chapter 16
“We need to get you out of here.” Even if she removed the pan from the bed, the fumes might linger. Opening the windows to air out the room wasn’t an option in a sick man’s room. It was spring, but the nights were still cool.
James nodded and pushed himself up and out of the bed. He had to grasp the bedpost to keep from wobbling, but his face was set in an expression Laura was coming to know well. All he said was, “Where?”
“My room. It’ll be easiest.” She slipped an arm around his waist and they started forward.
Demosthenes jumped up when she opened the door. Seeing James, his tail began to wag and he pressed against him. With the mastiff on one side and Laura on the other, they walked down the hall to Laura’s bedchamber. Their progress was slow and slightly weaving, but they made it to her door without running into anything along the way.
Laura left James on the chair just inside her door, Demosthenes beside him, while she returned to his bedroom to set up the scene. She intended to keep her discovery of the poison secret. If the would-be killer realized his trick had been discovered, he might try something else or get rid of evidence. But if he thought this was a temporary move and James would return, he would simply wait. He might even be complacent enough to give himself away.
She removed the evidence of the shattered bottle, wiping up the liquid and wrapping the broken glass in the towel with the mercury, but she left the pan hanging beneath the bed. She had a moment’s pause, concerned that others might be exposed to the fumes. But if James was no longer there, no one would go to his room except for the brief time maids might come in to dust.
Next she poured a cup of water from the jug and tossed the contents onto the bed, artfully leaving the cup on its side on the covers. It would be perfectly reasonable to move James if she had clumsily spilled a drink, soaking the mattress.
Casting a last glance around the room, she repacked her medical bag and carried it and the towel containing the ruined bottle back to her own room. Dog and man were waiting patiently by the door, James leaning back against the wall, eyes closed, and Dem sitting with his great head resting on James’s lap.
James levered himself up, and they made their halting way to the bed. As she reached out with one hand to whisk down the bedcovers, James said, “Dear Laura, if you wanted me in your bed, you had only to ask.”
She grimaced at him. “No doubt you’ll go to your maker with a smirk on your face. But I don’t intend for that to happen anytime soon.”
He eased down onto the bed and closed his eyes. Laura could see the effort the move had cost him in every line of his wan face. Demosthenes, who had followed them to the bed, whined softly.
“I know,” Laura told him as she sank down into the nearest chair, her urgency-fueled strength draining out of her. “It’s upsetting to you.” Dem sat down, putting one paw on her lap, and gazed earnestly into her face. “I’m so scared, Dem,” Laura whispered, laying her cheek against the top of his massive head and curling her arm around his shoulders. Tears spilled from her eyes and melted into his coat. “Thank God I have you with me. What if he’s already too far gone? What if I can’t handle it? I don’t know what to do.”
Dem gave her arm a reassuring lick, and somehow that lightened her spirits. With a last pat, she stood up and wiped away her tears. She couldn’t afford weakness. She needed to find out how to combat this poison.
She wasn’t sure what could be done beyond waiting for the mercury to leave his system and hoping she had caught it in time. But she knew that it could be done. Two of the men her father had treated had lived. And if anyone was stubborn and contrary enough to fight off the poison, it would be James.
The place to start was her father’s old medical journals. Thank goodness she had already had them brought up here to her room. Picking up a lamp, she went into the large dressing room. Her few clothes took up little space, leaving ample room for the trunks and boxes from her house.
It didn’t take her long to find the trunk containing her father’s journals. Fortunately, each was dated. But since she wasn’t sure when her father had healed the men, only that it had been before her mother’s death, there were several years to be explored.
She started with the year her mother died and worked backward. It turned out to be the year Laura was four that held her answers. No wonder she couldn’t remember the events, only her father talking about it years later. Flipping through the pages, her eyes fell on the word mercury, and she paged more carefully through it to find the beginning of the case.
“It may present as a catarrh-like illness,” her father had written. Upper respiratory symptoms—fever, chills, shortness of breath, pleuritic chest pain. Heart palpitations. Insomnia. Headaches. Tremors. Confusion . . . memory loss . . . irritability.
Laura drew in her breath, her hands trembling. They were all right there. Symptoms easily mistaken for other diseases, neurological indications that could be taken for the effects of a brain tumor. It was an uncommon illness, not a disease but poison, and unless one had treated hatters—an unlikely patient for doctors accustomed to treating the wealthy and the peerage—a physician would not have encountered it.
Squinting in the lamplight to read the faded ink, she followed her father’s accounts of “hatters’ shakes,” vivid dreams and hallucinations, even delusions. The symptoms were apparently many and varied, and not all the men had exhibited the same ones. She was grateful James had not experienced them all, but it made her heart squeeze in her chest to think of him suffering so needlessly.
Anger burned in her at the idea of someone purposely doing this to him. But that, too, she had to put aside. What she needed to focus on now was making sure that the monster didn’t achieve his goal.
Tears glittered in her eyes as she read her father’s closing remarks on several of the cases: patient deceased. But not all of them. Laura took hope from the fact that it seemed that those who had suffered a brief exposure, even if it was severe, recovered more quickly and completely than the men who had breathed in the vapor at a low level for years.
She skimmed the pages, looking for her father’s discussion of treatments. It seemed that little had sped up the recovery beyond removing them from the toxic fumes. But surely James, a strong, young, healthy man, would have a better chance of recovering than many of the men her father had treated.
But here . . . she stopped and read more slowly. Her father said he had had some success with administering milk thistle. Popping up, she went to the medical bag she had set on the floor by the bed and looked through it until she found a small bottle of milk thistle. Measuring out the brown liquid, she noted with concern that there was not much left.
It took some effort, but she managed to get the liquid down James. He began to talk in his sleep, his voice so soft and slurred she couldn’t make out the words. Then he stopped and opened his eyes and said, “Laura.”
“Yes. It’s I.”
“Lovely Laura.” He closed his eyes. His forehead was damp, a faint flush along his cheekbones, and she knew he was feverish again.
Laura bathed his face with cool water, and as she worked, she wondered what to do. Her supply of milk thistle would soon run out. She had to get more. But first, she knew, she must sleep. She was too tired to think clearly.
Demosthenes had been restlessly pacing about. Laura led him to the door of her room. Pointing to the floor, she said firmly, “Guard.”
Dem gazed at her for a long moment, then sprawled out in the hallway across the door. With one of his long-suffering sighs, he laid his head on his paws. Laura bent down to pat him, pleased that he had obeyed her. She felt much safer with the mastiff on watch. Closing the door and locking it made her feel even safer.
She checked on James once more and found him cooler. Laura thought of sleeping in the chair beside her window, but it was a dainty chair not given to comfort. She was too tired to care about the proprieties. She lay down beside James on the bed and immediately sank into sleep.