A Lady Under Siege(35)
To the nurse he barked, “Go and see that Lady Sylvanne is roused and brought to me—No, on second thought, I’ll pay her a visit. I must speak to her at once.”
“Then should I—” the night nurse began, but he had already hurried past her out the door.
THE GUARDSMAN ON DUTY outside Sylvanne’s room had fallen asleep, a young soldier hardly more than a boy propped up against the stone wall, resting his cheek on the pole of his halberd. When Thomas snatched it from him and brought the bayonet-like tip to his chin, the poor lad nearly died of fright. “Forgive me, m’Lord,” he pled.
Thomas tested the blade of the oversized axe and proclaimed, “I should behead you here and now.”
“As you wish Sire, as you wish,” the young man sputtered.
“I wish you would stay awake,” Thomas scolded him. “Now find the key and let me in. If you’re unlucky I’ll remember this later, but for now I’m intent on a greater purpose. Hand me that candle.”
The soldier did as told. Thomas entered a small anteroom, where he could make out the maid Mabel lying on a small cot against the wall. Fussing in her sleep, she turned and rolled away from the candle’s light. The door to Sylvanne’s room was open a crack. Thomas pushed it wide and entered. She lay upon a large bed in the center of the room. He moved quickly to her bedside, and called her name softly.
Sylvanne heard a voice, and felt herself shaken awake. She opened her eyes and saw Thomas standing over her bed, whispering, “M’Lady, m’Lady.”
She recoiled from him in fright. As she gained her senses her fear turned to fury.
“You’ll not have me,” she whispered. Finding her voice, she shouted for Mabel.
“Have you? You misjudge me,” Thomas chided her. He announced eagerly, “I bring wonderful news—the woman of the future, the one of whom I spoke, who looks your twin, who lives in my dreams—she also lives in dreams, or so it seems. She told me she is inside you, she has seen me, and it’s my hope that she is watching me now, and hears me as I speak.”
“How dare you come to me in the night like this,” Sylvanne hissed. “Have you not compromised me enough? Get out!”
“Madame, Madame. I know now what you are about. You have no more secrets from me. This Meghan—from her vantage point inside your mind, she sees all, and can tell me what goes on there. Judith and Holofernes! You see! I know all about it. She is the one who told me—how else could I know?”
“Mabel!” Sylvanne screamed. From the other room came the sound of Mabel grunting as she woke. She came running quickly, quite disoriented, and made more so by the sight of Lord Thomas in her Lady’s chamber. Sylvanne fixed her with an accusing glare. “What lies have you been telling this man?”
“Nothing, ma’am. I’ve spent no time with him at all.”
“M’Lady, whether you believe me or not has no further relevance,” Thomas interjected. “I speak to another, one whose soul has migrated the centuries and lodges now in your mind. She is unfelt by you, that much is apparent. Yet she sees me, and hears me, and when I communicate with her you become a mere vessel of transmission. When the sun rises in a few hours I intend to bring you to Daphne’s bedside, where you will listen to my physician describe his remedy. Through you that other entity, the woman Meghan, whom I pray may be my daughter’s saviour, will be informed. Even though you don’t intend it, you do me a great service, and I am grateful.”
He spoke with such enthusiasm that Sylvanne almost believed him for a moment. She put a hand to her chest as if seeking her heart’s pulse. “I don’t feel her,” she said.
Thomas answered without hesitation, “I’m certain she is there. I do not merely believe it, I know it, absolutely.”
A FEW HOURS LATER, with the arrival of daylight, the three of them gathered at Daphne’s bedside—Thomas, Sylvanne, and the Physician, a portly, ruddy-cheeked man of middle age named Blunt, who had laid out his tools upon the bed beside the girl, spreading them atop the same swath of coarse hemp cloth in which he normally kept them wrapped. He took hold of Daphne’s forearm and removed a filthy bandage. On her white flesh, just below her elbow, a pus-filled, swollen wound gaped grotesquely. Thomas and Sylvanne watched as he took up a rust-flecked scalpel that looked more suited to woodworking, and gently scratched it across the wound. Pus gushed out and soaked into a dirty rag he had placed under her arm.
“And so you see, this is how I’ve been attending to her of a morning, for some weeks now,” he pronounced. “Of the four humours, she withholds too much yellow bile—this is how we encourage it to the surface so as to drain it off. As you can see, the blood itself is corrupted.” With the scalpel he made a small incision near the wound. Blood began to trickle down her arm into the rag, soaking it crimson red. “It’s absolutely vital to allow some blood to escape, in order that poison burble out with it. The poison concentrates around the wound.”