Now, his flesh hung from sinew that clung more tightly to his thick bones. He was so tall, so naturally powerful, that his malnourishment was all the more horrid and conspicuous. She ran her cloth behind his neck and then to the front, tracing a poorly healed scar that reached from his clavicle to his shoulder. It hadn’t been there a year ago. Nor had the strange cluster of round, puckered skin that looked like pebbles had lodged into his flesh and subsequently been dug out. What could have caused such a scar? Trenwyth would, no doubt, have many more once the gashes and cuts now marking him healed.
If they had the chance to.
His murmuring became more insistent, escaping his dry, cracked lips on tortured sighs and groans. He still wasn’t coherent, and what few words she did catch disturbed and chilled her. March. Bayonets. Dig …
Babies.
Deciphering the horrors locked in his mind seemed too dreadful to contemplate. Dipping the cloth in the ice water once more, she spread it over the long range of his torso, interrupted by his many visible ribs and the uneven knots of his abdominals. He contracted, groaned, and then relaxed as the jarring cold became comfortingly cool.
“I’m sorry to cause you any distress, Cole,” she whispered to him, checking beneath a bandage on his bicep and deciding that it did need changing. Peeling it off, she spread iodine over the neat stitches, and redressed it with clean bandages from her tray. “I’m doing this to keep you alive. I know you must be tired, so very tired, but can you fight a little while longer? I’ll fight too. Whatever it takes.”
“Ginny?”
Her name—her Kitten name—on his lips startled her so much that she surged to her feet and glanced around the empty room. Elation that he spoke, that he recognized her voice even after so long, was quickly followed by a grave trepidation.
He made a sound of distress, his head turning this way and that as though looking for a familiar face in a crowd. The limb from which his hand had been taken flailed out. The subsequent groan that escaped him could have almost been a whimper had it been produced by a smaller chest. It was the sound of one forsaken. Low and desperate.
It broke her heart into gossamer pieces.
“Ginny,” he called, louder this time, and she could do nothing but answer him.
“I’m here, Cole,” she soothed, as she sat down beside him on the bed. “I’m here. Do you remember me?” She shouldn’t be touched but, bleeding heart that she was, she couldn’t seem to help herself.
Leaning over him, she took an ice chip from a crystal glass, and pressed it against his lower lip, letting it melt into his mouth. Pleased that he swallowed, she lifted the cloth warmed by his torso and submerged it back into the basin.
“Ginny.” His right hand burrowed into the rough folds of her uniform skirt and clung there with astonishing force for one so ill. “The world was on fire, Ginny,” he moaned. “The world was on fire, and I thought I was in hell.”
“I know,” she whispered, again wiping his unruly hair from where it was plastered to his burning forehead. She didn’t know—couldn’t comprehend—but desperately wanted to lend him some comfort. Some understanding.
“But it was the snow. The snow…” He pulled at her skirts, becoming more agitated. “Hell isn’t fire, Ginny. It’s ice.”
“Shhhhh,” she soothed, swallowing the lump in her throat that threatened to restrict her breath. She couldn’t think of a thing to say but, “You’re safe now,” which seemed like a tired and overused consolation.
And wasn’t entirely true.
If he’d had a terrible experience with ice, then her ministrations must be akin to torture, but how else could she keep his dangerous temperature from cooking him alive?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered through eyes blurred with tears as she took the frigid cloth and, this time, wrapped his feet with it, attempting to draw the heat from his head.
He hissed and repeated her name. Then his breath caught, and every one of his muscles seemed to tighten. Imogen watched helplessly as his bruised, pale body convulsed for a moment, and was glad that he was too weak to kick out at her. Thank God the typhus hadn’t produced the rash that most often accompanied the fever. When she’d been afflicted, she remembered her skin feeling like little beastly ants were slowly eating her flesh away. It had been unspeakably miserable.
Trenwyth had been spared that, at least.
She crooned soft things to him as she melted another ice chip on his mouth, painting his lips with it, and allowing the water to trickle inside. This he seemed to tolerate well, and even sighed when she produced another.
“I dreamed of you,” he rasped through a throat abraded by desert sand and pain. “I dreamed of blood. And you.”
“I dreamed of you too,” she confessed, pressing her hand to his forehead once more. She’d thought it impossible, but he felt even warmer than before.
“Bugger,” she muttered, and stood.
“No.” He pulled her back to the bed with surprising strength.
“Hush, Cole, hush now,” she soothed, reaching down to uncurl his fingers from her skirts. It seemed that her voice lowered to a whisper every time she said his name; the intimacy of it felt wicked on her tongue. She should be calling him Your Grace, even in private, but the familiarity seemed a nominal sin considering the circumstances. “I’m going to change your bandage.” She kept talking, as it seemed to appease him and calm his increasingly shallow breaths. “Then we’ll see if you can keep down some bone broth and tea.”
Settling herself on the other side of him, she stretched his left arm out so his wrist hung over the edge of the bed. She intended to use the flat-sided scissors to cut the bandage off, but the moment the scissors touched the edge of the bandage he groaned and flinched expansively. Had Imogen worse reflexes, he could have been cut.
She decided to unwrap it, instead, the chore taking her extra long because of his severe reaction each time she exerted even the smallest amount of pressure.
Imogen liked to think of herself as a seasoned and stouthearted nurse by now, incapable of disgust, but she gasped when she uncovered Trenwyth’s mangled wrist. The wound was not fresh, indeed, it was more healed than not. It became apparent from the haphazard stitching of the skin, and the misshapen form, that it hadn’t been properly cared for at all.
Battling her temper along with a fresh wave of pity, she reached for the iodine, applying it to the wound.
She barely ducked a vicious strike as he screamed in pain. Imogen stared down at him in helpless frustration as a suspicion began to form.
Fever, pallidness, delirium, and muscle contractions … all symptoms of typhus. But so was a rash that covered the entire body, and there was generally a dry and hacking cough, which Trenwyth didn’t have. Granted, his breathing was shallow, and his pulse weak … but didn’t William say he hadn’t released any water since he’d arrived?
Dropping the iodine, Imogen ran from the room in search of Dr. Fowler. Trenwyth didn’t have typhus but something just as deadly, if not worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Nurse Pritchard, I shouldn’t think you prone to such ridiculous bouts of female hysteria.” Dr. Fowler was a rather jowly man for one so thin. The extra skin drooped from his cheeks, punctuating his supercilious frown. “The diagnosis is typhus. Every medical professional who’s cared for Lord Trenwyth from India to here has agreed that this is a textbook case.”