“She means something to you, boy?”
She meant everything to him. But of course, he could not say that.
“Titus.”
“Pardon?”
“My name is Titus Conleith.”
The doctor gave a curt nod. “Irish?”
“My father was, but my mum was from Yorkshire, where they worked the factories. We were sent here when my dad was elevated to a foreman in a steel company. But the well was bad, and typhoid took them all three months later.”
Alcott made a sound that might have been sympathetic. “And how’d you come to be employed in the household of a Baron?”
Titus shrugged, increasingly uncomfortable beneath the older man’s interrogation. “I saved old Mr. Fick, the stable master, from being crushed by a runaway carriage one time. He gave me the job here to keep me from having to go back to the workhouse, as his joints are getting too rheumatic to do what he used to. Besides, no orphanage would take in a boy old enough to make trouble.”
“I see. Have you any schooling?”
Titus eyed him warily. “I have some numbers and letters. What’s it to you?”
“You’ve a good mind for what I do. A good stomach for it, as well. I’ve a surgery off Basil Street, in Knightsbridge. Do you know where that is?”
“Aye.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, looking suddenly regimental. “If Mr. Fick can spare you a few nights a week, I want you to visit me there. We can talk about your future.”
“I will,” Titus vowed, something sparking inside of him that his worry for Honoria wouldn’t allow to ignite into full hope.
The three days he sat at her side were both the best and worst of his life.
He told her tales about the horses’ antics as he melted chips of ice into her mouth. He monitored her for spikes of fever and kept her cool with damp cloths and linens packed with ice. The doctor even let him dose her with the thymol and look after most of her necessities when the maids took a turn for the worse.
He begged her to live.
All the while, he crooned the Irish tune his father used to sing to his mother on the nights when they drank a bit too much ale and danced a reel like young lovers, across their dingy old floor.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair,
Her lips are like some roses fair,
She’s the sweetest smile and the gentlest hands,
I love the ground whereon she stands.
He barely ate or slept until the fourth night, after she’d swallowed several spoonsful of beef bone broth, the deep sounds of her easier breaths lulling him to nap in the chair by her bed. Alcott had roused him with the good news that her fever had broken, and had then ordered him to wash and change clothing and sleep in the guest room nearby.
A commotion woke him thirteen hours later. Without thinking, Titus lurched out of bed and scrambled down the hall. Skidding to a halt, he narrowly avoided crashing into the Baron’s back.
Every soul in the Goode family gathered around Honoria’s bed, blocking her from view. Prudence, Felicity, and Mercy all chattered at the same time, and it was the happy sound of their cadence that told him he had nothing to fear.
Titus squelched a spurt of possession, stopping just short of shoving in and around them to see what was going on. This moment didn’t belong to them, it belonged to him.
She belonged to him.
“Young Mr. Conleith, there you are.” Doctor Alcott, a tall man, stood at the head of the bed next to his patient, who was still blocked from Titus’s view. “Miss Goode, you and your family owe this young lad a debt of gratitude. It is largely due to his tireless efforts that you survived.”
They all turned to look at him, clearing the visual pathway to her.
With an ecstatic elation, Titus drank in the sight of Honoria sitting up on her own. She was still ashen and wan, her eyes heavy-lidded and her lips without color.
And yet, the most beautiful sight he’d laid his eyes upon.
Her fingers worried at the burgundy ribbon in her hair, stroking it as if drawing comfort from it.
Was it his imagination, or did a dash of peach color her cheeks at the sight of him?
He already knew he was red as a beet, swamped in the blush now creeping up his collar.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Every word he knew crowded in his throat, choking off a reply.
“Yes,” the Baron chuffed, taking his shoulder and firmly steering him backwards. “Expect our gratitude in remuneration, boy. I’ll call for you to come to my office tomorrow to discuss the details. There’s a good lad.”
The door shut in his face, and he stared at it for an incomprehensible moment. From the other side, the Baroness’s voice grated as she asked the doctor if Honoria might be well enough to attend the garden party at the palace three days hence.
Titus dropped his head against the door and closed his eyes.
She’d looked right at him. Had seen him for the first time. Did she remember any of the previous days? Had she heard anything he’d said to her? Sung to her?
She’d thanked him.
And he’d said nothing. His one chance to actually speak to her and he’d choked.
And then he’d been shut out like the inconvenience he was. To them, the Goodes, he was still a nobody. Nothing. They would never think about him after today unless the dog shat upon the carpets and someone needed to clean it up.
Would she? Would she come to him? Had she noticed him, truly? Not as a servant or a savior but as himself…
One question haunted him as he dragged his feet down the hallway, back to the mews, his hand curling over the memory of her skin.
Would he ever get to touch her again?
Four Years Later
“I do believe someone is dead beneath your greenhouse,” Amanda Pettifer said with no real concern as she pulled the curtain back from the carriage window. “That’s quite a structure for merely a Baron’s home. Why, it’s as long as your stable walls.”
Honoria Goode didn’t miss Amanda’s latent jab at their rank. As the daughter of a viscount, she needed, upon occasion, to put them in their place. It wasn’t the most pleasant virtue for a friend to have, but neither was it uncommon among their class.
“Let me see!” Prudence lunged over Amanda’s lap to peer out the carriage window as they clopped in beneath the mews. “Holy Moses! You’re right. A man’s legs are sticking out from beneath as if the structure landed right on him. What if he drowned in that puddle of muck he’s in? Someone should do something, Nora! Oh…no…wait. The legs are moving. All is well. At least, I think it is.”
“I’m glad our welcome party isn’t a corpse.” Secretly pleased that her sister Pru still used the nickname she’d gleaned at finishing school, Nora marked her page and closed her book. She’d never liked the name Honoria. It was stolid and plain, belonging more to a nun or a suffragist than a debutante. Nora sounded much more sophisticated, she thought. Tidier, even.
Though Amanda Pettifer was Nora’s age at twenty, she and Prudence—almost three years their junior at seventeen—were thick as thieves. Likely, because they both shared a penchant for mischief and misbehavior.
They’d all bundled into the carriage from the Green Street Station, anxious to arrive home. Nora’s coming out ball was in three days, and there was so much to be done. She couldn’t help but become almost overwrought with anxiety at the thought.