“I thought he was dying. He said you made him stay in bed.”

“More the fool you,” Piers said unkindly. “I did make him stay in bed. We tried a rather innovative method of mending his bone by immobilizing it with a plaster cast, and it worked like a charm, if I say so myself. Now do I need to tell you again that my leg is hurting like a son of a bitch?”

“Is there any need to be so—”

“Rude? You came into my infirmary. You took a boy out of bed who’s only been out of a cast for three days. You had him carried down to the water and then to the stables, and now he’s crawling on the ground. That boy can’t even stand alone. He couldn’t walk if you—”

“Look!” Gavan shouted from behind them. “Look at me!”

They turned around.

He had Rufus in his arms and he was standing up. The dog was licking his chin. “He likes me!”

Chapter Eleven

Linnet dressed for supper in a rather somber mood. So the west wing wasn’t entirely full of dying people. She felt like a fool—and she felt belligerent at the same time. Piers was taking care of his patients’ bodies, obviously. But he didn’t care about how tedious it was to lie in those beds, day after day.

Still, it was hardly her business. They were ill suited, and the idea that he might fall in love with her ever, let alone in two weeks, was laughable. Marriage was out of the question.

So she had written a note to the duke, requesting that they leave the next day. She had to decide what to do with her life, and that meant going back to her father’s house, first of all. Then . . . perhaps a trip. Perhaps the Continent.

It sounded rather lonely—but then she’d been lonely ever since her mother died.

Annoyed with herself for whining like a self-absorbed child, she picked up her book but was incapable of losing herself in descriptions of cures for toothache. She had a feeling that the duke would be unwilling to leave immediately.

She had no idea why Piers and his father hadn’t spoken for years, but the look on the duke’s face was unmistakable. He was deeply happy to be in his son’s presence, even if that son behaved like a complete ass most of the time.

She was sitting at her dressing table reading aloud bits of the medical tract to Eliza, who was nimbly pulling her hair into an elaborate arrangement on top of her head, when a flare of noise rose from the courtyard.

“What on earth is that?” Linnet said.

Eliza put down a jeweled comb and darted over to the window. “It’s a carriage,” she said. “Just like a pumpkin, all yellow and shiny.”

Linnet came over in time to see a dainty ankle wearing an exquisite high-heeled slipper emerge from the carriage. It belonged to a lady wearing a plum-colored traveling costume topped by a jaunty little hat from which curled not one, not two, but three soft plumes.

“Lovely,” Eliza sighed. “That hat has to have come from La Belle Assemblée. There’s just something about it. You can tell.”

Linnet went back and sat down again. “Perhaps a rival for Lord Marchant’s hand has arrived.”

“More likely, she’s sick,” Eliza said, picking up her comb again. “The servants say that people come from all over Britain to see him. All over England, and maybe even abroad too. Maybe all the way from Scotland.”

Linnet didn’t want to think about whether Piers was a good physician, not given the way he laughed at her. His eyes were evil, just evil. He knew perfectly well that she had believed Gavan was dying, and he had let her go on making a fool of herself.

“I hope it’s another candidate to be the future duchess,” she said. “I shall enjoy watching her consider the prospect of living with that man for an entire lifetime.”

“There,” Eliza said, tucking the comb into Linnet’s curls. “You’re all set.”

Linnet stood up and drifted toward the door, but she didn’t feel like going downstairs. Not after Piers had laughed at her, and made her feel such a big booby. “Perhaps—”

“No,” Eliza said firmly. “He may well be the devil’s cub, the way they say he is. You’ll not be hiding in your bedchamber. Go out there and make him fall in love with you.”

Linnet groaned.

“We’re all counting on you,” Eliza said, pushing her out the door.

Linnet walked slowly down the stairs, morosely counting each step. She thought she’d been humiliated when a whole ballroom turned its back on her. Who would have thought that the humiliation would be even keener when an ass of a doctor laughed in her face?

There was a swell of excited voices coming from the drawing room, and Prufrock was standing just outside the open door, not even pretending to look like a butler.

“Do tell,” she said, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

“The duchess has arrived to visit her son,” Prufrock said. “That is, the former duchess has arrived.”

“You mean Lord Marchant’s mother? Doesn’t she live abroad?” Linnet felt a prickle of interest.

“Apparently she’s been in Andalusia for a few months, but got tired of that and decided to travel to Wales and surprise her son.”

“Only to find the duke in residence,” Linnet said. “Fascinating!”

“The duke has not yet arrived downstairs. So that joy is presumably yet in store for her,” Prufrock said. He pushed the door open wide, stepped inside and announced, “Miss Thrynne.”

Everyone in the room paused in their conversation and turned toward the door. In a blatant imitation of Zenobia, Linnet posed briefly under the doorframe before entering the room.

There was a small surge toward her: the Marquis Latour de l’Affitte, the three doctors . . . not Piers.

She held her hand out to Piers’s cousin Sébastien, who bowed over her fingers like the French nobleman he was. But her eyes slid sideways. There he was. Piers was leaning against the pianoforte, his eyes hooded, as if he was ignoring everything happening in the room.

Of course he looked up. He was about as sleepy as a stalking lion waiting for a gazelle to stumble by. There was mockery in those eyes . . . and something else.

That “something else” stiffened Linnet’s backbone. She turned back to the marquis and gave him a melting smile. “Do tell me about your day. Did Lord Marchant tell you that I enraged him by taking one of his patients into the open air?”

Sébastien was truly adorable in a French sort of way. His eyes crinkled with ready laughter. “I enrage Piers so regularly that I can hardly distinguish the state. But come, since he is too ill-mannered to do the task himself, I must introduce you to his Maman, my aunt. She arrived a mere hour ago.”

A moment later Linnet was curtsying before the petite, utterly elegant lady.

“Lady Bernaise,” Sébastien said. “May I present Miss Thrynne? She journeyed to Wales to meet your son, as you’ve heard.”

Piers’s mother showed no signs of fatigue from her journey; in fact she was beautiful, with glowing skin and shining hair that belied her age.

“Enchantée,” she said with a lazy little smile that reminded Linnet of her son. It said everything—and nothing at the same time. “I understand from darling Sébastien that you are my son’s destined wife.”