Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

“Phelps, I think I’ve killed him.” Dain could scarcely move his lips. His entire body was paralyzed. He could not make himself look down…at the corpse.

“Then why’s he breathin’?” Phelps looked up from the boy’s face into his master’s. “He be’nt dead. Only sick, I reckon. Mebbe took a chill comin’ here in the bad weather. Whyn’t you put him down over there on the bed so we can have a look at him?”

Addled, Dain thought. Jessica would say he was addled. Or high-strung. His face burning, he carefully shifted the boy up, carried him to the bed, and gently laid him down.

“He looks a mite feverish,” said Phelps.

Dain cautiously laid his hand over the lad’s grime-encrusted forehead. “He’s—he’s rather overwarm, I think,” said His Lordship.

Phelps’ attention was elsewhere. “Mebbe that be the trouble,” he said, moving to the small fire-place. He took a bottle from the mantel and brought it to Dain. “As I recollect, laudynum didn’t set right with you, neither. Nuss give it to you when your ma run off, ’n you was sick some’at fierce from it.”

Dain, however, had not been half-starved at the time and had not been dragged through a Dartmoor drenching as well. He had been safe in his bed, with servants in attendance, and Nurse there to feed him tea and bathe his sweating body.

…it was better to leave him where he would be safe, and where she was sure he’d be provided for.

Dain had not been loved, but his mother had left him safe enough. He’d been looked after, provided for.

His mother had not taken him with her…where he would surely have died with her, of fever, upon an island on the other side of the world.

This boy’s mother had left him to die.

“Go down and tell them we must have a pot of tea immediately,” he told Phelps. “See that they send up plenty of sugar with it. And a copper tub. And every towel they can find.”

Phelps started for the door.

“And the parcel,” said Dain. “Fetch my lady’s parcel.”

Phelps hurried out.

By the time the tea arrived, Dain had stripped off his son’s sweat-soaked garments and wrapped him in a bed sheet.

Phelps was ordered to build a fire, and set the tub near it. While he worked, his master spooned heavily sweetened tea into the boy, who lay limply against his arm, conscious again—thank heaven—but just barely.

Half a pot of tea later, he seemed to be reviving. His bleary gaze was marginally more alert, and his head had stopped lolling like a rag doll’s. That head, an untidy mass of thick black curls like Dain’s own, was crawling with vermin, His Lordship noticed, not much surprised.

But first things first, he counseled himself.

“Feeling better?” he asked gruffly.

A dazed black gaze rose to meet his. The sticky childish mouth trembled.

“Are you tired?” Dain asked. “Do you want to sleep for a bit? There’s no hurry, you know.”

The boy shook his head.

“Quite. You slept a good deal more than you wished, I daresay. But you’ll be all right. Your mama gave you some medicine that didn’t agree with you, that’s all. Same thing happened to me once. Puked my guts out. Then, in a very short time, I was all better.”

The boy’s gaze dropped and he leaned toward the side of the bed. It took Dain a moment to realize the brat was trying to see his boots.

“There’s no need to look,” he said. “They’re ruined. That’s the second pair in one day.”

“You squashed me,” the child said defensively.

“And I turned you upside down,” Dain agreed. “Bound to unsettle a queasy stomach. But I didn’t know you were sick.

Because Jessica wasn’t here to tell me, Dain added silently.

“Still, since you’ve found your tongue at last,” he went on, “maybe you can find your appetite.”

Another blank, shaky look.

“Are you hungry?” Dain asked patiently. “Does your belly feel empty?”

This won Dain a slow nod.

He sent Phelps down again, this time for bread and a bowl of clear broth. While Phelps was gone, Dain undertook to wash his son’s face. It took rather a while, His Lordship being uncertain how much pressure to exert. But he managed to get most of the grime off without scraping half the skin away as well, and the boy endured it, though he shook like a new-foaled colt the whole time.

Then, after he’d consumed a few pieces of toasted bread and a cup of broth, and had stopped looking like a freshly dug-up corpse, Dain turned his attention to the small copper tub by the fire.

“Her Ladyship sent clean clothes for you,” Dain said, indicating a chair upon which Phelps had heaped the garments. “But you must wash first.”

Dominick’s gaze darted from the clothes to the tub and back again several times. His expression became anguished.

“You must wash first,” Dain said firmly.

The boy let out an unearthly howl that would have done an Irish banshee proud. He tried to struggle up and away. Dain caught hold of him and picked him up off the bed, oblivious to pounding fists, kicking feet, and deafening shrieks.

“Stop that racket!” he said sharply. “Do you want to make yourself sick again? It’s only a bath. You won’t die of it. I bathe every day and I’m not dead yet.”

“No-o-o-o!” With that piteous wail, his son’s louse-infested head sank onto Dain’s shoulder. “No, Papa. Please. No, Papa.”

Papa.

Dain’s throat tightened. He moved his big hand up the lad’s woefully thin back, and patted it gently.

“Dominick, you are crawling with vermin,” he said. “There are only two ways to get rid of them. Either you have a bath in that handsome copper tub…”

His son’s head came up.

“Or you must eat a bowl of turnips.”

Dominick drew back and gazed at his father in blank horror.

“Sorry,” said Dain, suppressing a grin. “It’s the only other remedy.”

The struggling and wails ceased abruptly.

Anything—even certain death—was preferable to turnips.

That was how Dain had felt as a child. If the boy had inherited his reaction to laudanum, one might reasonably deduce that he’d also inherited Dain’s youthful aversion to turnips. Even now, he was not overly fond of them.

“You may have the hot water sent up now, Phelps,” said His Lordship. “My son wishes to bathe.”

The first wash Dain was obliged to handle himself, while Dominick sat rigid with indignation, his mouth set in a martyred line. When that was done, however, he was rewarded with a glimpse of the peepshow, and told he might play with it as soon as he was clean.

Dominick decided to conduct the second wash himself.

While he was making puddles about the tub under Phelps’ watchful eye, Dain ordered dinner.

By the time it arrived, the boy had emerged from the tub, and Dain had towelled him dry, got him into the old-fashioned skeleton suit Jessica had found, and combed his unruly hair.

Then the coveted peepshow was put into Dominick’s hands, and while he played with it, Dain sat down with his coachman to eat.

He took up his knife and his fork and was about to cut into his mutton when he realized he’d taken up his knife and his fork.

He stared at the fork in his left hand for a long moment.

He looked at Phelps, who was slathering butter on an enormous hunk of bread.

“Phelps, my arm works,” said Dain.

“So it do,” the coachman said expressionlessly.