A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [57]
She fought him, then collapsed in tears, and for a moment he knelt by her chair and simply held her, offering what comfort he could. She smelled of lilies of the valley, and her hair was soft against his face.
It was not professional, and Hamish was clamoring in the back of his head about the seduction of witches, but there was nothing else he could do.
When the worst was over, he went into the drawing room to ring for Mary Satterthwaite.
Waiting for his summons to be answered, he stood by the high back of the chair with one hand on Lettice’s shoulder, knowing from experience that the warmth of human contact was often more important than words.
And thinking to himself that this rather blew to the four winds his earlier impression that Lettice Wood knew who had killed her guardian….
9
Dr. Warren had spent a harried morning in his surgery, and added to that had been a sleepless night attending to Hickam. He was tired, irritable, and behind in his schedule. As he started out on his rounds, he was grumbling about a retirement long overdue and the ingratitude of villagers who seemed to think he was on call twenty-four hours of the day.
He looked in on the new baby he had delivered and found it flourishing, but tongue-lashed the father when he discovered that the mother had spent her morning bent over a full tub of washing.
“I’ve told you Mercy had a hard birth,” Warren finished, “and you’d have seen it for yourself if you hadn’t been ten parts drunk that whole day. Now either you find someone from the village to lend a hand in the house or I’ll find a good woman and bill you for her. If Mercy hemorrhages, she’s as good as dead. And then where will you and that child be?”
He stumped back to his car and swore as he barked his knuckles trying to start it.
The next stop was briefer, to call on an elderly widow ill with shingles, and this time he left her a stronger powder to help with the pain from the long ropes of fluid-filled blisters that looped down her arm. It was all he could do, but the old, cataract-clouded eyes smiled up at him with a pathetic gratitude.
Finally he reached the cottage on the Haldane property where Agnes Farrell’s daughter Meg lived. Agnes was tall, spare, and capable, the most levelheaded woman he’d ever met and—in his opinion—wasted as a housemaid when she’d have made such an excellent nurse. Meg had married well; her husband, Ted Pinter, would be head groom on the estate when his father retired, and the cottage was as pretty as she could make it. Warren had always looked forward to his visits here because Meg was as healthy as her mother and had gone through two pregnancies with no trouble at all, the last one four years ago. She was also a very respectable cook and never failed to send him away with a slice of cake or scones for his tea.
But the kitchen no longer smelled of baking, and the woman who met him at the door had lost the bloom of youth and health. Meg looked forty, and her mother twice that.
Lizzie was a pretty little thing, he thought, bending over the narrow crib to peer down at the pale little face staring blankly at the wall. But she wouldn’t be for long if something didn’t work soon. She was, as far as he could tell, exactly as he’d left her the day before, and the day before that as well—he’d lost count of the string of days he had come here, and yes, nights too, trying to break through that blank stare. Lizzie reminded him even more strongly now of those round-cheeked marble cherubs that the Haldanes seemed to want carved on all their family tombs—and nearly as white and cold where once her skin had had the soft warmth of ripe peaches.
Lizzie didn’t move, she didn’t speak, she never seemed to sleep, and food pressed into her mouth dribbled out it as if she’d somehow forgotten