A Kiss For Midwinter (Brothers Sinister 1.5)

Doctor Grantham took a step toward her. “Oh, God.”

“So don’t tell me I’m naïve. Don’t even think it.” Lydia’s voice had a quaver in it, and she hated that sign of weakness, that show of emotion over events that had come and gone. “After…after everything was over, after I realized how foolish I was, how ignorant I had been, I wanted to hate everything and everyone. But if I did, he would have won. He would have ruined me. I wasn’t going to be a bit of rubbish just because he discarded me.” She glared up at Grantham. “And I refused to break. I wouldn’t do him the honor.”

He was breathing almost as heavily as she was. His eyes burned into hers. His lips pressed together, and she could see that look on his face—that knowing, judging look. As if he needed more of a reason to look down on her.

That rush of heat passed, and Lydia felt almost unsteady on her feet. She took a deep breath, collecting her wits, and suddenly could not look at him at all. She’d just…she’d just…

Lydia put her hand to her forehead. “God,” she said. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

“I do.” He spoke slowly, hesitantly. “It’s because you’re angry, and you’re kind. You can’t be angry at the people who love you—your father, your mother. And you could never shout like that at the people who don’t know what happened. That leaves me.” He gave her a half-bow. “I know, although I should not. I’m the best target you have. I’m the only person you can scream at in all the world.”

There was another sardonic half-smile at that.

“I’m not angry,” she said in outrage. “I scarcely think of it after all this time.”

“You’re not angry?” He snorted. “I don’t believe that for one instant, my dear. I’m not you, and I’m furious. If you told me his name, I would hunt him down and…”

“And what?”

He shrugged. “And I don’t know. I was never the sort of boy to resort to fisticuffs as a child, and I haven’t ended up that kind of man. But you can rest assured, my dear Miss Charingford, that nothing enrages me more than a man who lies to a woman about her own body.” His lip curled.

Lydia bit her own lip. Doctor Jonas Grantham said a great many things to her, usually with that sardonic gleam in his eye. This was the first thing he’d said that she thought was entirely serious. His fingers clenched around the handles of his bag, and he looked off into the distance.

“What an odd thing to say.” She picked up her basket. “I revealed so many things that might set you off—my foolishness, my misplaced trust, my failure to protect my virtue. And you are angrier that he lied to me than that he had intercourse with me?”

“Yes,” he said savagely. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that we know next to nothing. Disease is a mystery. Health is inscrutable. The body itself is scarcely understood; we can only examine the secrets of the dead. And in all that dark ignorance, we’re sometimes granted a rare moment of illumination, of understanding. The truth is a gift.”

She felt quite peculiar. Her chest was too tight; her eyes stung. Lydia shook her head savagely; she didn’t want to inspire that kind of vehemence.

Yet he made a short motion toward her, reaching out his hand before pulling it back. His jaw set, and he looked away.

“I believe,” he said, “that there is a special place in hell for those who steal truth. And that man—whoever he is—I hope he is burning there.”

Chapter Five

MRS. HALL WAS EIGHT MONTHS ALONG.

Jonas wasn’t sure whether Miss Charingford would be taken aback by the other woman’s very visible pregnancy or pleased by it—he never could guess how women would react.

But Lydia greeted Mrs. Hall as she greeted everyone—with a warm, happy smile, with bright conversation and compliments.

“I do love these curtains,” Lydia said earnestly. “They are both functional and quite pretty. Never tell me you made them yourself?”

Jonas had never been able to manage that sort of small conversation. The labyrinthine rules attached to kind words usually left him bemused. And Miss Charingford was so good at it. He could have watched her make people smile for hours.

When he saw Mrs. Hall, he didn’t see a woman who made curtains. She wasn’t slender to his eye. She was undernourished. On her skinny frame, the pregnant bump of her belly sat like a grotesque lump.

There was a disease that was peculiar to women, and Mrs. Hall had it. It wasn’t a disease that came from exposure to contagion. It didn’t have a name. It was a sickness that took years to come on, and it crept up so gradually that people rarely noticed what was happening. It ravaged the rich and the poor alike—although, as with all illness, it landed most heavily on the poor.

Miss Charingford moved from Mrs. Hall to her children, never once looking at Jonas. She hadn’t looked at him at all since her outburst.

Not that it mattered now; he had work to do. Jonas set about seeing to his patient.

“I lost another tooth,” Mrs. Hall said quietly. “I lost it two nights ago.”

Her skin was dry and scaly to the touch; she had dark bags under her eyes. Her children gathered around Lydia in a group. From Miss Charingford’s basket, she’d taken a mass of wool stockings, which she distributed.

“Good of you, to bring her by,” Mrs. Hall said. “Once was, I’d not take charity. Now…” She shrugged, as if to say she’d take anything she could get.

“Your heart rate is acceptable,” he said, letting go of her wrist. “Just acceptable. There’s a little fluid in your lungs. I think that so long as you have a chance to rest and recover, you should not suffer too much in the next month.”

She nodded at this. “I’ve done eight already,” she said. “I do know how it’s done, Doctor.”

“It is not the childbirth itself that worries me.”

He didn’t know the name of the disease she had, but he knew its symptoms. A man who wouldn’t breed his mare two seasons in a row for fear of causing her an injury would be at his wife within weeks of childbirth. He’d plant his seed in a field that had not lain fallow for years, and like an overproduced field, the wife inevitably failed. Her back stooped. Her skin changed. Her eyes yellowed. Teeth fell out; bones that were once strong would snap at the smallest slip on icy pavement. Carrying a child was hard on a woman’s body, and eight children, delivered ten months after one another, left a woman no room to recover.