Free The Blessed by Lisa T. Bergren

holding boiling water that would be used to clean the mansion from top to bottom . . . and warm the lord’s bath.
    Daria had done a cursory exam and then demanded he bathe, that the linens atop his bed, his blankets, all would be clean before she proceeded. He also accepted a bit of bread and cheese, the first meal he had taken in some time, by the look of him. Daria took his acceptance of her demands as the tiny glimmer of hope she had been praying for. If he believed God could heal him, even in this late hour, it would be done. God had revealed his plan to heal him, had he not? Or was it as the lord had said, the final step to usher him into heaven and ultimate healing there?
    It mattered little. In heaven, Lord Devenue would know release, freedom, total peace. If that was how the Lord wished to heal him, she could abide by it. But as she glanced at the lovely countess’s face, the glimmer of hope in her wide blue eyes, Daria fervently hoped for a miracle here on earth.
    â€œThey call him Devil Devenue,” Anette said, staring outward and swallowing hard. “He was banished from court three years past, the other nobles fearing that somehow the cancer might be a contagion, a curse upon us all. But I believe it was mostly a desire to keep his disfigurement out of courts that preferred beauty.”
    â€œYou left him as well?” Daria asked softly. There was no accusation in her voice.
    â€œHe banished me. Refused to see me. I could do nothing but leave.”
    â€œAnd yet you married no other in that time.”
    â€œNay.”
    â€œYou love him.”
    â€œAlways. And forever. If you could’ve known him before, Daria . . . as he once was . . . He was a different man then. The cancer changed him. He was beset by rage. A fury like I had never seen before. It frightened me.”
    Daria nodded and wrapped an arm around the countess. “I understand. Let us see if God means to yet deliver him, here on earth. The cancer has moved in his head and affects him severely. I have seen it before. People change their ways, their manner of speech, even the way they see the world when they become so riddled with disease.”
    â€œWill he . . . if you heal him . . . What I mean to say . . .”
    â€œWill he ever look as he once did?”
    The countess nodded eagerly, hope alive in her eyes. “He was handsome, once.”
    â€œI know not. The cancer, it has moved bone, muscle, deformed in ways I’ve never seen before. Can you love him, even if he looks as he does?”
    â€œIf he loved me. If he were kind again. If we could walk, hand in hand, along the river . . .” Her eyes searched the far hills of the Gardon. “Mayhap it could be rediscovered.” She looked to Daria, begging her to understand. “So much has transpired . . . I . . .”
    â€œPay it no further heed, Anette. Let us see where God leads us all, yes?”
    The countess, eyes filled with mixed emotions of hope and confusion and fear and love, turned away, chin in hand. Daria watched her for a moment. Armand, with his love of the court and the drama that unfolded within it, would either reject such a notion out of hand or embrace it, relishing the sense of repulsion and the challenges that would present themselves in defending his brother-in-law. Daria hoped it would not come to that. And yet the lord’s monstrous deformities . . . never had she seen anything like it.
    Tessa took her hand. “Remember Old Woman Parmo, m’lady,” she said, staring intently up at her mistress.
    Daria smiled, remembering the old woman’s legs, damaged from decades of rheumatism, becoming straight. Bones in her fingers doing the same. A back, long curved into the arch of a snail, once again in alignment. Muscles lengthening beneath her fingers to match. God had done it. God had done his miraculous work through her there, in Siena. He could do it again, here.
    She leaned down and kissed the child on the