Free Cottage by the Sea by Ciji Ware Page A

the time Mrs. Quiller bustled in with a breakfast tray, Blythe also faced another problem: she had a raging sore throat. Her bones had begun to ache, and the crisp linen sheets brushing against her body felt as if they might peel off her skin.
       "All right if I be puttin' yer tea on the bedside cabinet?" the housekeeper inquired.
       Blythe could only produce a strangled croaking sound when she attempted to reply, "Fine… thank you."
       "Oh, dearie dear," Mrs. Quiller clucked. She carefully set the tray down and immediately marched over to the windows. With the hand of a professional she flung back the heavy drapes that had shut out the light in Blythe's large, but rather threadbare, guest quarters. "Let's have a look at you."
       Blythe winced as bright sunshine flooded the room. The older woman approached the side of the bed and scrutinized her houseguest's flushed face.
       "We'll be callin' the doctor straightaway," she announced in a firm manner that brooked no dissent and recalled for Blythe Lucinda Barton's fierce, motherly ministrations whenever someone on the ranch was shown to be genuinely ill. However, malingerers at the Double Bar B were another matter, she remembered ruefully.
       "No! Please…" Blythe rasped, and then was consumed by a fit of coughing. Her fervent wish was simply to crawl back to Painter's Cottage and disappear under the goose-down duvet—forever, if possible. However, when she struggled to sit upright, she soon flopped back onto her pillow and cried weakly, "Ooh…" She suspected that during her fitful night's sleep some raging bull had kicked her in the head.
       "You poor dear," Mrs. Quiller sympathized, helping Blythe to find a comfortable position among the piles of feather pillows. "Just you be tryin' to get some rest and I'll ring Dr. Vickery."
    ***
    Blythe retained no clear memory of the ensuing twenty-four hours, other than recollecting that a stranger with bushy eyebrows in his early fifties who she assumed was a medical doctor injected her in the bottom with some drug. Following that she had a dim recollection that Mrs. Quiller handed her antibiotics every six hours, around the clock.
       By the second day of her massive indisposition, Blythe's fever broke, but her throat still felt like a fìred-up barbecue pit. She found herself, when not giving in to drugged sleep, unable to refrain from weeping for more than twenty minutes at a time.
        Cowboy up! some voice whispered in the back of her mind.
       "I can't!" she wailed, and buried her head beneath a pile of pillows so no one could hear her sobs. The Barton family motto had lost its power to conquer the despair that literally held her by the throat.
       The lanky, balding Dr. Simon Vickery, who had come to see her the first day of her illness, reappeared one morning clad in tweeds appropriate for playing a round of golf, as he explained cheerfully. He peered down her gullet and directed Mrs. Quiller to continue her duties as impromptu nurse and carry on with the medical regimen of sleep, soup, and prescription medications.
       Later that evening Blythe heard the sound of the dumbwaiter creaking to a halt down the hall from her bedroom door. She made a lunge for the box of tissues perched on the nightstand beside her bed. She barely had time to wipe her eyes before the housekeeper opened the door to deliver her dinner tray. However, Blythe assumed that the balled-up tissues already littering her bedspread gave some clue to her mental state.
       "Feelin' any bit better, are we?" The housekeeper smiled encouragingly as her charge struggled to sit up so that the wicker bed tray would fit across her knees. This night's bill of fare featured Mrs. Q's interpretation of minestrone, delicately laced with fresh vegetables from the castle's own kitchen garden.
       On Blythe's fourth day as a recovering invalid, Mrs. Quiller disclosed that she and her husband, John, the undergardener, were indeed