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...cunning men, wizards, and white witches as they
call them in every village, which, if they be sought
unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind.
–Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
The Season was whirling rapidly to a close. Hostesses vied with one another to achieve entertainments that would be acclaimed as the crowning touch of this year’s festivities. The betting at the clubs as to who would bring whom up to scratch intensified. And every morning, the newspapers featured betrothal announcements indicating the successful culmination of the Season for the young ladies involved.
All across the West End of London there was a pervading sense of stakes being pulled up. In the great houses, the servants began to pack away the silver, the china, and the new wardrobes. Already, the talk of the master and the mistress was turning countryward to the subject of shooting parties and hunt balls.
In some of these same houses, an interesting domestic war was being waged. The mistress definitely wished to be packed and gone by two weeks hence. The master was inclined to linger so that he might attend the Cyprians Ball, although he was not so foolish as to mention this to his wife.
Lady Camden, the Marleighs, and the assembled Robsons, except for Annis, set out for Briarly Grange, the estate that Jamie would come into upon his marriage. Annis was to stay and supervise the wedding preparations, for Clare would be married at Camden House in the fall.
Although Annis was curious to see her sister’s future home, she had no ambition for travel at the moment, for the opportunities to see Nick once more were decreasing by the day. And as much as she told herself it was ridiculous to pine for the man, pine she did.
She was sitting at the writing desk in the library desultorily Making Up Lists when Pym brought in the morning paper. She took one look at the front page and tossed it aside in disgust. She had no desire to read any more articles about Princess Charlotte’s social engagements on the arm of her poor but handsome prince. A princess who had found her Prince Charming and who would now live happily ever after was not a thing that she cared to read about in her present state of mind.
Shortly thereafter, Pym came in again, bearing a letter addressed to her. The writing on the envelope was in a large childlike scrawl, and it was written from Lindenwold Lodge in Kent. She recalled the name with a rising sense of excitement. Lindenwold Lodge was the Ryder family hunting lodge. Nick had spoken of it once, saying it had been built when it was still possible to keep a pack of hounds available to hunt with while staying in London. Now it served as a country retreat.
With trembling hands, she unsealed the letter and read:
Dear Madam,
I have the sad duty to inform you that my lord is stricken with a high fever and calls for you constantly. I beg you to come at all possible speed. I have taken the liberty of instructing the bearer of this message to convey you here if you are agreeable.
C. Sloane
Annis stared at the letter, fearful and elated all at the same time. So Nick had not cast her off as easily as he had thought to, and in his hour of pain, he had called for her. But what could have happened to him?
“Send in the messenger,” she ordered Pym, and a few minutes later, he returned with a provincial-looking young man in tow.
“Your master,” Annis said quickly. “How does he fare?”
The young serving man looked blank.
“Young man,” Pym said sharply, “you are addressed. Kindly answer.”
Comprehension swept, none too swiftly, over the young fellow’s face. “Oh, I takes your meaning, ma’am. Only I ain’t in his lordship’s employ. I be a carter in the village nearest to the lodge and—”
“To the point, if you please!” Pym snapped.
“A relation of mine is the stableman at Lindenwold Lodge. He came yesterday to hire a chaise, with me to deliver the letter and bring back a passenger.”
“How long a journey is it to the lodge?” Annis asked.
“If you starts at cockcrow, you can be there in the afternoon.”
“Very well. We start tomorrow at the earliest possible hour. Pym will see that you are boarded for the night.”
“I will summon Dicken to do that,” Pym said starchily.
“Of course,” Annis said, her thoughts elsewhere. “I’m sure you have more pressing tasks to attend to.”
But as it turned out, Pym’s most pressing task was finding fault with her travel arrangements.
“Madam, ought you to be traveling alone with that...rustic? Let me send to one of the registries and procure a respectable abigail to accompany you.”
“Pym, I have been my own abigail for many years, and we will have been on the road for hours before the registry opens.”
“This is highly irregular. Why did his lordship’s coachman not come himself?”
“Because,” Annis said in a low voice, “if Lord Ryder were ill or injured, Sloane would never, never leave him.”
She passed Pym by without another word, leaving the butler thinking that Mrs. Fulton had a very odd look in her eye.
****
Annis went to her bedchamber and locked the door behind her. She cast off her dress, as a warrior casts off his town finery, and moved about the room in her white shift, which was her witch’s battle array.
She cast her circle, set four candles at the quarters, and spoke a healing spell for the black knight:
Fevers, I forbid thee, one and all. I forbid the Sea Fevers and the Land Fevers, the Night Fevers and the Day Fevers, the Falling Fevers and the Palsied Fevers, the Aching Fevers and the Quaking Fevers, and all the Fevers ever ordained.
Out of head, out of heart, out of sides. Out of back, out of knees, out of thighs. From the points of the fingers to the nebs of the toes, out, Ye Fevers! from my true love go.
She only hoped this healing spell for Nick would prove more efficacious than the healing spells she had been casting for her own galling ill—the nightmare visitations of Russell Fulton.
And that night he came to her again.
His eyes were blood-red and burning as if to swallow her up, soul and all. But first, he would feed her eyes to the black-winged bird of death, and then he would flay her flesh from her bones and feed it to the death bird’s crooked beak. Annis lit her lamp with shaking hands, but, as always, she saw only the empty dark of night. Only a dream, only a dream.
Yet this dream was a thing apart. Always before, her dreams of Russell Fulton had been faithful tableaux of his past tortures of her. But this dream put him in the Here and Now, and this, it seemed to her, held some dark and awful portent for her future.
But her nightmare-haunted sleep did not prevent her from leaving London the next morning at an hour so early she had not seen it since lambing time at her estate. It was her first journey to Kent, but she had no thought for the scenery. She was clarifying her mind for what must happen now.
She would see Nick through this crisis. She would use all the healer’s arts and witch’s charms at her command to cure him of whatever malady had struck him down. And then, if they could part as friends, equal to equal, even to even, neither in the debt nor toils of the other, then she would be satisfied.
It would be passing strange to see Nick sick and helpless. She could not imagine what ill thing had laid him low. All she could do was whisper healing charms as they sped southeastward into the rising sun:
If it be a white ill thing, a red ill thing, a black ill thing, or a sticking, cracking, pricking, stabbing ill thing, or a bone ill thing, or a sore ill thing, or a swelling ill thing, or a rotten ill thing, or a cold creeping ill thing, or a hot smarting ill thing, let it fall away from thee, my love.
The sun was westering by the time the carriage turned down the isolated road that led to the Ryder hunting lodge. Both sides of the road were lined with strands of the flowering linden trees from which the lodge took its name. The lodge itself was a rustic stone-and-timber dwelling surrounded by equally rustic outbuildings. An elderly retainer of some sort answered her knock, pulling open the heavy wooden front door to let her in.
“Lord Ryder,” she demanded. “I must see him at once.”
The man bobbed his hoary head and led her into the main room of the lodge. It was furnished in a rustic style with a low, whitewashed ceiling crossed with dark beams. One wall was taken up by a large stone fireplace. Standing before it was Nick. Smoking a cigarillo.
Annis frowned. It could hardly be beneficial for him to be smoking his noxious weed in his weakened condition. She would take it away from him immediately. And why was he out of bed, anyway? Surely he must be ill, for he wore only boots, breeches, braces, and a loose white shirt. He was minus coat, waistcoat, cravat, and cuffs, and surely, no gentleman would receive a lady without those items of dress unless he was at death’s door.
The thing of it was, he didn’t look as if he were at death’s door. Truth to tell, he looked remarkably fit, healthy, and in one piece for a man who had just suffered a grievous fever. In fact, he looked altogether too vigorous to suit her.
He regarded her through the cigarillo smoke. “You came in good time. I’m flattered.”
And then the truth dawned, and she cursed herself inwardly for being a dimwitted, gullible fool. A high fever, indeed! She was chagrined, mortified, infuriated, and deeply afraid, only she didn’t intend to give him the satisfaction of showing it.
She forced herself to walk toward him and say calmly and quietly, “Abduction, Nick? I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”