Ruling with a New Frame novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Yellow Aunt

The dining room exploded into noise.

Chairs scraped back, the cardigan sisters shrieked, and the uncle with the hearing aid shouted, "Somebody call someone!"

"Nobody calls anyone," said Marguerite, rising. "Edmund, carry your aunt to the sofa."

"The house physician will be here within the hour."

I was already on the floor beside the old woman.

I loosened her shawl and laid two fingers on her neck.

Her pulse was fast and thin, and her skin burned.

A stone had slid into the duct that drains the liver, and the bile behind it had gone bad.

If she waited an hour for a man who gave cough syrup for pneumonia, she would be dead by morning.

"Felix!" I said.

He was already standing, because he never missed an order.

"The telephone. Dial nine, one, one. Say an eighty-two-year-old woman has a fever, a blocked bile duct and a pulse over a hundred and twenty."

"A what?"

"A blocked bile duct. Say it exactly."

Felix ran.

Marguerite crossed the floor in three strides and seized my arm.

"You will not."

"Let go of me," I said.

I said it in the voice from the throne room, flat and quiet, and every person at that table heard it.

The grip loosened by one finger.

Behind her, the uncle with the hearing aid slapped his palm on the table.

"Marguerite, take your hand off that child," he said.

"If she dies on your carpet because of your house rules, I'll say so at the dinner."

A cousin pulled out a phone.

"I'm calling, too," she said.

Marguerite stood very straight in the middle of the room.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Ruling with a New Frame from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.