‘I can save your life. Should it be necessary.’ He raised his face. Then he saw the look in her eyes. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Annabelle. I have a cure.’ He held out a hand in a calming gesture. ‘A very reliable cure.’
Her mother tensed. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She has epidemeosis.’ He patted a hand to his chest. ‘That term is my own as I am the first to be aware of it. In the rest of the world it’s unknown—for now.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well. Nothing really.’ He blinked his words away. ‘The cure is so simple as to be...simple, for lack of a better word.’
‘But her illness?’
‘It’s merely a lack of bile. A serious bile blockage.’
‘The humours again,’ her mother whispered, eyes widening. ‘Those devilish humours. They never stay in order.’
‘Yes. But she’s young. She’ll recover fast. I just would not want it to hurt her spleen. If it reaches the stage where it damages the spleen...’ He shook his head, and expelled a lingering breath, seeming to paint the room with his concern.
‘I will recover?’ Annie asked. She clutched the back of the chair, using it to keep herself upright.
‘Of course.’ The physician turned in her direction, but he glanced briefly at the ceiling, as if he’d heard the words before and perhaps did not even believe himself.
Annie sensed something wrong, but she wasn’t sure if he lied about her recovery or something else.
Then he took the manner of a tutor. ‘It seems the night air right before dawn can build strength. By exposing a person to a small amount of some poisons, they can build a resistance. Edward Jenner discovered this with his cowpox theory when he created a way to save us from smallpox.’ He puffed at the glass of the monocle, blowing away a bit of fuzz. ‘But we mustn’t be overzealous. Give me a few moments and I’ll search out the room which has the highest chance of filtering the air in the right amounts.’
‘Are you sure it will help?’ Annie asked.
‘It’s very simple. You’ll have to sit alone, awake, in the room between four and five in the morning—breathing. Those are the best hours for the air. You can read, or sew or whatever suits your fancy.’
He tapped the monocle against his leg and stared at her mother. ‘I would certainly pass the word throughout the staff and family that they are definitely not to disturb her at this time. It seems the humours are most likely to be put askew by the people who are closest to her the most often. I—’ He put his monocle away. ‘I could speak with her for hours and it wouldn’t bother her as I’ve hardly been near her. But there’s something shared, a miasma of sorts, in people who have been closest to her... She needs to be away from them for a bit.’
‘Are you certain it will cure her?’
‘Oh, yes. I have studied this extensively. For years. I wrote a paper on it.’
‘Well, let me know which room and I will tell the maid to wake her in time for her recovery regime.’
‘I don’t want to do that,’ Annie said. She didn’t trust the man.
The doctor looked at her as if her spleen had just spoken back to him.
‘Miss Annabelle. You must. You have no choice. I have my reputation to keep.’
‘You’ve not been able to cure Mother’s headaches.’
Her mother leaned towards Annabelle, reached out a hand and swatted at Annie’s arm. ‘They are so much better, though. And the lavender oils he has the maids rub into my feet... It always eases my pain.’
The doctor raised a brow in one of those I told you so gestures.
‘Very well.’ She stood and looked at her mother. ‘But only if you promise to let me go somewhere the next week.’
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where do you wish to go?’
‘Anywhere. Anywhere but a soirée or a gathering. I would just like to not feel I am being coddled every moment.’
‘Your father will forbid it.’ Her mother’s lids lowered. Her eyes drooped closed and she pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘My pain just increased tenfold.’
‘We will get that corrected right away.’ The doctor stepped forward, but glanced at Annie. ‘I will discuss which room for you will be best and I expect you to be there from four to five in the morning.’
‘Yes, Annie.’ Her mother opened one eye. ‘Do as the physician says.’
Annie left. She would do as the big miasma of a physician said, but if it became too tedious, she would walk in the gardens, darkness or not. She was tired of being a puppet.
Annie bundled her dressing gown tight and took the lamp from the servant and waved the woman away. She twisted her hair up, unwilling to have the wisps tickling her face. After pinning it, she added the jewelled one—the pin her grandmother had given her.
The physician had told her mother to send her to the portrait room. Annie hated the Granny Gallery. It had apparently become a tradition for every woman of her heritage to have a portrait painted and, if the woman didn’t like the portrait, she would commission another and another until one finally pleased her—and then the artist would soon be asked to paint a miniature, or two, or ten.
Annie walked into the room, past the two shelves of miniatures her mother had insisted Annie and her sisters pose for. She held watercolours in her hand and a sketchbook under her arm. The barest flutter of air puffed the closed curtains. The doctor had insisted the window be opened the width of a finger. No more. No less.
Eyes from musty portraits almost overlapping stared at her. The ancestors. They’d probably all died in the house.
She put the lamp on the table between the chairs, which faced away from the window. They were the only two chairs in the room. Both squat, flat, and with clawed feet. The chairs were heirlooms and probably looked the same as the day they were made because no one willingly sat on something so uncomfortable.
This was the room where her mother put the furnishings that one had to keep because they’d been in the family forever, but that she would never have purchased.
And now Annie sat in the middle of it, thinking of which road would be best to take her from the house.
She rose, prepared her watercolours and stepped over to one of the portraits of her great-great-aunt. Very carefully, she took the wetted brush and added a beauty mark just outside the eye. It hardly showed against the oils. She sighed. She wasn’t even allowed the true paints of an artist.
She put the brush away, crossed her arms and paced back and forth in front of the trapped eyes.
If she went to find her sister, her mother and father would be desolate. She was the good daughter. The Carson sister who wasn’t wild. The one that took after the Catmull side of the family. And now she was inheriting her mother’s afflictions and she was standing in a room of discarded furniture. She jerked her arms open, her hands fisted, and grunted her displeasure. Making a jab at the world which had trapped her. She punched again.
‘Keep your thumb on the outside of the fist, don’t swing the arm and thrust forward with the motion. It works better.’ A masculine rumble of words hit her ears.
She jerked around and backwards at the same time.
A man stood in the doorway. Although it wasn’t that he really stood in the doorway. More like he let it surround him. A dark shape with an even