Free The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati

sense,” Aunt Quinlan said finally. “Proper nourishment and rest and fresh air at a very high altitude. Do you think it might do Cap some good?”
    Sophie raised a shoulder and let it drop. “It’s possible. Even likely, if these figures are accurate. But the real question is, could he be persuaded to go so far?” Her calm was countered by a twitch at the corner of her mouth that she could not control, the perfect demonstration of why medical professionals weren’t supposed to treat family members. In fact, she knew that if Anna were here, she would insist that they hand the whole business over to another physician.
    Purposefully, she had excluded Anna, and on Aunt Quinlan’s face she could see that this fact had not escaped her.
    “You can’t take this proposal to him.”
    Sophie swallowed a grimace. “You know I can’t. I can’t even write to him about it; he doesn’t read my letters.”
    “Anna?”
    Sophie turned her face away. “She would disapprove. She wouldn’t want him to travel so far.”
    Her aunt might have challenged this assumption, but she seemed satisfied to let it stand for the moment. Instead she said, “It is true that Cap couldn’t make this journey alone. Someone will have to go with him. I can see that you’ve already sorted this through in your mind. Who are you thinking?”
    “I don’t know,” Sophie said, frustration creeping into her voice. “I find I can’t think clearly about this.” An understatement of the first order.
    “But you think he should go.”
    Sophie took a deep breath. “I do. I can’t explain exactly why, but it feels to me like a chance worth taking.”
    “You are so much like your grandmother,” Aunt Quinlan said after a while. “Medicine was more than science to her.”
    “What do you mean by that?” Sophie asked, her temper welling up, something that happened so rarely that Aunt Quinlan was looking at her with both alarm and concern. But now she must go on. “Am I less of a physician than Anna, or is she less than I am?”
    Aunt Quinlan did not hesitate. “It is not a criticism, but an observation. Anna is in the first line a scientist.” And then: “I see I have upset you.”
    “Anna is an excellent physician,” Sophie said, her voice catching.
    “She is an excellent surgeon.”
    Sophie folded the letter and slid it back into her pocket, her hands shaking a little.
    “You think I am being unkind, or disloyal, or both,” Aunt Quinlan said finally. “But that’s not the case. I am not finding fault in Anna; I am pointing out to you that in a case like this, you have an advantage that she does not. You understand it in the bone, you know it with a part of your mind that you deny because it frightens you.”
    She raised a hand to stop Sophie’s protest. “When you say that Cap should go to Switzerland but you can’t put words to the why of it, I understand what you are trying to say. And I know that you require help. That I can provide.”
    It was what Sophie wanted to hear, but it still brought her up short to hear it stated so plainly.
    “He will resist.”
    Aunt Quinlan gave her one of her sweetest, most disturbing smiles. “I have lived a long time,” she said. “And I have come up against walls far higher than the one Cap’s built. He’ll listen to me. He surely will.”
    •   •   •
    S OMETIMES S OPHIE DREAMED about knocking on Cap’s door. In these dreams that simple gesture caused the door to swing open, revealing rooms that had been emptied of every familiar and beloved thing, a shell as clean and cold and impersonal as an operating theater. In her dream she went from room to room desperate for some sign of him, any sign at all, and then woke, bereft.
    She had loved him for as long as she could remember, but she had refused every marriage proposal for reasons she had explained, again and again, in great detail. Sometimes she felt she might give in and accept him, because she could not deny to herself that she