“Bedford,” Patrick said. “I think she needs a doctor.”
“Of course she needs a doctor!”
Patrick held his finger to his lips. There was no need to raise one’s voice, especially not in front of Linley, whether she could hear them or not.
Sir Bedford lowered his voiced to an acceptable range. “Of course she needs a doctor.”
“I asked the lama—”
Linley’s father ground his teeth at the words.
“I asked the lama,” Patrick continued. “And he believes there is a missionary camp somewhere southeast of here. It may be a few days walk, but at least there is a chance we could find help.”
“Do you honestly believe she will last long enough for someone to bring back a doctor?” Sir Bedford asked. “That could take weeks.”
Patrick looked at Linley, who lay quiet as the grave in her narrow bed. Her deathbed. “I realize we do not have that much time. I thought we would take her to the doctor.”
“You propose we take a dying girl on a weeklong journey through the Indian wilderness on the off chance we might find a missionary camp?”
He nodded. “Yes, I do.”
Linley’s father snorted. “Preposterous.”
“Why?”
“Because a journey like that is dangerous even for a grown man in perfect health. You do remember the hell we came through to get here, do you not? That was before the rains set in. I would imagine the level of danger has increased tenfold.”
“You are not willing to try?” Patrick looked at every pair of eyes in the room, but he already knew the answer.
“Absolutely not.”
“She will die if you do not help her,” he said, disgusted with the lot of them. “How could you stand there and sentence your daughter to death, Bedford? How?”
Linley’s father grew very still and very calm. “Because she will die either way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“If we leave with her, she will die in the wilderness,” Sir Bedford explained. “I have seen what happens to dead things left out in the heat and the elements, and I do not in a million lifetimes wish to see my only child rot before my eyes.” He took a few breaths, bracing himself. “At least here she can die peacefully in a safe, warm bed. And she can be given a proper funeral.”
Patrick felt sick to his stomach. He gripped the back of the stiff wooden chair to keep from reeling. The mental image of Linley festering in the forest was too much for him.
But so was the thought of living without her.
“Do you understand now, Lord Kyre? My daughter has suffered enough already. I will not risk hurting her any more.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice too weak to be his own. He swallowed down the tightness in the back of his throat. “I understand.”
Sir Bedford Talbot-Martin and the rest of his team shuffled through the curtained doorway. Their movements were slow, tired. Beaten. Linley’s illness took its toll on all of them, it seemed. And why shouldn’t it? The others knew her much longer than Patrick had. They were like a family. Patrick remembered what death had been like in his family. How it killed them all, little by little.
Of course the Talbot-Martin team was devastated.
Alone in the room, Patrick took a seat on the wooden chair at Linley’s bedside. He watched her chest rise and fall beneath the blanket. He did this just as he did the night before. And the night before that.
And the night before that.
She barely moved. Sometimes her eyes opened, but she stared at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Saying nothing. Hearing nothing.
Patrick reached for a basin and a cloth, dabbing the cool water across Linley’s forehead. He smoothed back a tangle of brown hair from her face. She was almost too hot to touch. He pressed the water to her lips, cracked and drawn across her teeth.
How desperately he longed to kiss her.
But he didn’t. Patrick placed the basin and the cloth down onto the floor. He settled in for the six long hours of his watch. It was agony wondering if each breath she took was her last.
Patrick had been too young to remember his mother’s death, but he remembered Johnnie’s. Remembered hearing his school chums whispering about it. Remembered reading about it in the papers years after the accident.
If only he’d gone swimming with his brother that evening, Johnnie would still be alive and everything would be the way it should have been all along.
Linley stirred, drawing Patrick’s attention down to the narrow cot. Her eyelids fluttered open and she rolled her eyes around in her head. They seemed to move with no definite purpose, bouncing from object to object, wall to wall like a runaway squash ball.
Suddenly, they fixed themselves on the man in the chair at her side.
Did she see him? Did she recognize him? Patrick was not sure.
Her lips parted as if to speak, and she lifted her arm just high enough off the blanket to point a trembling finger. At first, Patrick thought she gestured at him, but then he realized she wanted something else. Something in the corner behind him.