in the hearth, he lingered still, content to simply share the air she breathed.
“Is it burning?”
Her hoarse words nearly startled him out of his own skin.
Titus jumped to his feet, upsetting his kindling basket, and dropping the poker on the stones with a thunderous clatter.
“The—the fire, miss? Aye. It’s burning proper now. It’ll warm your bones and no mistake.” Compared to her high-born dialect, his Yorkshire accent sounded like ripe gibberish, even to his own ears.
“It’s burning me,” she complained tightly, the words terse and graveled as if her throat closed over them.
“Miss?” His heart pounded as he approached her side of the bed, then sank at what he found.
Her braid was a tangle, escaped tendrils matted to her slick forehead and temples as if she’d done battle with it all night. Lines of pain crimped her brow and pinched the skin beside her lips thin and white.
She wasn’t simply curled against the cold but, more accurately, around herself. As if to protect her torso from pain. Though beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and her upper lip, she shivered intermittently.
It was her eyes, though, that terrified him. Open, but fixed on nothing, not even noting his approach.
“Miss Goode?” he whispered. “Can you—can you hear me?”
Suddenly her limbs became restless as she arched and flailed weakly, shoving her bedcovers away from her body, revealing that she’d clawed her nightdress off sometime during the night.
Honoria Goode was pale in the most normal of circumstances, but her lithe nude limbs were nearly indistinguishable from the white sheets, but for the feverish red flush creeping up her torso, over her breasts, and toward her clavicles.
“It’s burning my skin,” she croaked, levering herself up on shaking arms. “Everywhere. Put it out, boy, please.”
Boy. Later, the word would pierce him like a lance.
She made a plaintive sound that sliced his guts open, and made to roll off the bed.
“No, miss. You’re with fever. Lie still. I’ll wake the house.” Without thinking, he reached for her shoulders, meaning to keep her in place.
She stunned him by collapsing back to the pillow in a heap of bliss at his touch. “Yes,” she sighed, clutching at his hands. “So cold. So…better.”
The winter air was frigid and damp this morning and laying the fires had done next to nothing to slake the bone-deep chill from his fingers and toes.
Her skin did, indeed, feel as hot as any flame beneath his palms, leeching whatever comforting cold his hands could offer as she warmed him in kind.
Panic trilled through him, seizing his limbs. As an uneducated boy, he knew very little, but he understood the danger she was in all too well. She was burning from the inside out, and if something wasn’t done, she’d become just another ghost to haunt the void in his heart where his loved ones used to live.