A Lady Under Siege(38)
“If I do wish to appeal to their good natures, Madame, it is only so that they might treat us both better,” Mabel defended herself.
“Yesterday and this morning you’ve been allowed to fetch meals from the kitchen—do they watch you closely in that duty?”
“Oh yes, ma’am, there’s a soldier at my side throughout.”
“Does he hurry you? Impede you from talking to others?”
“Not exactly ma’am. The cooks are ladies of my age, and they like a wee gossip. The guard allows it, for it grants him time to chat up the younger maids.”
“It sounds as if he barely watches you at all.” Sylvanne said. “The kitchen must be busy as a beehive, a place of some clutter, where knives are plentiful.”
Mabel felt a sense of dread at these words of her Mistress, but tried to hide it. She hoped her face showed sympathy and support. “I can guess your intent, Ma’am. It wouldn’t be easy.”
“Not easy, but not impossible. Please obey me in this, Mabel. Stealth has been lost to me, for I’m kept under lock and key. You are more fortunate, you move more freely, and that puts me at your mercy. I can’t succeed without you.”
“I’ll try my best, Ma’am.”
“That’s not enough. You know how much this means. You must hurry, for I fear delay—I intend to fulfill my duty to Gerald quickly, before I lose my nerve. Bring me a knife, quick as you can. Promise me you’ll succeed, and keep to it.”
Before Mabel could answer, the door was flung open, and without announcement Thomas entered. “Ladies, I come to inform you that I’ve started Daphne on a brand new regimen of fresh vegetables,” he proclaimed. “That’d be squash, beans, and carrots, all boiled up in a nice chicken broth. She ate it heartily, safe to say she devoured it, which brought joy to my heart. I’ve had good news from the south: oranges are procurable in the port, they will be two days in arriving.”
A jubilant smile stretched across his lips. Mabel met his gaze with a smile of her own, a more careful one, making sure that her Mistress did not see it. Sylvanne had turned away, toward the window, to the rooftops, the treetops beyond, and the kestrels that continued to whirl in the sky.
“Did you hear me?” Thomas asked her. She didn’t respond. “I said, did you hear me?”
Sylvanne turned and looked at him dispassionately.
“That suffices,” he said. “I’ll leave you ladies to your rest.”
He bowed, stepped lightly to the door, and closed it behind him. Mabel cautiously offered an opinion. “He seems a decent man,” she said.
“Mabel, please!” Sylvanne demanded. “Such remarks are not helpful when I’m doing my best to hate him.”
20
Meghan rang the doorbell and waited impatiently, clutching the handle of a large leather art portfolio. She glanced at her watch. Cutting it too close, she thought. She decided she could still make her ten o’clock meeting if she limited her chat with Derek to three minutes. Another minute passed, another ring of the bell and knock upon his door for good measure, and she was preparing to bolt, when the door opened, and there stood Derek, groggy-eyed and rumpled in pyjama bottoms and a tee shirt, bed-head hair hanging limp like seaweed exposed at low tide.
“Good morning, I have a meeting I can’t be late for, so I’ll keep it short,” she began. “I’m speaking to Thomas now. I just wanted you to know I was there at your daughter’s bedside, I took it all in, despite Sylvanne’s indifference—”
“Come in, come in,” Derek muttered sleepily, stepping back and bidding her enter with a half-hearted wave of his arm.
“I don’t have time,” Meghan told him. “Let me say this: Thomas, I’m glad you’re giving her fruits and veggies, that’s a great start. Now the next step, get that crazy doctor away from her! He doesn’t know what he’s doing! He’s killing her. That whole system of medicine he practices, of trying to balance the four humours—it’s all bullshit, it’s been discredited a long time ago. Now we worry about germs and bacteria, which are like tiny little bugs you can’t see, but they’re having a field day in that nasty wound on her arm that your doctor keeps poking and gouging at daily. Just clean it up and leave it alone! Boil some water, let it cool to lukewarm, and clean out that wound, clean it thoroughly, I want all the pus gone. Then wrap it in clean linen, and keep it wrapped. Change the linen twice a day. Don’t let the pus build up, pus is bad, not good! And no more bloodletting, she needs all the blood she’s got, poor thing! You hear me?”