The Dying Duke's One-Year Wife Is a Nurse novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lancet
Rosalind wakes on the Duke's carpet mid-signing, knocks the physician's lancet away, props the dying Duke upright, and signs a one-year marriage on her own terms.
The last thing Natsuki Hoshino remembered was the floor of the emergency ward, cold under her cheek.
She had been walking from the medicine room to bay four, and then she had not been walking.
Now the floor was a thick wool carpet, and a man was wheezing somewhere above her.
She knew that wheeze.
She had heard it a thousand times, and she opened her eyes already counting.
She lay on her back in a cream silk gown with a corset around her ribs.
Her heart was pounding, and she could not take a full breath.
"She's fainted again," said a man's voice, bored. "The girl is no use to anyone. Take her out."
"Leave her," said a second voice, thin and dry and very tired. "She's signing."
Natsuki sat up too fast, and the room tilted.
It was a big bedchamber with dark paneling, a canopied bed, and a fire that was far too hot.
On the bed, flat on his back, lay the thinnest man she had ever seen.
His black hair was stuck to his forehead, and his lips were the color of a bruise.
His chest heaved with each breath, and a wet crackle came out of it.
His ankles under the blanket were swollen.
Beside the bed stood a stout man in a black coat, and in his hand was a silver lancet.
On the floor sat a copper basin.
On a small table by the window lay a long paper with a pen beside it, and a name half written at the bottom.
Rosalind Ave
It was her hand, and it was not her hand.
Then the memories came, and they were not all hers.
She would have to be Rosalind now, because that was the name on the paper.
A girl called Rosalind Averill, a baron's daughter, twenty-four years old, with a father drowning in debt.
A paper that said one year, and twenty thousand crowns.
And under it all, a story.
Natsuki had read it on night shifts, propped against the break room wall with her phone and a cold coffee.
The Duke Who Would Not See Spring.
The man on the bed was Lysander Ardmoor, Duke of Ardmoor, twenty-nine years old.
Everyone in the first forty chapters said the same thing about him.
He was dying, and he would be dead by next spring.
"Madam," said the stout man in black, "you will have to wait outside while I finish."
He lifted the Duke's arm and turned it over.
The inside of the elbow was a mess of old white scars and one fresh red line, and she counted forty of them before he set the blade.
"Stop," said Rosalind.
Her voice came out small and hoarse in a stranger's throat.
The man didn't look up. "Your Grace's bleeding is Tuesday and Friday. It has been for two years."
"Stop it now."
She was across the carpet before she knew she had stood, and her knees nearly folded.
She grabbed the stout man's wrist with both hands and wrenched it sideways.
The lancet flew out of his fingers and rang across the floorboards.
"Madam!"
"He can't breathe," she said. "You're laying him flat, and his lungs are full, and you're taking out the blood he needs to carry what air he gets."
"I am a physician of the royal college..."
"Then you know a drowning man sits up."
She didn't wait for his answer.
She dragged the pillows off the other side of the bed, three, four, five, and shoved them behind the Duke's back.
"Help me lift him," she said to the room.
Nobody moved.
So she slid her arms under his shoulders herself and hauled.
He weighed almost nothing.
That frightened her more than the blue lips.
He came up against the pillows with a gasp, and she bunched another one under his knees to take the weight off his swollen legs.
His breath hitched, and then it stretched.
It was still ugly, but it was a breath.
She took his wrist in her fingers without thinking.
Two fingers on the thin skin, her eyes on the carved clock above the fire, her lips moving.
It was fast and uneven, a hundred and ten and skipping.
His hand turned under hers, and long cold fingers closed around her own.
She looked up.
He was looking straight at her.
His eyes were grey, and the skin under them was dark as a thumbprint.
They were very awake.
"Duchess," he said, in a voice like paper. "You're counting."
"Quiet," she said. "I need your chest."
She pulled the collar of his nightshirt open to his breastbone, and her palm pressed flat over the hard cage of his ribs.
His skin was cold, and his heart slammed against her hand.
She bent and laid her ear against him.
She heard the sound she had been afraid of: a wet, rushing whoosh where a clean beat should be, and a crackle under it.
It was a damaged heart, and it was drowning him.
His chest rose and fell under her cheek, and his free hand lifted, hesitated, and settled on her hair.
"Is it bad?" he asked quietly.
"It's not good." She lifted her head. "But it's not what's killing you tonight."
"No?"
"The bleeding is."
The stout man made a sound of outrage.
"Get out," said Rosalind.
"I serve the Duke's family, madam, and Lord Corbin will..."
"The Duke's wife is speaking."
The word came out of her mouth before she had decided on it.
She turned to the table, snatched up the pen and wrote under the half name in a crisp slanting hand.
She finished the name in one stroke: Averill.
Then she wrote a line of her own in the margin of the contract.
The Duchess has authority over the household, the sickroom first.
She signed it.
"If the Duke wishes," she added, and looked at him.
The man on the pillows stared at her for a long moment.
Then something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile.
"Give me the pen," said the Duke of Ardmoor.
He signed with a hand that shook, and under his name he wrote:
Agreed.
The stout man gathered his bag, white with rage.
"He will be dead by morning," he said from the door. "Sit him up all you like. You'll have killed him, madam, and I'll say so to the King."
The door shut behind him.
The fire popped.
A grip closed around her wrist, cold and surprisingly strong.
"Duchess," said the Duke softly. "The girl who signed the first page could not look at me."
Her mouth went dry.
"I can look at you," said Rosalind.
"Yes." His grey eyes did not leave her face. "I noticed."
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