“I’M STILL A MAN… YOU THINK I CAN’T DO THIS?” THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND DUKE WHISPERED TO HIS BRIDE

Chapter 9

The medicine troubled her more than the fever did.

The tonic Dr. Wallace administered carried a bitter, familiar smell — the same sharp undertone she remembered from a sedative once prescribed to her own father in his final illness. A medicine that had left him foggy and weak long before his heart finally failed.

When she raised the question the next morning, Benedict Wallace’s affable manner cooled instantly.

“I have treated his grace’s condition for eighteen months, your grace.” He gave her title a faint, condescending emphasis. “I would advise against a duchess practising medicine on instinct alone. Movement is dangerous for him. Complete rest is the only path to whatever recovery remains possible.”

Lily said nothing further. But the unease did not leave her.

It was two days after the fever broke that Lord Augustus Kensington arrived at Thornwick, and Lily understood at once why society found him so easy to like. He was handsome in an effortless, unstudied way. His smile was quick and warm. His manner attentive without being overbearing.

He found her in the conservatory among the ferns and the damp green smell of growing things, and spoke to her as though they were already old friends.

“You must find it difficult,” he said gently, “married to a man who cannot walk you into a ballroom. Charles married you to satisfy the trustees. You understand that? Nothing more. I would not wish to see you trapped in an arrangement built on his ambition rather than your happiness.”

“That is a great deal of concern,” Lily said carefully, “from a man I have known for less than an hour.”

Augustus’s smile did not falter. “Family looks after family, Duchess. Even family Charles no longer trusts.”

He asked, in the same easy tone, about her father’s papers. About Samuel. About whether she had travelled beyond Thornwick since her arrival, and to whom she wrote her letters.

Lily answered carefully, revealing nothing — but she noted every question and stored it away, like a woman gathering evidence without yet knowing what case she was building.

“You do not trust me, Duchess,” Augustus observed, tilting his head, disarming. “Understandable, perhaps. But I would remind you that Charles is not the only Kensington capable of protecting what matters to you.”

“I have not asked for protection, my lord,” Lily said, matching his lightness with her own. “I have found so far that I am rather capable of managing on my own account.”

Something flickered behind his eyes at that — not quite anger, but a cold recalculation, as though she had stepped outside whatever role he had assigned her. He recovered his smile quickly, bowed with practised grace, and excused himself to find Mabel about dinner.

Lily remained among the ferns a long while after he had gone, arms wrapped around herself despite the conservatory’s warmth, certain now that Lord Augustus Kensington’s charm was a well-tailored coat worn over something considerably colder beneath.

Below stairs, a lighter thread of the household continued its own quiet rhythm. Mabel’s niece, Phoebe, visiting for the season, had taken an immediate and unconcealed interest in Captain William Clark, whose stern composure seemed to amuse rather than discourage her.

“Does he ever smile?” Phoebe asked Mabel over the kitchen fire.

“When circumstances require it,” Mabel said dryly.

“Then I shall endeavour,” Phoebe announced, “to become a circumstance.”

It was the kind of small warmth Thornwick badly needed, and Lily, catching sight of it from the corridor, allowed herself a rare, unguarded smile of her own.

Unable to shake her suspicion of Benedict Wallace’s medicine, she wrote quietly to Richard Randolph, and through him arranged for an independent physician — Dr. Elias Sterling — to examine Charles under the guise of a routine consultation.

Elias’s findings, delivered privately to Lily two days later, confirmed what she had feared.

Charles retained meaningful sensation and muscular response in both legs, far more than Benedict’s reports to the trustees suggested.

“The dosage of his sedative,” Elias said gravely, “is excessive by any reasonable medical standard. Sufficient to explain the persistent fatigue, the fogged concentration, the slow erosion of strength his grace has come to accept as inevitable.”

Lily sat very still in the window seat of her chamber, and let the cold fact of it settle into place.

Eighteen months. Eighteen months of being told he was getting worse. Eighteen months of believing his own body was betraying him, when someone else’s hand had been on the scales.