“They don’t agree with me.”
“They are not supposed to agree with you! They are designed to bring your humors back into balance. My lady, I beg of you; you must trust me in this.” He brought up his hands, palms together, as if he were praying. “Your color is too robust, and you have far too much energy. At this point, patients who follow my strictures are pale and languid, as befits a woman about to give birth. I shall have to bleed you again.”
Hero watched in silence as he turned to remove a basin and lancet from his satchel.
“Most severely, I’m afraid,” he said. “Under the circumstances, I suspect that to take any less than two pints would be folly.”
“Two pints?”
“Yes, my lady,” he said, advancing on her with his lips cinched tight and his eyes weary with benign contempt for the weaker sex, with whose folly he struggled daily.
? ? ?
By the time Sebastian reached Brook Street, a light snow had begun to fall, big, soft, white flakes that fluttered down to stick to the pavement and the iron railing guarding the area steps.
“Bit wet out there, my lord?” asked his majordomo, Morey, as he took Sebastian’s hat, greatcoat, and gloves.
“I suspect we’re in for a good deal more of this before nightfall.” Sebastian’s gaze fell on the modest gentleman’s hat resting on a nearby chair. “I take it Richard Croft is here?”
“Yes, my lord. He—”
The majordomo broke off as a loud rattling clatter sounded from above.
A moment later, a small, slight man came charging down the stairs, the tails of his black coat billowing behind him, his satchel gripped before him in both hands. He had his head down, his lips clamped in an angry line, his prominent chin set mulishly. But at the sight of Sebastian, he drew up, nostrils flaring, his entire frame aquiver with his indignation.
“Lord Devlin,” he said, taking the last step down to the entrance hall and bowing stiffly. “I am pleased to see that you are here, for it affords me the opportunity to tell you that I refuse—yes, refuse!—to act as Lady Devlin’s accoucheur any longer. She is stubborn and opinionated, full of outlandish ideas gleaned from reading an assortment of ridiculous foreign publications. She ignores my advice, refuses my prescriptions, and just now she threw my basin at me when I attempted to insist that she allow me to bleed her.”
“And how, precisely, did you ‘insist’?”
Croft’s thin chest jerked with the agitation of his breathing. “Sometimes with expectant mothers, the emotions run high and a touch of male firmness is required.”
“You’re fortunate she didn’t take the lancet to you.”
Croft’s features darkened with a resurgence of fury. “Indeed, she threatened to do so.” He tugged at the lower hem of his waistcoat, which had become rucked up in his hasty descent of the stairs. “I cannot be held responsible for the outcome of a confinement when the patient refuses to submit herself to my Lowering System. Therefore, I resign my position. Nor can I in all good conscience recommend her as a patient to any of my colleagues. To be frank, under the circumstances, I can’t imagine how you will find anyone competent to agree to attempt to deliver her.”
“Under what ‘circumstances’?” asked Sebastian with deceptive restraint.
The esteemed Richard Croft opened his mouth, then thought better of what he’d been about to say, and closed it.
Sebastian advanced on him. “What the devil are you saying?”
Croft took a step back, his heels clattering against the riser of the first stair.
“What circumstances, damn you?”
The accoucheur swallowed hard. “The child . . .”
“Yes?”
He swallowed again. “The child is in the wrong position. By now, it should have shifted, so that the head is down in preparation for entering the birth passage. It has not done so. Instead, it is lying . . . crossways.”
Sebastian felt as if someone had reached into his chest to twist his heart and elbow his gut, so that it was a moment before he was able to say, “What can be done?”
Croft shook his head. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“The child may turn itself.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The accoucheur sidled toward the door. “Some babes which present in a breech position are born successfully.”
“And the mothers?”
“Some mothers survive,” said Croft. “But . . .”
“But?”
Croft straightened his spine and met Sebastian’s fierce gaze with a fortitude Sebastian couldn’t help but admire.
“But rarely both.”
Chapter 25
S ebastian found Hero standing at the window of her chamber, one hand on the panel of heavy drapes at her side, her gaze on the flurry of snow falling from the sky.
“I owe the poor man an apology,” she said as Sebastian came to stand behind her.
“Did you really throw his basin at him?”