Barbara Metzger Read Online Free Page B

spirits. So did his horse. The horse, incidentally, having frightened off the gardener and Jed Groom, seemed about to stomp the jug-bitten soldier to death, nuzzling at his pockets, while Delia gave a fair imitation of Lot’s wife. She managed to rouse herself from her horrified paralysis enough to shove the horse away from the still-lying sot, which cost her the ugly mobcap, and a few long red hairs with it.
    Rubbing her head, Delia watched the horse prance off with his booty. That was George’s mount, all right, the devil’s own namesake, that had taken them ages to tame after rescuing him from the circus. The only good thing about George going off to war was that he’d taken the troublesome trooper with him. Now Diablo was back, with a drunk on his back.
    Well, neither horse nor high-seas-over soldier was staying. Delia reached for the bucket her newest servant held. If Dover’s pail contained water, fine. If slops, toobad for the big, handsome fellow and his clean uniform. She was about to toss the contents over the unconscious officer when she noticed his arm shaking. She also took time to note the high color in his cheeks and the dampness of the hair plastered to his forehead.
    She gingerly reached a finger to touch the stranger’s face, but swiftly drew her hand away. “Confound it, the man is sick, not inebriated,” she told her waiting subordinates. “He is burning with fever. The man wasn’t pot-valiant when he’d made his offer; he was delirious.”
    The boy backed away, but Mindle bent over, his joints creaking, to see for himself. “Dangerously ill, I would say. What shall we do with him, Miss Delia?”
    “Heavens, I have no idea.”
    “Well, you cannot bring him in here, Dilly,” Aunt Eliza called from the doorway, where she was shredding her handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes. “Heaven knows we have enough sickness and woe. And we could all come down with whatever infection he carries. What would we do then?”
    “But we cannot simply leave him here either, Aunt. He quite ruins the scenery, don’t you think?” she jested, trying to think. “I suppose we can haul him onto a wagon and drive him to the village.”
    “I doubt they’d take such a sick one at the inn,” Mindle said. The old man was still bent over, searching through the stranger’s pockets for his identification. He held up a heavy purse. “Despite his blunt.”
    “No, and he would not get much care there, if Molly Whitaker did deign to give him a bed,” Delia agreed.
    Aunt Eliza sniffed. “Molly Whitaker would not give clean sheets to the bishop. But the vicar could take him in, or the apothecary.”
    The soldier groaned and, without thinking, Delia knelt to put her hand under his head, to cushion it from the ground while they decided what to do. She wiped his forehead with her handkerchief, and sent Dover to fill his bucket with clean water.
    “Dilly, keep away from him!” Aunt Eliza shrieked. “He is diseased!” She held her handkerchief over her mouth and nose.
    From another pocket, Mindle handed Delia a small brown-paper packet of medicinal powders marked “Fever” on the label. Delia sniffed at it. “I suppose this means he has some recurring illness, not a contagion. Nanny might know what the stuff is and how to give it to him. Or else Mags will.” Mags was the local herb woman and midwife, who was already calling at Faircroft House on a daily basis.
    “Then send him to Mags’s place. She can care for him.”
    “In her one-room thatched cottage, with drying plants hanging everywhere?”
    “That makes no never mind,” Aunt Eliza declared, back to wringing her handkerchief between twitching fingers. “He cannot come in here! For all we know he is a deserter, a ruffian who will murder us all in our beds.”
    Mindle handed her a calling card from a silver case.
    “No, Aunt,” Delia said after reading the expensive vellum card, “our caller appears to be an officer. A major, not a marauder. And a