No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 17

They took her to the house of Lord Revelstoke’s sister, four streets away, and put her on a sofa, and a surgeon came within the hour.

The wound was long and shallow. The blade had crossed the muscle of her forearm and taken two inches of skin and nothing else. It was, the surgeon said, the sort of thing he had seen a hundred times and would see a hundred times again, and he cleaned it, and stitched it, and bound it, and told her that she had been uncommonly lucky and that she must have moved at precisely the right moment.

“I was watching the man,” Lenora said. “Not the knife. His shoulders. He turned them before he came.”

Adrian sat beside her with his own hand bandaged and would not leave.

The surgeon — a brisk Scotsman named Murray, with hands like a craftsman and no patience for reticence — had noticed something else.

“Your Grace,” he said, as he was packing his bag, “may I ask how long since your injury?”

“Three years.”

“And who attended you?”

“Hollis. Frederick Hollis. Of Wimpole Street.”

Dr. Murray paused, with one hand on the clasp of his bag, and looked at the Duke of Ravenwood with an expression that Adrian did not like at all.

“Hollis,” he said. “I knew him. He was struck off the College register four years ago for signing a false certificate in a lunacy matter and then went into private practice out of a house in Wimpole Street, where he makes a very good living doing — ” He stopped. “Your Grace, may I examine you?”

The examination took a quarter of an hour, in a small side room, with the door shut.

At the end of it, Dr. Murray sat back on his heels and wiped his hands on a cloth and said, without any particular ceremony, “Your Grace, you have feeling in your feet.”

“I have not.”

“You have. I stuck a pin in the sole of your left foot and you moved your knee. You did not do it deliberately; I watched you do it. The reflex is there. Your spinal cord is not severed. It is bruised — badly bruised, and there is some damage, and you have been told for three years to lie still and keep out of chairs and be content, which is very nearly the worst possible advice for what you have.”

Adrian sat looking at the wall.

“How much?” he said.

“I cannot promise anything, because any man who promises you movement in a spinal case is a fraud or a fool. But the muscles have not gone. The feeling is not gone. The reflex arc is intact.” Dr. Murray stood up. “I will say this much: I have seen worse cases walk with a cane. I have also seen better cases not walk at all. But you have been lied to for three years by a man who was paid to keep you in that chair, and I will stake my reputation on that.” He pulled on his gloves. “You need exercise, every day, and a great deal of it, and it will hurt, and there is no certainty in it. And you need someone standing behind you while you try.”

When he was gone, Lenora came into the doorway with her arm in a sling, and looked at her husband’s face, and understood everything without being told.

“Get up,” she said. “Now. Both of us, here, in this room. You put your hands on my shoulders and I will hold your arms and we will see what happens.”

“Your arm — ”

“My arm is a scratch, and I am the only person in London who will hold you without pity.”

Adrian Ellsworth looked at her for a long moment. Then he set his hands on the arms of his chair, and pushed, and rose — two inches, four, forward and up, with his weight on hands that had not taken his weight in three years — and his legs took some of it. Not much. Some. His left knee was shaking badly, and his right foot turned under him, and he had to grab at her, and she caught him, and they stood there together in a borrowed side room in London, swaying, him breathing hard, her arm bandaged, both of them holding on.

“Three seconds,” Lenora said. “That is three seconds more than yesterday.”

“It is one second more than yesterday.”

“Then tomorrow it will be five.” She was crying and did not appear to notice. “And the day after, six.”

Adrian let his forehead rest against hers.

“When I married you,” he said, “I told you I had nothing to offer but an empty name and a chair.”

“You told me you would never be easy to live with.”

“That too.”

“Your Grace,” said Lenora Vale, “I did not marry you for the chair. And I am not staying for the walking.” She tightened her grip on his forearms. “Now try again. One more.”