Why Kings Confess

Chapter 24

“The problem, my lady, is that your humors are out of balance.”

Richard Croft, the most distinguished and respected accoucheur in Britain, stood with his back to the fire, his chin sunk deep into the folds of his snowy white cravat. In his early fifties, he was a slight man with wisps of fading pale hair that fell from a slightly receding hairline. Like his face, his nose was long, his chin pronounced, his lips thin and drawn, as if he were constantly tightening and sucking them in disapproval.

Hero sat in a nearby chair, her hands in her lap, her maid standing behind her. “I feel fine,” she said.

“Ah.” Croft tsked and shook his head with a deprecating smile that filled Hero with an undignified urge to box his ears. “You may feel fine, but unfortunately that does not mean that all is as it should be. What did you eat yesterday?”

Hero told him.

Croft fluttered his soft white hands in horror. “But that is far too much! You must take only a cup of tea for breakfast, and not before ten. Then, at two, you may have a bite of cold meat or some fruit-but not both. Your dinner must be equally sparse-a thin soup, perhaps, or some fowl with a small serving of well-cooked vegetables. Bland, of course.”

“If I reduce myself to the regime you suggest, I shall soon be too weak to walk across the room.”

“But that is precisely the idea, my lady!”

“I was reading an article yesterday written by a Dr. Agostina DeFiore at the University of Padua-”

“A woman?” sputtered Croft. “An Italian woman?”

“-who argues that while a woman should take care not to gain too much weight, it is nevertheless important that she continue to consume a varied and adequate amount of healthy foods. To do otherwise not only debilitates the health of the mother, but also puts the child at risk.”

“Utter nonsense, I’m afraid.” He cleared his throat. “I trust you have been taking the purges I prescribed?”

“They don’t agree with me.”

“They are not supposed to agree with you! They are designed to bring your humors back into balance. My lady, I beg of you; you must trust me in this.” He brought up his hands, palms together, as if he were praying. “Your color is too robust, and you have far too much energy. At this point, patients who follow my strictures are pale and languid, as befits a woman about to give birth. I shall have to bleed you again.”

Hero watched in silence as he turned to remove a basin and lancet from his satchel.

“Most severely, I’m afraid,” he said. “Under the circumstances, I suspect that to take any less than two pints would be folly.”

“Two pints?”

“Yes, my lady,” he said, advancing on her with his lips cinched tight and his eyes weary with benign contempt for the weaker sex, with whose folly he struggled daily.

• • •

By the time Sebastian reached Brook Street, a light snow had begun to fall, big, soft, white flakes that fluttered down to stick to the pavement and the iron railing guarding the area steps.

“Bit wet out there, my lord?” asked his majordomo, Morey, as he took Sebastian’s hat, greatcoat, and gloves.

“I suspect we’re in for a good deal more of this before nightfall.” Sebastian’s gaze fell on the modest gentleman’s hat resting on a nearby chair. “I take it Richard Croft is here?”

“Yes, my lord. He-”

The majordomo broke off as a loud rattling clatter sounded from above.

A moment later, a small, slight man came charging down the stairs, the tails of his black coat billowing behind him, his satchel gripped before him in both hands. He had his head down, his lips clamped in an angry line, his prominent chin set mulishly. But at the sight of Sebastian, he drew up, nostrils flaring, his entire frame aquiver with his indignation.

“Lord Devlin,” he said, taking the last step down to the entrance hall and bowing stiffly. “I am pleased to see that you are here, for it affords me the opportunity to tell you that I refuse-yes, refuse! — to act as Lady Devlin’s accoucheur any longer. She is stubborn and opinionated, full of outlandish ideas gleaned from reading an assortment of ridiculous foreign publications. She ignores my advice, refuses my prescriptions, and just now she threw my basin at me when I attempted to insist that she allow me to bleed her.”

“And how, precisely, did you ‘insist’?”

Croft’s thin chest jerked with the agitation of his breathing. “Sometimes with expectant mothers, the emotions run high and a touch of male firmness is required.”

“You’re fortunate she didn’t take the lancet to you.”

Croft’s features darkened with a resurgence of fury. “Indeed, she threatened to do so.” He tugged at the lower hem of his waistcoat, which had become rucked up in his hasty descent of the stairs. “I cannot be held responsible for the outcome of a confinement when the patient refuses to submit herself to my Lowering System. Therefore, I resign my position. Nor can I in all good conscience recommend her as a patient to any of my colleagues. To be frank, under the circumstances, I can’t imagine how you will find anyone competent to agree to attempt to deliver her.”

“Under what ‘circumstances’?” asked Sebastian with deceptive restraint.

The esteemed Richard Croft opened his mouth, then thought better of what he’d been about to say, and closed it.

Sebastian advanced on him. “What the devil are you saying?”

Croft took a step back, his heels clattering against the riser of the first stair.

“What circumstances, damn you?”

The accoucheur swallowed hard. “The child. .”

“Yes?”

He swallowed again. “The child is in the wrong position. By now, it should have shifted, so that the head is down in preparation for entering the birth passage. It has not done so. Instead, it is lying. . crossways.”

Sebastian felt as if someone had reached into his chest to twist his heart and elbow his gut, so that it was a moment before he was able to say, “What can be done?”

Croft shook his head. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“The child may turn itself.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

The accoucheur sidled toward the door. “Some babes which present in a breech position are born successfully.”

“And the mothers?”

“Some mothers survive,” said Croft. “But. .”

“But?”

Croft straightened his spine and met Sebastian’s fierce gaze with a fortitude Sebastian couldn’t help but admire.

“But rarely both.”