Whitney frowned at him. “I can’t see anything the least bit ‘odd’ about two pillows propping up an injured knee.”
“I quite agree with you there.” Dr. Whitticomb’s eyes twinkled. “But unless I misread your note to his grace, it was your left knee which was injured. Yet it is your right knee which we see here upon these pillows.”
His finger pointed accusingly to the wrong leg and Whitney pinkened. “Oh that,” she said hastily. “We propped the right leg up to keep it from bumping the left.
“Very quick thinking, my dear,” Dr. Whitticomb said with a chuckle.
Whitney closed her eyes in chagrin. She wasn’t fooling him at all.
“There doesn’t appear to be any swelling.” His fingers gently felt first her right knee, then her left. Then the right again. “Do you feel any pain here?”
“Dr. Whitticomb,” Whitney said with a resigned smile trembling on her lips, “would you believe, even for one second, that I am in any pain?”
“No. I’m afraid not, actually,” he admitted with equal candor. “But I must say I admire your knack for knowing when the time has come to throw in your cards and call the game lost.” He replaced the bedcovers and leaned back in his chair, gazing at her in thoughtful silence.
He couldn’t help admiring her spirit. She’d concocted a scheme and she’d done her level best to see it through. And now, when she was defeated, she conceded the victory to him without rancor, no missish sulks and sullens, no tears or begging. Damned if he didn’t like her for it! After a moment, he straightened and said briskly, “I expect we should discuss what I am going to do next.”
Whitney shook her head. “There’s no need to explain. I know what you’re obligated to do.”
Dr. Whitticomb gave her an amused look. “First of all, I’m going to prescribe absolute, undisturbed bedrest for the next twenty-four hours. Not for you”—he laughed at Whitney’s joyous expression— “but for your poor, beleaguered maid behind me, who’s been torn between grabbing the nearest heavy object and bludgeoning me unconscious or swooning dead away.” Plucking the hartshorn bottle from the bedside table, he passed it to Clarissa. “If you will take some free advice from an extremely expensive physician,” he told her severely, “You will not involve yourself in any more of this lovely hoyden’s intrigues. You haven’t the constitution for it. Besides, your face quite gave your mistress away.”
When Clarissa closed the door behind her, Dr. Whitticomb turned his gaze upon Lady Gilbert, who’d gone round the bed and was standing beside Whitney, waiting like a condemned man in the box to share her niece’s sentence. “You, Lady Gilbert, are not in much better condition than that maid. Sit down.”
“I’m quite all right,” Lady Anne murmured, but she sank to the bed.
“Much better than all right,” Dr. Whitticomb chuckled “Quite splendid, I should say. You never betrayed your niece by even the flicker of an eye.” Whitney was the next object of the doctor’s penetrating gaze. “Now then, how do you think your future husband is going to react to this deception of yours?”
Whitney closed her eyes against the frightening image of an enraged Clayton, his gray eyes icy and his voice vibrating with cold fury. “He’ll be furious,” she whispered. “But that was the risk I took.”
“Then there’s nothing to be gained by confessing the deception, is there?”
Whitney’s eyes snapped open. “Me confessing? I thought you were going to tell him the truth.”
“The truth I have to tell, young lady, is this: An injury to a joint, any joint, can be difficult, even impossible, to diagnose. Despite the absence of swelling, I could not definitely rule out the possibility that your knee was injured precisely as you claimed. Beyond that, any further revelations will have to come from you. I am here as a physician, you know, not an informant.”
Whitney’s spirits soared. She snatched a pillow from beside her and hugged it to her chest, laughing with relief and gratitude. After thanking him three times, she said, “I don’t suppose that you could tell his grace that I should stay in bed?”
“No,” Dr. Whitticomb said flatly. “I cannot and would not do so.”
“I quite understand,” Whitney said generously. “It was just a thought.”
Reaching out, he took Whitney’s hand in his and smiled gently. “My dear, I have been a friend of the Westmoreland family for many years. You are soon to become a Westmoreland, and I would like to think we are also friends. Are we?”
Whitney was not going to become a Westmoreland, but she nodded acceptance of his offer of friendship.
“Good. Then allow me to presume upon this new friendship of ours by telling you that denying your fiancé your company in order to gain whatever it is you want, is not only foolish but risky. It was obvious to me that his grace has a great affection for you, and I truly think he would give you anything you want if you simply gave him that lovely smile of yours and asked him for it.”
More emphatically he said, “Deceit and deviousness do you no credit, my child, and what’s more, they will get you absolutely nowhere with the duke. He has known females far more skilled in deception and trickery than you, and all those ladies ever got from him was the opportunity to amuse him for a very brief time. While you, by being direct and forthright as I sense that you are, have gained the very thing those other females most desired. You,” he said, “have gained the offer of his grace’s hand in marriage.”
Fireworks exploded behind Whitney’s eyes; bells clanged in her ears. Why did everyone act as if she’d just been offered the crown jewels because Clayton Westmoreland had stepped down from his lofty pinnacle and deigned to make poor little lucky her an offer of marriage? It was insulting! Degrading! Somehow she managed to nod and say, “I know your advice is well meant, Dr. Whitticomb. I—I’ll think about it.”
He stood up and smiled at her. “You’ll think about it, but you don’t plan to follow it, do you?” When Whitney made no reply, he reached down and patted her shoulder. “Perhaps you know best how to deal with him. He’s quite taken with you, you know. In fact, I never thought to see the day anything or anyone would unnerve him. But you, my dear, have come very close. When I arrived from London this morning, I found him wavering between anger and laughter. One moment, he was quite prepared to break your pretty neck for pulling this ‘stunt,’ I believe he called it. The next minute he was laughing and regaling me with stories about you. The man is torn between merriment and murder.”
“So when he couldn’t choose between the two, he sent you here to teach me a lesson,” Whitney concluded darkly.
“Well, yes,” Dr. Whitticomb said, chuckling. “I rather think that was his intent. I confess that I felt a certain annoyance when I discovered that the patient I’d been hauled out of my house and bounced across half of England to treat was most likely shamming. But now that I’ve been here, I daresay I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”
* * *
Gaiety, Whitney thought testily as she dined with her houseguests that evening, was not a balm for misery, it was an i
rritant. But then, nothing seemed to help. In an attempt to bolster her drooping spirits, she had taken extra care with her appearance and had even worn one of her new gowns—a soft powder-blue confection. At her throat and ears were blue sapphires encircled with diamonds which she’d bought just before leaving Paris. Her hair was pulled back off her forehead and fastened with a diamond clip, leaving the rest to cascade naturally over her shoulders and down her back.
I am a kept woman, she thought as she listlessly pushed at a stuffed oyster with her fork. He had paid for the clothes she was wearing, the jewels, even her underthings. To add to her unwholesome feelings about herself, her cousin Cuthbert’s slavering gaze kept slithering sideways as he tried to steal a glimpse of what her bodice concealed.
Her father, she noted, was behaving with artificial joviality, proclaiming to his guests how happy he was that they’d come, and how sad he was that they were departing tomorrow. Whitney thought that he probably was sorry to see them go. After all, he had been using them as a shield to insulate himself from her impending wrath. So much the better, Whitney thought. She didn’t want a confrontation with him. All she felt for him now was a frigid core of . . . nothingness.
After the gentlemen had enjoyed their port and cigars, they joined the ladies in the drawing room, where tables were set up for whist. The instant Cuthbert saw her, he started toward her table. He was pompous, balding and, to Whitney, wholly repulsive. Mumbling a quick excuse to Aunt Anne about not wanting to play whist, Whitney hastily stood and left the room.
She wandered down the back hall and into the library, but could not find anything of interest among the hundreds of books lining the shelves there. The salons were being used for parlor games, and Cuthbert was in the drawing room. Under no circumstances could Whitney endure another moment near him, which left her the choice of either returning to her bedroom and the plaguing problems that would haunt her there, or else going into her father’s study.
She chose the latter and, after Sewell brought her a pack of cards and added a log to the cheerful fire burning in the grate, Whitney settled into a high-backed chair beside the fire. I am becoming a hermit, she thought, slowly shuffling the deck, then laying the cards, one at a time, on the parquet table in front of her. Behind her, she heard the door open. “What is it, Sewell?” she asked without looking around.