Why is she bleeding?
I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything.
The crimson against the white sheets.
“Love lies bleeding,” he thought, strangely, bizarrely, before he fell to his knees and clutched his head in both his hands, stripped of everything but the innermost core of who he was.
“What is happening to her?” He choked out.
Mrs Cooper, who had started wrapping his wife in a clean sheet, said, “It could be nothing, merely her monthly courses.”
“Or?”
The married couple looked at each other again, and Talbot hated them both in that moment. The husband nodded.
“Or she might be losing a child,” Mrs. Cooper replied.
“Oh, no,” Mary gasped.
Colin felt the ground under his feet sway.A child.
“How can we know for certain?” he managed to ask, the words in his mouth feeling thick and unfamiliar.
“We cannot,” Dr. Cooper told him. “When it’s early in the pregnancy, we have almost no way of knowing. If she were awake, I’d start by asking her about the last time she saw her monthly bleeding. The repeated absence of a woman’s courses is what usually serves as the most reliable indicator that she might be with child.”
Colin frantically tried remembering the last time his wife had informed him of her menses, but couldn’t. He glanced at Mary, and she shook her head helplessly.
He heard the door open and voices around him discussing where to move his wife and how. Stevenson was also there.
“Put her in my room,” Colin said, not lifting his head to look up at anyone.
He was still on his knees, and when they all left, he reached for the bloody sheet Mary and Mrs. Cooper had discarded on the floor.
After staring at it for a while, he clutched it to his chest and, for the first time since his first night at Eton, Duke Colin Talbot let himself cry.
*
Colin spent the night in a chair next to the bed he’d had Robert make for him and Elizabeth because he wanted them to sleep in a bed untouched by others, while Mrs. and Doctor Cooper came in and out of the room every two hours to check on her.
When he returned from his dressing room the next morning, he found the Doctor’s wife spooning some liquid into Elizabeth’s mouth.
“What are you giving her?” he barked at Mrs. Cooper, who remained unperturbed by his behaviour, as if he were merely one man in the long line of grief-crazed husbands she dealt with daily.
Colin found that attitude surprisingly comforting.
“Willow bark tea. It will help with her fever.”
”Is there anything else you can do?”
“Doctor Cooper will perform a cupping later.”
“Hasn’t she lost enough blood already?” Colin felt himself growing agitated again.
“Cupping extracts dirty, unhealthy blood from the body; it’s not the same thing,” Mrs Cooper explained patiently, as one would to a child.
“Very well. I’ll go cancel my appointments for the week. Warn the doctor not to start without me.”
As he flung the door of his room open into the hallway, his cook, Mrs. Clark, took a step back from where she’d clearly been eavesdropping. She was wringing her apron in her hands as she curtsied to him.
