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She set the book gently back onto the table and licked the pad of her finger before leafing through the pages of her father’s herbal. The scent of old paper and dried leaves wafted up, a comforting perfume. With her valise perched beside her on the table, she flipped to the section marked with a ribbon.

Page 128. Oak.

“The same is singularly good in pestilential and hot burning fevers, for it resists the force of the infection and allays the heat. It cools the heat of the liver, breaking the stone in the kidneys, and stays women’s courses …”

She reached into the valise and drew out a small stoppered glass vial containing finely ground oak bark, her father’s labeling still intact.

She continued scanning.

My Lady’s Thistle.

“The seed and distilled water is held powerful to all the purposes aforesaid, and besides, it is often applied both outwardly with cloths or sponges to the region of the liver, to cool the distemper thereof, and to the region of the heart, against swoonings and the passions of it.”

In the margin, her father had written, “Excellent as compress. Particularly effective when combined with oak bark to cool fever rooted in the liver.”

Audrey drew the second vial and placed it beside the oak. The habit of assembling ingredients with methodical precision steadied her. It was as though her father’s voice was guiding her hand.

By the time Rose returned with the boiling water, Audrey had devised a complete treatment plan for the hours ahead. Tea for ingestion, compresses for cooling, cloths for physical regulation. She worked quickly, combining the powdered ingredients in the teapot. The resulting brew smelled earthy and faintly acrid. She poured out a cup, bringing it to her lips to taste.

The bitterness was immediate—dry, grassy, and lingering. Her nose wrinkled.

“Hmph. A spoonful of honey would not go amiss.”

After mixing in a little of the honey she had earlier applied to his wound, she returned to Julius’s bedside.

He was still conscious, though barely. She coaxed him upright, sliding an arm behind his shoulders and pressing the cup to his lips. “Drink this while you can,” she said firmly. “It will bring your fever down.”

He obeyed, though sluggishly. She noted the tremble in his hand as he tried to grip the cup.

If he slipped into a deeper fevered sleep, there would be no more swallowing. Then she would rely solely on compresses, placing them over the liver and the back of the neck, alternating with the cool cloths she had requested. It would be a long night.

And it was the first she would endure alone.

Her father had always stood beside her when treating patients in the past, correcting, supporting, guiding. But now it was her hands alone. Still, his knowledge was in her blood, and his voice in her mind. He had trained her for this.

She must not falter. There was no physician in London she would trust to treat Julius, not with their mania for bloodletting and leeches. Her father had railed against it. “It is not medicine to bleed a man dry who is already weakened. It is murder disguised in a white cravat,” he had said once. Audrey could hear him now.

And Lord Stirling had trusted her father with his health for over three decades. In his absence, Audrey believed she was doing exactly what the earl would have wished for his heir.

Still, the weight of it pressed against her chest—a silent, invisible mantle heavy as lead. Yet there was no turning back. Julius’s life depended on her.

Julius was hot. Blisteringly so. A searing heat pulsed through his limbs, licking at his heels like the flames of damnation. The very air scorched his lungs, and the roar of the fire thundered in his ears, deafening and relentless. If it did not relent, he would be consumed, reduced to ash. He must be in hell.

It was retribution. Just punishment for the sins he could not undo.

Abbott, poor devil, forced to wed under the lash of scandal, while Julius had done naught but bear witness. A friend betrayed by silence.

The little baroness, barely out of the schoolroom, her voice soft as spring rain, choked by bruises that ringed her throat like a noose. He had failed her too.

Brendan, dragged to Bow Street, the noose figuratively at his neck, and Julius had stood idle, unable to stop it.

Coward.

He had not even gone after his mother when she fled to Paris, simply because he could not bear to face the horror of that journey back across the Channel. The reek of salt and bilge, the endless tossing of the ship. Even now, he could feel the sickening roll beneath his feet. That was strange. Hell should not be drenched in seawater.

And yet the fiery air was thick with the briny sting of the English Channel, of storm-drenched sails snapping taut in a gale. The dissonance was nauseating.

Then … light.