Chapter 5: If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.

It’s been coming on for weeks now.

Aidan’s known this, of course, and has been quietly dreading it all the while.

This being said, there hasn’t been much he can do about it. Physical therapy is a natural part of the healing process, and his body has seen far better days. He doesn’t even fear the therapy as much as he fears the invasive questions that will no doubt accompany it.

But begging Aures has been futile. She is correct in her judgement that Dr Bolton is better suited to treat him. Aidan has just been very…thoughtful about the man since their midnight stroll.

‘Thoughtful’ to mean he has been doing quite a bit of thinking indeed. Mainly because not even Blake ever called him beautiful. Well, it’s not exactly like the good doctor has, either. Or has he?

He’d insisted Aidan is as well when Aidan had called his sister beautiful, but even then the qualifier had been more of a suggestion. Aidan has no clue if that’d been what Edmund had intended to say. Yet, he’d still turned that selfsame qualifier on Aidan – and he hadn’t taken it back. Hadn’t even sounded embarrassed.

Truthfully, this is just a little too much emotion for him to deal with sober, or muddled up as he is by the medication his family insists he take. Poison, in his opinion, but if it means a roof over his head and the distant possibility of independence, he’ll take it.

Hopefully, it doesn’t kill him first.

The knock at his door is quiet, but rings out in the hollowness of his room.

He sits up straight as he can and calls for the knocker to enter.

Not his mother or Aures, or any buffer to give him time enough to school himself into something akin to human.

Dr Bolton enters with a warm smile and a gentle glint in the pale green of his eyes.

“And how’s my patient doing this morning?” he asks in that jovial way of his.

“Tired,” Aidan replies, attempting a smile.

Truthfully, it’s probably more of a grimace.

“To be expected,” the good doctor answers, coming to kneel at Aidan’s bedside. “Your dreams of late have been very active. I’m surprised you’re not sleeping off whatever nightmare took you last night.”

“I was trying to fill my dreams with something else,” Aidan says, glancing at the book at his bedside.

The doctor gives it a look over as well, while preparing his medical instruments. With a small smile, he slips the prongs of his stethoscope into his ears.

“Astronomy? You have an interest in our physical universe?” he asks, bringing the scope up to press against Aidan’s chest.

“Bit of an escapist,” Aidan admits. “Anywhere that isn’t mundane is my destination, whether physical or otherwise.”

The scope is cold, but he spends most of his time feeling cold these days.

The medication makes it so that his body withers and becomes weak, no longer able to warm itself or resist the urge to shiver and hide amongst the bedclothes.

“Colour me curious!” Dr Bolton expresses. “Aures mentioned you’d come from school, but you don’t seem a stuffy Oxford lad to me. Cambridge? University College London?”

Without hesitation, while looking him squarely in the eye, Aidan responds, “The Royal School for Ballet.”

Which leads him to the first – well, perhaps second – genuine warmth he’s felt in weeks, as Edmund Bolton, missing not a single beat, nods and says, “You absolutely have the frame for it! As a surgeon myself, I’ve always admired the precision of ballet. The discipline! As an art form, it comes second only to music for me.”

Aidan can’t help it: a bright smile breaks out across his face. “I assume you were trained at St Bartholomew’s? Did you go see many live performances during your time in the city?”

Edmund smiles just as brightly. “I did! None of my classmates much fancied the theatre; all preferring to unwind at the pub. But I would go as often as I could. Never missed a performance of Beethoven. Not one! Remarkable composer.”

“Even more remarkable man,” Aidan agrees.

“So true!” Dr Bolton puts away his stethoscope before continuing. “Your heartbeat seems mildly erratic. I’ve been holding out hope it would stabilise, now that you’re in a calmer environment, but it’s as jittery and weak as ever. Tell me, do you often feel faint and short of breath?”

Taking a reflexive deep breath, then, Aidan says, “All the time, these days.”

The doctor nods as though he expected as much. “Unfortunately, that delays our physical therapy plans. I can’t push you if it might further damage your heart. You’ll need much, much more rest.”

Schooling his features into impassivity, Aidan tucks himself back into bed.

He knows no amount of rest is ever going to make him healthy again. As long as he’s on these blasted pills, he’s simply going to continue to wither away to nothing. The doctor would be far better suited to give up on treatment now, and save himself from the futility of it all.

He winces internally at how much he sounds like Aures just then.

“Well, I’m not due to help with farm work for another two hours. Shall I read to you from your book until you sleep?” the doctor offers.

Aidan used to believe kindness to be transactional. If found in people with nothing to gain from it, it is a sign of a weak character. But there is nothing weak about Edmund Bolton. He is merely kind because it is his nature. He is true warmth in places a fire or even sunlight could never reach.

How someone like him could have willingly gone to war, even as a doctor, is something Aidan is sure even the brightest minds could never fathom.

“That would be most appreciated,” Aidan says, quietly.

Getting Aidan comfortable amongst the frankly ridiculous number of pillows Aures has carted in here, Edmund brings the covers up to just under his chin. Satisfied that his patient is well tended to, Dr Bolton takes out the fossilised imprint Aidan uses to mark his place in the textbook and begins to read aloud about binary star systems.