She Called the Cold Duke “An Insufferable Bore” — What Happened Next Stunned London
Chapter 15
The launch came at four in the morning instead of eight, because a fever that had been climbing all week and a night without waking are two facts that change what weather is worth risking.
There was no helicopter. The island’s meadow — the only flat thing on Greyhaven, and the reason the helicopter had landed there on Sunday — turned to soup in the first hour of the storm, and the wind sat at forty knots and would not move. So the Coast Guard sent a fifty-two-foot motor lifeboat out of the station eight miles up the coast, and the coxswain brought her in through the strait with the rain going sideways off the water, and two rescue swimmers came up the gravel to the front door of Greyhaven in dry suits, and found a scene they would each tell privately for years.
A seven-year-old girl unconscious on the floor of the hall with a woman holding her head; her father standing over them with his coat off and his sleeves rolled; a grandmother in gray and pearls standing against the wall with her hands folded in front of her, offering nothing, saying nothing, watching.
“Mr. Ashford? Coast Guard. We have to move her now.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“Sir, I need you in the back of the boat and I need you to hold this. Ma’am—” the swimmer looked at Nora, and then at the way Lily’s fist had closed itself in the front of Nora’s wet coat, and made the call without asking anybody — “you’re coming too. Both of you. Now.”
Helena Ashford did not come. Somebody had to stay; the island was hers; the caretaker was hers; and she stood on the porch of the house in the rain and watched the boat take her grandchild off the water, and it is recorded that she did not move until the lights were gone.
They ran the child up the coast to Saint Vincent’s and in through the emergency doors at 5:12 in the morning, and the whole building learned what kind of case it was inside of four minutes: fever, bruising, pancytopenia, a marrow failure on a treatment protocol, and a mother — a mother, in a wet gray coat — who had to be physically peeled off the stretcher and asked whether she was the parent, and who said, without any hesitation at all, in front of a nurse and a resident and the attending:
“I’m her mother. Test me again if you want. Test me twice.”
Dr. Miriam Wren was paged at home and came in at six.
By eight, the picture was clear enough to be terrible. Lily had developed an infection in the marrow failure’s long, slow shadow — the kind the doctors call opportunistic, the kind that live in every hospital and every island house and every human mouth and only matter when the body has stopped having soldiers. Fungal pneumonia. She was moved to the pediatric intensive care unit behind two sets of doors, and put on oxygen, and started on an antifungal that took four hours to drip in.
And at 9:40 on Monday morning, in a county building twelve miles away, in a courtroom with fluorescent lights, a lawyer named Tomas Rennick brought a laboratory report and a security officer and a housekeeper named Iris Bell before a judge, and the charge of grand larceny against Nora Reyes was dismissed, and Corinne Vale, who had spent the night in the same cellblock Nora had occupied on Saturday, was arrested in the corridor outside the courtroom on the same charge she had helped manufacture — and was told, before she had finished saying the word aunt, that the district attorney would be very interested in anyone who could describe how the necklace came to be in a gray coat.
She described it at 1:15 in the afternoon, in a small room with a recorder on, and it took eleven minutes, and at the end of it the assistant district attorney went out into the corridor and used a telephone.
At 3:00 that afternoon, in the ICU waiting room, Nora Reyes was sitting in a plastic chair with her hands between her knees when Tomas Rennick came through the doors and crouched in front of her, which is a thing lawyers do when they need you to hear them over the noise of your own life.
“The theft is finished. You will be publicly cleared this week; I’ll see to the wording myself.” He looked gray. “Miss Reyes — Mrs. Ashford has filed a petition in the family court. An emergency guardianship petition, on the grounds that the child is legally a member of the Ashford family, that the mother is a woman with no established residence, no income, a recent arrest, and a documented history of unauthorized contact with the minor, and that the child is in critical condition and requires continuity of care.”
“That’s not — can she do that?”
“She can file anything. She may not win.” He stood. “The hearing is tomorrow at two. There is one more thing, and I want you to hear it from me and not from a deputy: Mrs. Ashford is at the hospital. She arrived twenty minutes ago with the paperwork and a court order granting her temporary visitation and medical consultation while the petition is pending. She is on her way up to this floor now, and there is nothing I can do to stop her.”
The doors at the far end of the corridor opened.
Helena Ashford came down the waiting room in her gray coat and her good shoes, with a lawyer behind her and a sheet of paper in her hand, and she walked past Nora Reyes without looking at her — not out of contempt, which would have been bearable, but with the total, blank, purposeful absence of a woman walking past furniture to get to something that mattered.
She stopped at the ICU doors and held up the order for the nurse’s station.
“I am Lily Ashford’s grandmother,” she said. “Here is a court order. I will be seeing my granddaughter.”
And from behind the second set of ICU doors, where the monitors live, came a sound that stopped every conversation in the corridor at once — first the alarm, and then, over it, the fast flat voice of a nurse calling for the attending.
“Code blue, PICU — code blue—”