“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.”
She frowned down at her hands. “Perhaps it would’ve been better if I had tripped.”
He asked quietly, “What happened?”
“He was kind,” she said simply. “He came and talked to me a little, even smiled. I thought at the time that he was being gracious to a nervous young girl, but of course it was more than that even then. He admitted quite freely later that he wanted me as his mistress from the first.”
“And you went skipping into his arms?” he asked cynically.
She cocked her head. “It was a bit more complicated than that. Our first conversation was very brief. Papa came down from the dowager duchess’s rooms, and we left for home. I chattered all the way about His Grace, but I think I would’ve forgotten him eventually had I not seen him again on our next visit. I thought it an odd coincidence that I would meet him again so soon when I’d been accompanying Papa to the duke’s mansion for almost a year without meeting him. Lister had engineered it, of course. He made sure to enter the sitting room where I waited only after my father had gone to see Her Grace. Lister sat and talked to me, ordered tea and cakes. He flirted, although I was too unsophisticated to realize it.”
She walked to one of his display cases and peered inside, her back to him. He wondered if she was hiding her face from him. “There were several such tête-à-têtes, and in between he sent me secret letters and small gifts—a jeweled locket, some embroidered gloves. I knew better. I knew I was not supposed to accept such gifts, wasn’t supposed to let myself be closeted alone with a man, but I… I couldn’t seem to help myself. I fell in love with him.”
She hesitated, but he simply watched that curving back. Even at this moment, he could feel desire for her— perhaps more than desire.
“Then one afternoon we did more than talk,” she said to the glass case. He could see her reflection, ghostly in the glass, and she looked remote and cool, though he was beginning to realize that the appearance she projected might not be real. “We made love, and afterward I knew that I couldn’t go back home with Papa. My world—my life—had changed completely. I knew vaguely that Lister was married, that he had children not much younger than I, but in a way that only fed my romantic fantasy. He didn’t mention her often, but when he did, Lister described his wife as cold. He said she had not let him into her bed for years. We could never be together as husband and wife, yet I could be with him as his mistress. I loved him. I wanted to be with him always.”
“He seduced you.” Alistair knew his voice was cold with suppressed rage. How could she? How could Lister? To seduce a young, sheltered girl was caddish behavior beyond the pale of even the most dissolute of rakes.
“Yes.” She turned and faced him, her shoulders back and her head high. “I suppose he did, although I was more than willing. I loved him with all the fervor of a young, romantic girl. I never truly knew him. I fell in love with what I thought he was.”
That he didn’t want to hear. He pushed away from the desk. “Whatever your motives when you were seventeen, it doesn’t change anything now. Lister is the father of your children. He has them. I don’t see anything you or I can do.”
“I can try and get them back,” she said. “He doesn’t love them; he’s never spent more than fifteen minutes at a time with them.”
He narrowed his eye. “Then why take them?”
“Because he considers them his,” she said, not bothering to hide the bitter tone in her voice. “He doesn’t care for them as persons, only as things he thinks he owns. And because he wants to hurt me.”
Alistair frowned. “Will he hurt them?”
She looked at him frankly. “I don’t know. They are no more than a dog or a horse to him. Do you know of men who whip their horses?”
“Dammit.” He closed his eye a second, but he really had no choice. He opened the bureau drawer again and took out the pistols. “Pack one bag. Be ready in ten minutes. We’re going to London.”
HE WASN’T TALKING to her. Helen swayed as the carriage Alistair had rented in Glenlargo jounced over a rut in the road. He’d agreed to come with her, agreed to help her find and rescue the children, but it was obvious that he wanted no more to do with her beyond that. She sighed. Really, what had she expected?
Helen gazed out the tiny, rather grimy carriage window and wondered where Abigail and Jamie were now. They must be frightened. Even if Lister was their father, they didn’t know him very well, and he was a cold man besides. Jamie would be either very still with fear or nearly ricocheting off the carriage walls with nervous excitement. She very much hoped it wasn’t the latter case, because she doubted Lister would take well to Jamie in high form. Abigail, in contrast, would probably be watching and worrying. Hopefully, she wasn’t saying much, because Abigail’s tongue could be quite tart at times.
But wait. Lister was a duke. Naturally he wouldn’t be taking care of the children himself. Perhaps he’d thought ahead and brought along a nanny to take care of the children after he snatched them. Perhaps she was an older, motherly woman, one who would know how to handle Jamie’s high spirits and Abigail’s sullen moods. Helen closed her eyes. She knew this was all wishful thinking, but please, God, let there be a nice, motherly nanny to keep the children away from their terrible father and his temper. If—
“What about your family?”
She opened her eyes at Alistair’s rasp. “What?”
He was frowning at her from across the carriage. “I’m trying to think of possible allies we can recruit to help fight Lister. What about your family?”
“I don’t think so.” He simply sat staring at her, so she reluctantly explained, “I haven’t spoken to them in years.”
“If you haven’t spoken to them in years, how can you know they won’t help?”
“They made it quite plain when I went to the duke that I was no longer a part of the Carter family.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Carter?”
She felt her face heat a little. “That’s my real name—Helen Abigail Carter—but I couldn’t use Carter when I became Lister’s mistress. I took the name Fitzwilliam.”
He continued to stare at her.
Finally she asked, “What is it?”
He shook his head. “I was just thinking that even your name—Mrs. Halifax—was a lie.”
“I’m sorry. I was trying to hide from Lister, you see, and—”
“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.”
