Eliza came back. “I won’t be able to hold him off for long,” she said, peering down at Linnet. “He is a doctor. He’s seen the worst of it. He was here all alone with you the first night.”
A tear trickled down Linnet’s cheek. Eliza sat down and put a hand on her arm, not even flinching at the feel. “There, there,” she said. “If a body ever deserved a good cry, you’re the one.”
It went on like that for a week. Piers would push his way into the room, and Eliza would manage to thrust him back out. Sometimes she thought they were actually enjoying it, the two of them. Eliza took to shouting at the earl with relish. And Piers had never hesitated to shout back. They were a pair.
But once or twice, she caught Piers’s face when he looked at her, and she understood that she was hurting him. She did understand that.
“But it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter,” she whispered to herself in the depth of the night, thinking of it. “I can’t—I cannot be a duchess. Never. It’s inconceivable.”
Finally, Piers declared her ready to travel, back to the castle at least. Eliza wanted to put her in a gown, but Linnet said no. She could talk now, albeit in a low voice. “The sheet,” she said hoarsely. “It’s bigger.”
Eliza immediately caught what she was saying. “Your hair’s curling all over,” she said. “So that’s good. It looks like that short haircut some ladies get. It’s à la mode, which means French ladies probably did it first.”
Her hair didn’t matter; she knew it would grow back. Yet even thinking about leaving this room and people staring at her face made Linnet want to vomit. Or faint.
But leave the room she did, wrapped up like a mummy and carried by Mr. Buller, Piers’s coachman.
It wasn’t so terrible leaving the inn . . . but when they got to the castle, Prufrock was there, and the footmen. The duke came down the stairs to greet them, and Linnet actually prayed for a quick death after she saw the kindness in his eyes.
But as death didn’t seem to be offered, she closed her eyes, and pretended, as fervently as she could, that none of this was happening. That she was in London, dancing with Prince Augustus. The prince was smiling down at her with that besotted expression he tended to have around her.
“Of course she’s fine,” Piers’s rough voice said, interrupting her daydream. “She looks like a lobster, and she’s twice as irritable.”
The dance . . . Prince Augustus turned her in a circle and she caught a glimpse of a row of faces ogling them, frankly envious. Her skirts were swirling—
“No, she’s just having a fit of the megrims,” Piers barked. And then, off-handedly, “Someone show Buller the way to her bedchamber.”
With Linnet’s eyes closed, she could hear Eliza tapping up the stairs before them, and the sound of Buller’s heavy breathing.
“I’m sorry if I’m too heavy,” she said. Her voice was no longer rasping.
“Not at all, miss,” Buller said. His voice was kind. All the kindness was mortifying, worse than the moment when the whole ballroom gave her the cut direct. Honestly, she preferred Piers’s irritatability.
A moment later she was in bed. “His lordship said as you should get up today,” Eliza said. “Perhaps Lady Bernaise might join you for tea.”
“No,” Linnet said, firmly. When evening came, she closed her eyes but she couldn’t sleep. Instead she lay in bed, listening to the sounds of the castle, distant clinkings, floors squeaking, the sound of the front door opening and closing.
Over the next few days she ate everything Eliza brought to her, and she obediently walked in circles around the bed to gather strength, but she refused to leave the chamber. Piers had stopped trying to visit her; she had taken to rolling over with a pillow on top of her head the moment he entered, and no matter how he ranted, she didn’t listen.
“I am strong enough to return to London,” she told Eliza one evening. “Will you please inform the duke?”
“I’ll tell him,” Eliza said uneasily. “But what of—”
“I am grateful for the earl’s care of me,” she said steadily. “But I have made up my mind not to marry him. Which is no more than he said to me, before I became ill. I’m not marrying anyone who pities me, Eliza. Never.”
Eliza sighed and left the room.
Chapter Thirty-Four
She wants to leave,” the duke said to Piers.
“Bollocks,” Piers said angrily. “She can’t leave.”
“Her maid says that she is quite strong and sat up for the entire day yesterday.”
“Her skin is still scabbed over, which may well lead to infections. She should be under medical care.”
“Are such infections common?”
Piers hated the fact his father’s eyes were so sympathetic. It was bad enough that he and his mother were gazing at each other like feverish adolescents. He turned away, raking his hand through his hair so the ribbon fell away. “No,” he admitted. “No.”
“Perhaps if you let her go, she will come back to you,” the duke said. “When she is well.”
“She won’t.” Piers took off across the garden in front of the castle, his cane digging savagely into the grass.
His father kept pace with him. “She loves you. Why wouldn’t she come back to you? I came back to you.”
“Oh God, is that the cue for a tender reunion?” Piers said, stopping at the edge of a flower bed.
“Not unless you wish it.”
He stood still, a tacit yes.
The duke took a deep breath. “I know you hate to hear this, but I’m sorry for injuring you, for ruining your life, Piers. I would cut off my own leg, if I could. I would—”
“Killing yourself wouldn’t achieve much,” Piers said. His father’s eyes, oddly enough, were just like his. In his imagination, he always saw them with pupils contracted and the wild gleam of opium intoxication.
But those were childhood memories. What was in front of him was a grieving man, but a strong man. A loving man.
“I forgive you,” Piers said flatly. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing, so he thought for a moment if there was something else Linnet would think he should say. Too bad she was locked in a bedchamber playing Sleeping Beauty.
His father’s eyes glistened with tears. “I will never forgive myself. Never.”
Then he knew what Linnet would do. He opened his arms and his father came to him, just as he had when Piers was small and his father was large.
All this emotion was making him feel even more irritable, so he pulled back and snapped, “By the way, my life isn’t ruined.”
“You suffer intolerable pain,” his father said, dropping his arms.
Piers whacked off the head of a nodding daisy with his cane. “That hasn’t ruined me. I’m a hell of a doctor. I wouldn’t even be a doctor if you hadn’t developed a liking for opium.” He scowled at his father. “I’d rather be dead than not be a doctor.”
A smile tugged at the corner of the duke’s mouth. But: “You have no family and no friends.”
“Bollocks. I have Sébastien. You sent Prufrock to me. And I have Linnet, if I can manage to keep her.”