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She looked up as St John stood beside her with an unusual, soft expression on his face that made her catch her breath.

He nodded. “He would, no doubt, appreciate it if you were there, to soothe him when he awakes. He might feel sick and be in pain.”

“I did not have the opportunity to ask earlier, but how are you feeling?” She regarded him closely. He was still pale and there were dark shadows under his eyes. “I did not think you would recover that quickly for you appeared to be in much pain.”

“Oh, it still throbs, this head of mine, but the pain is a fraction of what it was and it is bearable now.” There was a beat of a pause. “You helped me greatly in overcoming it, and for that I owe you my gratitude.”

Anna felt a heat sweep through her. “It was nothing.”

“You appear to have a healing hand yourself.”

Anna tilted her head, but before she could ask what he meant, he smiled. “You are a truly remarkable woman, Miss Hilversham.” His eyes were warm.

“Not at all.” She adjusted the boy’s head on her lap. “I believe the person who is truly remarkable is you.”

He waved her comment away as if embarrassed.

For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of the soft breathing of the boy in the room.

Chapter 12

Anna ended up spending the entire afternoon in St John’s examination room, with the sleeping boy on her lap. She watched as he tended to his patients, how he listened patiently to their complaints, how he found a kind word for each of them, whether it was a worried mother with her ailing child, a labourer with a broken ankle, or a woman with an abscess. He then treated each patient swiftly and efficiently, bandaged them and mixed together medicine for them to take with them.

He never charged them a penny.

Willis was right, Anna thought, this man was a saint.

He was not only compassionate and kind to those far, far beneath him in status, but he treated them with respect. His knowledge of medicine and surgery must be vast, and he immediately knew the remedy to each of their ailments.

Her admiration for him grew. How that man had developed a reputation as a madman was a mystery to her.

Maybe it was because he was an earl, she mused, as her hand played with the strands of the boy’s hair. He wouldn’t be considered a gentleman by the other members of his class. The aristocratic class was ruled by strict codes of etiquette, and however unfair it was, the workings of a surgeon were considered to be ungentlemanly. They would shun him because he laboured with his hands, cutting and stitching their patients, as opposed to the physicians who merely asked questions and examined their patients’ pulses. St John dealt with blood and gore. He’d been an army surgeon, he said. That would explain it.

The boy stirred beneath her touch and whimpered.

St John was with them in an instant and lifted the boy out of her lap. He made a few noises and vomited into a bucket that St John held ready.

“It’s good he gets the laudanum out of his system,” he said, matter-of-factly. Marks entered the room and St John gave instructions to put the drowsy boy into one of the servants’ quarters.

“Thank you, Miss Hilversham. Mrs Marks will take over from here.”

“Mrs Marks?” Anna’s eyes flitted over to Marks, who carefully lifted the boy into his arms.

“She is Marks’s wife and the cook,” St John explained.

Anna hadn’t known that he was married.

“Will the boy be all right?”

St John nodded. “He will have a difficult night as the laudanum leaves his body and sensations set back in. But this one is a fighter, and he will weather through it. I will check on him again later and change the bandage. The bigger concern is that he has escaped from the mills and is likely missed there. If he returns, they will punish him and put him back to the spinning wheel, regardless of his injury.”

“How barbaric!” Anna’s face darkened.

“It is how things are in the mills, it’s no secret. They take children like Jem from the workhouse and put them to work in the mills as indentured servants. Jem was lucky that he found his way to me. If he had gone to some village quack, he might very well have not only lost his fingers, but even died of the infection.”

Anna looked at him with pleading eyes. “What can be done about Jem now? Knowing all this, surely, you won’t send him back to the mills?”

“The boy has to heal first. Mrs Marks is a kindly soul and will care for him in the meantime. I will ask around on the estate to see where the boy can be lodged afterwards. Maybe there is some childless tenant farmer who would be grateful to take in a boy as his own.”