“I’ll do my utmost not to fail you, Your Majesty.”
“One hopes that’s enough,” the queen clipped.
“Dr. Longhurst is in with His Grace; give them a quarter hour to finish washing and dressing him before you enter.” Dr. Fowler’s uncompromisingly stern voice always gave her a case of the fidgets, and Imogen clutched her skirts to avoid them now.
“Of course, sir.” Should she curtsy again?
“Above all things, we must be proper,” the queen agreed. “Come, Dr. Fowler, we will discuss a few details of a delicate nature in your office.” By the time she’d finished talking, she was halfway to the stairs.
“Just so, Your Majesty.” Casting Imogen a voluminous look, he hurried after her, barking at the staff to resume their duties.
As they dispersed, Imogen exchanged a look of sheer amazement with Gwen, deciding to use her quarter hour wisely. Hurrying three doors down from her nurse’s station, she turned the latch and slipped inside, panting as though she’d sprinted a league.
“Ah, my dear Miss Pritchard!” Everyone in the world should hear their name enunciated with such warm and earnest enthusiasm, Imogen decided. It did wonders for the soul.
“Lord Anstruther.” She greeted him, with mirroring pleasure as she bustled into the paradoxically opulent gloom of his private quarters. The frail, septuagenarian earl all but disappeared into the bed beneath a pile of blankets. His head and thin shoulders, swathed in a dark silk dressing gown, were scooped into a sitting position by a mountain of pillows. “How do you fare this morning?” Imogen queried with a sad smile, reminded of what a merciless brigand time was to them all. “Describe how you feel so I may record it on your chart.”
“Like a steam engine has taken residence in my chest, but never you mind that.” He lifted a hand to wave in front of him, and Imogen made a note of how blue the paper-thin skin of his fingers had become. “I assume you’ve brought me your copy of the reclining bacchante sculpture?” He made a grand show of tilting his head this way and that, as though to spy something hidden behind her.
Bugger, she’d promised that she’d sketch Jean-Louis Durand’s scandalous sculpture for the earl on Saturday, when it was her habit to visit the Grand Gallery. They had it on loan for a very short time before it was returned to its French salon. A fellow artist, Anstruther had lamented to her that he was too unwell to visit the unveiling, and Imogen had said she’d do her best to immortalize it for him in all its indecent detail. Instead, she’d been forced to put in an extra shift at the Bare Kitten.
“No, my lord, and I do apologize. I was unable to find my way to the gallery.” She was equally unable to stand his disappointment, so she busied herself with his assessment so she didn’t have to look into his soft brown eyes. “I came to inform you that I won’t be in to see you for a while, as I’m going to be nursing someone with typhus, and I dare not bring that misery to your room.”
“Typhus, you say?” His brows were two silver-white bushes separated by surprise and inquiry.
Imogen leaned down to take his pulse, but covered the gesture with an air of conspiracy. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but His Grace, the Duke of Trenwyth, is here in this hospital.”
“Trenwyth? You mean they found that scamp? Little Collin Talmage?” His thin face split into a wrinkled grin.
She tried to keep the skepticism from her features. No one with eyes in their heads could call Trenwyth little.
“I’ve been worried about the boy,” the old man confessed. “Lived next to Trenwyth Hall my entire life. I knew his grandfather, by Jove, I even knew his great-grandfather. Outlived them all, and what do you think of that?” He curled his mustache between two fingers before he broke into a fit of coughs that concerned Imogen a great deal. “Typhus, you say? Aren’t you putting yourself in a great deal of danger on his behalf?”
She shook her head. “I’ve already had it.”
“Still … Bring me Dr. Fowler, I’ll demand he find someone else.”
Imogen made a gesture of helplessness, touched by his concern for her. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take it up with the queen, as she only just left.”
“The queen, you say? Well, doesn’t that just take the bright spot out of my week?” He visibly deflated, then seemed to come to a decision. “Why don’t you visit me anyway? There’s no cure for old age, or for what I’ve contracted. What’s typhus when there’s art to be discussed?”
Imogen’s heart tugged at the note of loneliness in his voice. “Dear Lord Anstruther, you know I would never put any of my patients in danger, least of all my favorite.” She attempted to charm him.
He snorted. “You’ll take one look at Trenwyth and change your mind about that, my dear, typhus or no. Handsome as the devil and afflicted with a similar set of morals, that’s Trenwyth.”
Struck by sudden curiosity, Imogen lowered herself to the edge of his bed. “You knew—know him well?”
“Watched the Talmage children grow, Sarah and I did.” Sarah, his wife, had been gone a long fifteen years, and still the man pined for her. “She was particularly fond of Collin,” he recalled. “Lad would pop over for a peppermint whenever she was in the garden and tarry round her skirts, that is, until he started chasing skirts of his own. A bit starving for female affection, if you ask me. Mother was a cold fish, God rest her soul.”
Imogen smiled. “He was a good boy, then?”
“Cole? Good? Not at all! But my Sarah always did have a soft spot for us rakes and ne’er-do-wells.” His eyes sparkled at her. “We never did have children, I suppose she enjoyed her time with the boy. Even wept a bit when he went into Her Majesty’s Service. She was mighty proud of him.”
“They say he contracted the disease in the Indies,” Imogen prompted, drinking in every detail.
True to his nature, Anstruther took the bait. “My valet, Cheever, got his hands on an American paper,” he bragged. “Januarius MacGahan wrote that he witnessed a man fitting Trenwyth’s description fighting like the very devil during the April Uprising in Bulgaria. Claims to have seen him dragged off by the Ottomans, he did.”
“But … the Ottomans deny that the April Uprising even happened,” Imogen speculated. “Surely they would have killed Trenwyth if he was witness to it, wouldn’t they?”
“Perhaps not if he’s a royal.” He shrugged. “Maybe they were paid his weight in gold for ransom.” The excitement and the conversation had the earl dissolving into a fit of coughs. The cancer was now in his lungs and there was naught to be done but make him comfortable. Only God knew when it would take him.
Checking her watch, Imogen stood. “I’ll send Gwen in with a compress and your tonic,” she said, hoping her bright tone would smother the grief already welling in her chest. “I vow to bring you my rendering just as soon as … as I can.
“Give us a kiss then.” He offered his cheek, and she complied. His skin was cool, dry, and thin beneath her lips.
“And take good care our boy Trenwyth,” Anstruther admonished. “Does the realm no good to lose that entire family. They are among the few noble families that deserved that designation.”