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“I know.” He waved away her apology. “I even understand. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering if anything I know about you is true.”

She blinked, feeling oddly hurt. “But I—”

“What about your mother?”

She sighed. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about what was between the two of them. “The last time I spoke to my mother, she said she was ashamed of me and that I’d tainted the family. I can’t blame her. I have three sisters, all of whom were unmarried when I went to the duke.”

“And your father?”

She looked down at her hands in her lap.

There was silence a moment before he spoke again, and now his voice had gentled. “You went with him on his visits to patients. Surely you were close?”

She smiled a little then. “He never asked the others to go with him, only me. Margaret was the eldest, but she said visiting patients was boring and sometimes disgusting, and I think my other sisters felt much the same. Timothy was the only boy, but he was also the youngest and still in the nursery.”

“Was that the sole reason he took you?” he asked softly. “Because you were the only child interested?”

“No, that wasn’t the sole reason.”

They were passing through a small village now, the stone cottages worn and ancient-looking. It may have stood thus for millennia—unchanging, uncaring of the outer world.

Helen watched the village go by and said, “He loved me. He loved all of us, but I was special somehow. He’d take me on his rounds and tell me about each patient—their symptoms, his diagnosis, the treatment and if it was progressing well or not. And sometimes if we were coming home late in the day, he would tell me stories. I never heard him tell them to the others, but when the sun was beginning to glow with sunset, he’d tell me stories of gods and goddesses and fairies.”

The carriage came to the last cottage in the village, and she could see a woman cutting flowers in her garden.

She said softly, “His favorite was Helen of Troy, though I didn’t like it much because the ending was so sad. He’d tease me about my name, Helen, and say that someday I’d be as beautiful as Helen of Troy but that I should watch myself because beauty wasn’t always a gift. Sometimes it brought grief. I never thought about it before, but he was right.”

“Why don’t you ask for his help?” Alistair asked.

She looked at him, remembering her father in his gray bobbed wig, his blue eyes laughing as he teased her about Helen of Troy, and then she remembered the last time she saw him. “Because when I last spoke to my mother, when she called me a common trollop and said I was no longer a part of the family, my father was in the room as well. And he didn’t say anything at all. He just turned his face away from me.”

o;I’m not a whore,” she whispered in a trembling voice. “I never was a common whore. Lister kept me, yes, but it wasn’t what you think.”

A part of him ached at the pain he was inflicting on her, but he couldn’t seem to stop. And besides, another part of him wanted to inflict the pain. How could she have done this to her children?

He leaned a hip against a table and crossed his arms, cocking his head again. “Then explain to me how you were his mistress but not a whore.”

She clasped her hands like a little girl giving a recitation. “I was young—very young—when I met Lister.”

“What age?” he snapped.

“Seventeen.”

That gave him pause. Seventeen was still a child. His mouth tightened a bit before he jerked his chin at her. “Go on.”

“My father is a physician, a rather respected one, actually. We lived in Greenwich, in a house with a garden. When I was young, I would sometimes go with him on his visits.”

He eyed her. What she described was a lower class than he had imagined her to be. Her father worked as a physician, true, but he still earned his living. She wasn’t even gentry. She was leagues beneath a duke in social standing. “You lived with just your father?”

“No.” Her eyes dropped. “I have three sisters and a brother. And my… my mother. I was the second eldest girl.”

He jerked a nod for her to continue.

She was squeezing her hands together so tightly, he could see her nails digging into her skin. “One of my father’s patients was the dowager Duchess of Lister. She lived with the duke at that time. She was an elderly lady with many ailments, and Papa saw her every week, sometimes several times a week. I often accompanied him to the residence, and one day I met Lister.”

She closed her eyes and bit her lip. The room was quiet; this time Alistair made no move to interrupt.

Finally, she opened her eyes and smiled crookedly, sweetly. “The Duke of Lister is a tall man—Tom was right. Tall and imposing. He looks like a duke. I was waiting in a small sitting room for Papa to finish the visit, and he entered the room. I think he was looking for something—a paper, perhaps, though I can’t remember now. He didn’t notice me at first, and I was frozen in awe. The dowager duchess was an intimidating old lady, but this was her son, the duke. He looked over at me finally, and I rose and curtsied. I was so nervous I thought I’d trip over my own feet. But I didn’t.”

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