Page 7 of Courting Trouble
“She means something to you, boy?”
She meanteverythingto him. But of course, he could not say that.
“Titus.”
“Pardon?”
“My name is Titus Conleith.”
The doctor gave a curt nod. “Irish?”
“My father was, but my mum was from Yorkshire, where they worked the factories. We were sent here when my dad was elevated to a foreman in a steel company. But the well was bad, and typhoid took them all three months later.”
Alcott made a sound that might have been sympathetic. “And how’d you come to be employed in the household of a Baron?”
Titus shrugged, increasingly uncomfortable beneath the older man’s interrogation. “I saved old Mr. Fick, the stable master, from being crushed by a runaway carriage one time. He gave me the job here to keep me from having to go back to the workhouse, as his joints are getting too rheumatic to do what he used to. Besides, no orphanage would take in a boy old enough to make trouble.”
“I see. Have you any schooling?”
Titus eyed him warily. “I have some numbers and letters. What’s it to you?”
“You’ve a good mind for what I do. A good stomach for it, as well. I’ve a surgery off Basil Street, in Knightsbridge. Do you know where that is?”
“Aye.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, looking suddenly regimental. “If Mr. Fick can spare you a few nights a week, I want you to visit me there. We can talk about your future.”
“I will,” Titus vowed, something sparking inside of him that his worry for Honoria wouldn’t allow to ignite into full hope.
The three days he sat at her side were both the best and worst of his life.
He told her tales about the horses’ antics as he melted chips of ice into her mouth. He monitored her for spikes of fever and kept her cool with damp cloths and linens packed with ice. The doctor even let him dose her with the thymol and look after most of her necessities when the maids took a turn for the worse.
He begged her to live.
All the while, he crooned the Irish tune his father used to sing to his mother on the nights when they drank a bit too much ale and danced a reel like young lovers, across their dingy old floor.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair,
Her lips are like some roses fair,
She’s the sweetest smile and the gentlest hands,
I love the ground whereon she stands.
He barely ateor slept until the fourth night, after she’d swallowed several spoonsful of beef bone broth, the deep sounds of her easier breaths lulling him to nap in the chair by her bed. Alcott had roused him with the good news that her fever had broken, and had then ordered him to wash and change clothing and sleep in the guest room nearby.
A commotion woke him thirteen hours later. Without thinking, Titus lurched out of bed and scrambled down the hall. Skidding to a halt, he narrowly avoided crashing into the Baron’s back.
Every soul in the Goode family gathered around Honoria’s bed, blocking her from view. Prudence, Felicity, and Mercy all chattered at the same time, and it was the happy sound of their cadence that told him he had nothing to fear.
Titus squelched a spurt of possession, stopping just short of shoving in and around them to see what was going on. This moment didn’t belong to them, it belonged to him.
Shebelonged to him.
“Young Mr. Conleith, there you are.” Doctor Alcott, a tall man, stood at the head of the bed next to his patient, who was still blocked from Titus’s view. “Miss Goode, you and your family owe this young lad a debt of gratitude. It is largely due to his tireless efforts that you survived.”
They all turned to look at him, clearing the visual pathway to her.
