I swallowed. “How do you do it?” I asked quietly. She cocked her head in question. I explained, “How do you ignore the voices in your head? The ones that won’t let you just be happy. The ones that want more out of life. More like what men are free to do—study what they want, go where they want, be who they want.”
Her smile was rather tight. She held up the glass as Hensley fell asleep on her shoulder. “I drown them in gin, but I’d be no kind of guardian if I recommended that.”
EIGHT
DAYS PASSED, AND EDWARD’S fever still didn’t break.
We moved about the manor like unquiet ghosts. McKenna tried to brighten our gloom with talk of the wedding. She sent the girls out to prune the flowering trees in the garden so the spring would be full of new growth, and prepared entrees for us to sample for the wedding feast, but it was increasingly impossible to ignore the feverish moans coming from Edward’s room. Lucy attended to his bedside day and night.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” I told her one morning. “Take a break. Let me watch him.”
“Your bedside manner is deplorable.” She tried unsuccessfully to feed him broth. “You’d poke and prod him so much, he’d never want to get better.”
She tried to feed him more broth, but he turned his head, eyes glassy and unfocused, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Sometimes he seemed to be aware of who we were, and in the next moment he’d push the bowl away and shudder.
“It’s getting worse,” she muttered, mopping up the spilled broth. “No matter what Elizabeth said, I can’t help but think . . .” Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of something over my shoulder. “Goodness, do you see that? It looks like the moors are on fire!”
I whirled toward the windows, where the blackness was broken by huge flames in the lower fields. I pressed my face against the glass.
“Montgomery!” I called. “Balthazar, hurry!”
They soon appeared, and I pointed beyond the window. “The fields are on fire,” I gasped. “Stay with Edward. I’ll find Elizabeth and warn her.” I turned to go.
“Juliet, wait.” Montgomery’s voice was steady and calm, almost light. “It’s just a bonfire. Look.”
I squinted into the darkness. He was right—it was a controlled blaze in the lower field. I let out the tension in one long breath.
“It’s the festival of Twelfth Night,” Montgomery explained. “It’s a pagan holiday in this area. Carlyle told me about it while I was helping him chop firewood yesterday. The highlanders celebrate it out here, where no preachers are around to tell them not to.”
The flames rose higher, crackling with sparks. Now I could make out clusters of people around the bonfire, some of them dancing. My heart lurched. With Edward so ill, it had been a long time since we’d all laughed and danced, that carefree.
“The whole household must be down there,” I said. “No wonder it’s quiet as a church around here.”
Lucy tsked as she squinted toward the fire, exhaustion written in her features. “To think they didn’t invite us.”
“They probably thought we wouldn’t approve of a pagan festival,” I said. “We being such civilized city folk and all.”
Lucy rolled her eyes.
Balthazar turned to Montgomery, fingers knit together. “I’ve never seen a festival before.” He paused and sniffed the air. “Roast pig with honey. Oh, Sharkey loves roast pig. Might we go?”
Montgomery seemed amused. “Certainly you may go, Balthazar, and I’ve no doubt Sharkey would be welcome, too.”
Balthazar grinned and started to straighten his shirt, but his fingers were too clumsy. Lucy adjusted his collar and refastened his top button, dusting off his shoulders. “There now. All the ladies will want to dance with you.”
His face fell. “I don’t know how to dance.”
“Can’t dance!” she said. “Well, Montgomery, you’d best go and teach him. And you should go, too, Juliet, or else one of those girls is going to try to steal him from you.”
“Only if you come as well,” I said to her.
She jerked her head toward the bed. “I can’t leave Edward.”
“McKenna can watch Edward—it’s only for a few hours. Come on, we all need a bit of fun.”
She bit her lip in indecision, but then her stomach grumbled. “Roast pig, did you say?”