Snatching up her sheets, he carefully swaddled her enough to keep her from doing herself any harm, before tearing out of the room.
He rang every bell, roused every adult from their beds with frantic intensity. The Baron immediately sent him for their doctor, Preston Alcott. Not wanting to waste the time it took for the old stable master to saddle a horse, Titus ran the several blocks to the doctor’s, arriving just as his lungs threatened to burst from the frigid coal-stained air.
Doctor Alcott was still punching his arms into his coat as Titus dragged him down his front stoop in a groggy heap of limbs, and shoved him into a hansom. To save time, he relayed all the details of his interaction with Honoria, noting her feverish behavior, appearance, and answering supplemental questions, such as what she’d had to eat the night before and where she’d traveled to in the past couple of days.
“You are a rather observant lad,” the doctor remarked, peering over the rims of his spectacles. It was difficult to distinguish beneath the man’s curly russet beard if he was being complimentary or condemning, until Alcott said, “Would that my nurses would be half as detailed as you.”
Even though it wasn’t his place, upon their arrival, Titus trailed the doctor up the grand staircase and lurked in the hallway, near an oriental vase almost as tall as he was, doing his best to blend with the shadows.
Through Honoria’s open door, he watched helplessly as Mrs. Mcgillicutty, the housekeeper, ran a cool cloth over Honoria’s face and throat. The Goodes hovered behind her, as if nursing their firstborn was still so beneath them, they needed a servant to do it.
Honoria laid on her back, mummified by her sheets, her lids only half-open now.
Titus thought he might be sick. She’d become so colorless, he might have thought her dead already, but for the slight, rapid rise and fall of her chest.
The doctor shooed them all aside and took only minutes of examination to render the grave verdict. “Baron and Lady Cresthaven, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, have any of you previously suffered from typhoid fever?”
Honoria’s mother, an older copy of her dark-haired daughters, recoiled from her bedside. “Certainly not, Doctor. That is an affliction of the impoverished and squalid.”
If the doctor had any opinions on her reaction, he kept them to himself. “If that is the case, then I’m going to have to ask you to leave this room. Indeed, it would be safer if you took your remaining children and staff elsewhere until…”
“Until Honoria recovers?” the Baron prompted through his wealth of a mustache.
The doctor gazed down at Honoria with a soft expression bordering on grief.
Titus wanted to scream. To kick at the priceless vase beside him and glory in the destruction, if only to see something as shattered as his heart might be.
“I knew she shouldn’t have been allowed to attend Lady Carmichaels’s philanthropic event,” the Baroness shrilled. “I’ve always maintained nothing good can come of venturing below Clairview Street.”
“Is there anyone else in your house feeling ill, Lady Cresthaven?” the doctor asked as he opened his arms in a gesture meant to shuffle them all toward the door.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she answered as she hurried from her daughter’s side as if swept up in Alcott’s net.
“Two maids,” Mrs. Mcgillicutty said around her mistress. “They took to their beds ill last night.”
The doctor heaved a long-suffering sigh as they approached the threshold. “Contrary to popular belief, typhoid contamination can happen to the food and drink of anyone at any time. It is true and regrettable that more of this contamination is rampant in the poorer communities, where sanitation is woefully inadequate, but this is a pathogen that does not discriminate based on status.”
“Quite so,” the Baron agreed in the imperious tone he used when he felt threatened or out of his depth. “We’ll leave for the Savoy immediately. Charlotte, get your things.”
“I’ll need someone to draw your daughter a cool bath and help me lift her into it,” the doctor said, his droll intonation never changing. “If you’d inquire through the household about anyone who has been inflicted with typhoid fever in the past—”
“I have done, Doctor.” Titus stepped out of the shadows, startling both of the Goodes. “It took my parents and my sister.”
Before that moment, Titus hadn’t known someone could appear both relieved and grim, but Alcott managed it.
“Absolutely not!” Charlotte Goode was not a large woman, but her staff often complained her voice could reach an octave that could shatter glass and offend dogs. “I’m not having my eldest, the jewel of our family, handled by the boy who shovels our coal and horse manure. This is most distressing; Honoria was invited to the Princess’s garden party next week as the Viscount Clairmont’s special guest!”
Titus lowered his eyes. Not out of respect for the woman, but so she wouldn’t see the flames of his rage licking into his eyes.
At this, the doctor actually stomped his foot against the floor, silencing everyone. “Madam, your daughter barely has a chance of lasting the week, and the longer you and your family reside beneath this roof, the more danger your other children are in. Do I make myself clear?”
The Baron, famously pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness, took his wife by the shoulders and steered her away. “We’re going,” he said.
Without a backward glance at his firstborn.
Tied with a Bow
Doctor Alcott took all of two seconds to dismiss the frantic bustle of the Baron’s household, and yanked Titus into Honoria’s bedroom before shutting them in. “Where is the bathroom?”
Titus pointed to a door through which the adjoining bathroom also shared a door with the nursery on the other side.
“Does the tub have a tap directly to it, or is it necessary to haul water from the kitchens?”
“It’s a pump tap, sir, but I’ve only just started the boiler and that only pipes hot water to the kitchens and the first floor.”
“That’s sufficient.” The doctor divested himself of his suit coat and abandoned it to a chair before undoing the links on his cuffs. “Now I need you to fill the bath with cool water, not cold, do you understand? We need to combat that fever, but if the water is freezing, it’ll cause her to shiver and raise her temperature.”
“I’ll go to the kitchens and have them boil a pan just to make sure it inn’t icy.”
The man reached into his medical bag and extracted an opaque lump. “First, young man, you will take this antiseptic soap and scrub your hands until even the dirt from beneath your fingernails is gone.”
“Yes, sir.”
It took a veritable eternity for the water to boil, but it seemed he needed every moment of that to scrub the perpetual filth from his hands. Once his skin was pink and raw with nary a speck, he filled two buckets as full as he could carry and hauled the boiling-hot water up the stairs.
The Baron and his wife swept by him on their way down. “We mustn’t let on it’s typhoid,” he was saying as his wife plunged her hands into an ermine muff.
“You’re right, of course,” the Baroness agreed. “What assumptions would people make about our household? Perhaps influenza would be more apropos?”