found my way here; I can certainly return home. I hardly want my family to see me with a strange gentleman.”
“What family would that be?”
“That is neither here nor there. They are a family, and therefore will disapprove of . . . of scandalous behavior.” They wouldn’t disapprove, that was the worst of it. Instead, her father would be devastated and heartbroken. She felt she could live with his rage. But knowing she had caused him pain would destroy her.
“All right. But I will see you to your carriage.” He pulled on his shirt, then asked, “Did you bring your own carriage?”
She shook her head. “No.” She did not want to tell him she had come here in a hackney, and that she had snuck out alone from her home before she’d summoned the vehicle. She had brought a dagger from Father’s collection of artifacts. As she’d walked, she’d had the knife hidden in a pocket of her cloak but kept her hand wrapped around the hilt. If anyone had attacked, she would have used it.
“Then I will see you on board a hackney. I could ride with you—”
“No.” Sutcliffe had been to her house. He would guess who she was at once. Though, did it matter? It wasn’t as if she was an innocent ninny who had been seduced. Sutcliffe had told her she was not to expect a proposal of marriage. He would hardly change his mind if he knew she was the daughter of his rival.
It did matter. What if he told her father what she had done?
“All right,” he said finally. “Let me help you dress.”
It was strange to get dressed with him and not speak. Neither of them said a word. But what could she say? She could hardly ask him if he was going to enjoy the rest of the orgy while she was gone. It shouldn’t matter, there was no future for her, but she didn’t want to think of him going to other women.
With his help, she had her Grecian gown in place and fastened in minutes. He summoned a servant to fetch her cloak. Then they waited, again in awkward silence.
Finally he cleared his throat. “My dear, I don’t want to believe you are actually dying.”
She didn’t want to talk of this. She did not feel weak. Her body still felt tingly and almost light as a feather from pleasure. But she met his gaze and said, “Thank you. But I have accepted it.”
“What is it that ails you?”
“I don’t know. No doctor has been able to understand it.”
“Perhaps you have not seen the right doctor.”
“I’ve seen many, many of them.” She sighed. Father had employed one physician after another; each one had visited the house and examined her—well, had spoken to her and asked her questions. Only one doctor had placed a thing called a stethoscope to her chest and had listened to her lungs.
Father had held onto hope, but finally he had begun to give up after she had been visited by at least half of all the doctors in London. He was convinced he had brought some virulent and mysterious illness back with him from one of his travels, and she had caught it. She had argued that Father was obviously healthy, but he pointed out there were those who never got sick, yet who managed to spread disease while they remained untouched.
If it was a disease from somewhere else in the world, it was unheard of in London. For no one had been able to give it a name or cure it.
Sutcliffe was watching her, regret and tenderness in his eyes. “It is strange.”
“It is,” she said briskly. The pain in his face was hard to look at. Anyway, she couldn’t give him any further explanation about her illness. How could she reveal that it might come from some other place, like Russia, or Turkey, or Africa, without revealing her father’s identity?
Sutcliffe and her father were rivals—could Sutcliffe be the kind of man who would use what she’d done to hurt her father?
She felt his gaze on her and lifted her head. He studied her, eyes frankly curious. “What kind of symptoms do you have?”
“Many things. Weakness, generally. My legs become