Читать книгу The Companion's Secret - Susanna Craig - Страница 10

Chapter 2

Gabriel could tell by the expression on Miss Burke’s face just what Fox must have said to her.

He did not blame his friend for revealing that horrible truth about his past. Fox was unfailingly honest, and he would never have had it any other way.

Besides, everyone already knew what he had done.

No, if there was blame to be cast, it ought to fall squarely on Lady Merrick’s shoulders—she who must have known what lay at the root of his ruined reputation and said nothing to warn her niece. Perhaps not even her daughter, though the girl looked nothing short of terrified of him.

Then again, Lady Merrick was still quite young. Just past forty, he guessed. Fair and lovely, like her daughter, she herself might have been the object of his attention under different circumstances. She would not have been the first neglected wife with whom he had amused himself during the Season. Perhaps the countess really did not know what he had done. Perhaps the decade or more of scandal surrounding him had at long last created a cloud that obscured his original sin—though nothing could blot it out entirely, to be sure.

Abruptly, he rose from his chair. “You will excuse me, Lady Felicity. Fox and I are in danger of overstaying our welcome. We should go.”

She murmured an obligatory protest that sounded to him more like a sigh of relief. “So soon?”

What in God’s name was he doing here? Was he really the sort of man who destroyed the blush of some innocent blossom for his own base needs?

But of course, the answer was yes. He had been destroying the guiltless since the hour of his birth, after all.

So he smiled into her wide, worried eyes and asked, “If the weather stays fair, Lady Felicity, would you be disposed to join me for a stroll in the park tomorrow at four?”

As was proper, she glanced at her mother. “Felicity will be only too happy to go, my lord,” the countess confirmed. Merrick had assured him that both his wife and daughter would happily accede to his wishes, whatever they were. But then, as if to spite that promise, Lady Merrick added, “Miss Burke will accompany her.” Underscoring his mistress’ lazy-sounding drawl, her pug lifted his head from her lap and yawned until his tongue curled and his mouth stretched in a wide grin.

The very last thing Gabriel needed was a clumsy spinster peering at him disapprovingly over her spectacles while he attempted to win over Lady Felicity. Not that his victory was in doubt. But Merrick had asked him, “as a gentleman,” to take a few days to court the girl before making her an offer, to make her feel as if she were something more than a pawn, as if she had some choice in the matter. The novelty of the request, of the notion that anyone might imagine him to be a gentleman, had caught Gabriel off his guard, and he had assented to Merrick’s request without thinking the matter through.

Now, given what she had just been told, would he have to win over Miss Burke as well?

The woman in question leaped to her feet and preceded the men to the door, her light step and lithe figure insufficiently disguised by the sort of ugly, ill-fitting dress that lady’s companions—or rather, the ladies who employed them—seemed to favor. In the hallway, she lifted their hats one by one from the table where some other servant had laid them.

“Will you be joining us tomorrow, Mr. Fox?” she asked, not meeting Gabriel’s eye.

“If you wish it, ma’am.”

“My wishes are never consulted on such matters,” she replied with a shake of her head. Heavy raven locks threatened to spill from the pins that only just managed to contain them. With her black hair and bright eyes, she was really quite striking, albeit in a thoroughly un-English way.

“Perhaps they should be,” Gabriel said. As he reached for his hat, his gloved fingertips brushed her bare ones where they held the brim. Lady Felicity would have flinched at the contact. Miss Burke did not.

With a tip of his head, Gabriel turned to accompany Fox out the door. On the threshold he glanced over his shoulder, but Miss Burke’s gaze had not followed them. She was speaking quietly to a footman, who handed over some piece of correspondence—not on a tray, as would have been proper, but surreptitiously, as if the note contained something she would not want others to see.

“Lady Felicity does not disappoint, I trust?” Fox asked when they reached the bottom of the steps.

“She is precisely what I expected her to be.”

A perfect specimen of English womanhood. Replete with china doll charms—golden ringlets, rather vacant blue eyes. And young. Very young. She would be biddable, he had been assured. A virtuous Sophie to his jaded, world-weary Emile.

But young, biddable ladies had never been Gabriel’s style.

“You, on the other hand, must have thoroughly shocked her,” Fox scolded. “I must say, your society manners could use a bit of polish. Your behavior toward her cousin, for instance. Why, one supposes Miss Burke is little more than a poor relation.”

A poor relation. Overlooked, in other words. Disregarded.

Vulnerable.

“Her position in the household no doubt entirely dependent upon her aunt’s sufferance.” Fox’s rebuke was gaining momentum. “And you all but called her a flirt—!”

Gabriel lifted one brow, assessing the tone as much as the words themselves. It was in Fox’s nature to play the knight to a damsel in distress. But if her conduct in the drawing room was any guide, Miss Burke seemed to have more in common with the dragon in that tale. So was Fox defending her, or himself?

Although his behavior could hardly be described as flirtatious, the simple fact remained that Fox usually tended toward a rather wooden demeanor around young women. Not, of course, that Miss Burke was precisely young.

“You will walk with us tomorrow, I hope?” Gabriel asked, echoing her invitation. “The lady in question seemed to desire it.” He needed a way to distract and divert Miss Burke. Fox would do admirably. When he did not immediately reply, Gabriel pushed further. “What say you, Foxy? Shall you court the dark Irish cousin whilst I woo the fair English one?”

Fox blushed—blushed!—and shook his head. “Miss Burke is rather too sharp for a dull fellow such as myself.” He walked a few steps, then added, without a hint of slyness, “I should think her more suited to someone like you.”

An hour past, Gabriel would have laughed and said that a woman of a certain age who hid behind frumpy dresses and wire-rimmed spectacles was beneath his notice. But he could hardly deny that she had caught his attention. In his mind’s eye, he saw Merrick’s footman slipping that illicit piece of correspondence into her hands.

What else was she trying to hide?

Fox made a show of digging his watch from his waistcoat and starting in surprise at the information revealed on its face. “Goodness, look at the time. I must get home and change. I’m for Victoria’s tonight.”

So Fox hoped to avoid further discussion of what had just transpired? His reluctance suited Gabriel just fine. “Ah, another of Lady Dalrymple’s interminable dinner parties,” he drawled. “Do thank her for sparing me an invitation.”

It was a joke, of course. No one ever invited Gabriel anywhere.

With a rather guilty nod, Fox took his leave. Gabriel watched him walk in the direction of South Audley Street, though his mind was still elsewhere.

One encounter with Miss Burke’s sharp green eyes and even sharper Irish tongue had shown him a glimpse of a worthy adversary, and worthy adversaries were in short supply these days. He had grown rather weary of besting unworthy ones.

At this very moment, she was probably cautioning her cousin against him, relaying what Fox had confessed, making his life difficult. But every opponent he had ever faced had a weakness, and tomorrow’s walk in the park would give him a chance to learn hers.

He would find a way to reveal the companion’s secret and turn it to his advantage.

* * * *

“You asked me to keep an eye on the post, miss.” Curiosity was etched into the second footman’s face.

“Thank you, Tom.” Cami had given him almost the last coin in her purse to keep him from revealing what he knew, but now she wondered if keeping her secret would prove too much for him at last. She reached for the letter he was holding, hoping her fingers would not tremble and betray her nervousness. As she touched the pressed paper, she saw the red seal but refused to glance at the direction for fear she would see a hand she knew—Papa’s, or perhaps her sister’s.

The young footman nodded his acknowledgment and returned to his post, but not before offering a cautious smile and words of encouragement. “Good luck, miss.”

Not trusting her voice, Cami smiled weakly back, then hurried up the stairs to her bedchamber, clutching the letter against her breast.

Her name had not been written by a familiar hand. And she could tell from the postmark that the letter had been mailed within the city. She knew very well who must have sent it and the inevitable rejection it must contain. Still, she hesitated to open it, staring at the letter on her palm as if sheer dint of will could revise its contents.

“What foolishness,” she scolded herself after a moment. Settling atop her bed, one leg tucked beneath her, she turned the letter over, slid a fingernail beneath the wax seal, and lifted it. No point in delaying the inevitable.

As she unfolded the paper, her eyes were arrested by the letter’s opening words:

Dear Miss Burke,

I have read The Wild Irish Rose with great pleasure—

“Great pleasure” did not sound like a rejection. Surely a man as busy as Mr. Dawkins would not take time to express the great pleasure he had felt in tossing her beloved manuscript onto the rubbish heap…would he?

—and believe others will do the same, the more so given its timely—and, if you will permit me, rather extraordinary—subject matter.

“Extraordinary subject matter”? A euphemism, she supposed, for a woman’s foray into the world of politics. But as women’s opinions in such matters were so little valued otherwise, how else was Cami to speak if not through the pages of fiction? She returned her eyes to the letter.

However, as this novel purports to be a work of realism and not of the Gothic school, I must draw your attention to one flaw. I fear that a London audience will find your English villain wholly unbelievable, a caricature drawn out of Irish prejudice.

Annoyance pricked along her spine. Caricature? Ha! That only meant she had succeeded in holding up a mirror before one Englishman’s eyes. Now, if only she could force them all to recognize their reflection.

A man, even an Englishman, is rarely as unrelievedly bad as your Granville. Though it may seem to go against the moral of your tale, I assure you his failings will be more powerfully felt if he has been shown also to have some strengths. A faithful portrait must be drawn with light and shadow.

If you are willing to undertake these revisions, we are prepared to review the manuscript again, with an eye to purchasing it outright for publication. This is, as I am sure you are aware, quite a generous offer for an untried author.

Please indicate your intentions by return post.

Yours, &c.

Benjamin Dawkins, Jun.

The letter slipped from her trembling fingers and drifted down to the coverlet. Despite his reservations, Mr. Dawkins was willing to take the time and trouble to read her book again. He hoped to purchase it, to publish it! He would not say that if he did not have some confidence in its potential to succeed.

Unexpected tears sprang to her eyes, fogging her spectacles. All the sacrifices—rising early, scribbling frantically by the light of a candle before even the housemaids were awake; exchanging the green of Dublin for the grime of London; even leaving her family, wondering if she would ever see them again—would be worth it.

If she could find a way to render the despicable Lord Granville more believable, or at least more palatable, she would be an author.

But just how on earth was she going to manage that?

Without a knock of warning, the door to her room swung open. Cami hastily folded the letter and thrust it into the drawer of her bedside table.

Felicity wandered in and flopped onto the bed, not waiting to be invited. “Oh, Cousin Camellia,” she sighed, a tremor in her voice, “Mama says I must marry Lord Ash.”

Cami sat more upright. “Marry him?” Although the news was not entirely unexpected—in the Earl of Merrick’s circle, unmarried gentlemen visited unmarried young ladies with a single goal in mind, after all—the speed with which the decision had been made alarmed her. She had never even heard the man’s name mentioned before today.

“Papa has reached a—an understanding with him, it seems. Something about Stephen’s debts.”

Just yesterday, Uncle Merrick had lit out for Derbyshire with his wayward son in tow, muttering something about teaching him the meaning of “rustication.” Did the arrangement with Lord Ash also have something to do with their sudden departure?

“Are you to have no say in the matter?”

A thin smile, followed by an almost imperceptible shake of her perfect blond ringlets. “You know Papa is too gentle to force me to do anything against my will. But Mama says if I accept Lord Ash, we are saved,” Felicity said. “If I refuse him, we will be ruined. If he asks me, how can I say no?”

Heat flared in Cami’s chest and spread through her body, warming even the tips of her ears. When the first flush of shock passed, it left her chilled. She struggled to find words of consolation. “Perhaps it will not be an intolerable match. He is rather…that is, he’s very…” Arrogant? Sardonic? No, those would never do. She needed a description Felicity might actually want to hear. Finally, she settled on “…handsome.”

Felicity’s pert nose wrinkled. “Do you think so? But he’s…why, he must be even older than you, Cousin. And he’s so…dark.”

Felicity could be forgiven for thinking of thirty as old, she supposed. But dark? The writer in Cami wanted to press for more specific adjectives, words that would leap off the page and belong only to Lord Ash. Hair the color of burnished mahogany wainscot that disguised a secret passageway, eyes the precise shade of the forest floor in early autumn. And a voice…but here Cami had to concede that dark suited the timbre of his deep voice—a fitting pitch for the dark, troubled soul to which it belonged, if Mr. Fox’s story was to be believed.

“King says Lord Ash’s reputation is quite as charred and sooty as his name,” her cousin continued. “He is said to be a—a rake.” The last word was little more than a scandalized whisper. Cami knew she ought to chide Felicity for repeating servants’ gossip, but she could not bring herself to do it. Not with his friend’s revelation still ringing in her own ears.

Despair at her cousin’s predicament mingled uneasily with the elation Mr. Dawkins’s letter had brought, leaving Cami feeling something she could never remember having felt before: light-headed. And at a distinct loss for words. Should she repeat what Mr. Fox had said? But if Felicity’s fate was already sealed, what would be gained by frightening her cousin further?

Felicity spoke for her. “Is it…is it true, do you suppose, Cousin?”

Cami started. Well, Mr. Fox had spoken as if everyone else already knew what he had told her. Why, that meant even Uncle Merrick must have heard what Lord Ash was said to have done and was nevertheless willing to sacrifice his daughter to atone for his son’s improvidence.

Anger rose like bile in her throat. “Is what true, dear?” she managed to ask.

Felicity’s smile was still weak, but hopeful. “That reformed rakes make the best husbands. You know…like in the novels.”

Biting back an automatic denial—along with a stern recommendation that her cousin read better books—Cami reached out to pat her cousin’s icy fingers where they lay on the coverlet. “If it is, then you will be the happiest of brides, for even Lord Ash could not fail to be improved by a girl as sweet and gentle as you.”

Felicity’s laugh sounded surprisingly jaded. “If you were a man, Cousin, people would call you silver tongued. Mama says it must be your Irish blood.”

Cami twisted her answering grimace into something approximating a smile. She was quite familiar with the qualities—the failings, rather—her aunt attributed to her Irish blood. This despite the fact that so little of it actually ran in her veins, her mother being entirely English and her father half so.

But Cami never denied being Irish. She was not ashamed of her origins, and no Englishwoman—or man, she added, thinking of Lord Ash’s mocking expression—could make her so.

“Still,” said Felicity, pushing to her feet, “I hope you’re right. He makes me so terribly nervous. Oh, I am glad you’ll be joining us tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? Ah, yes. The stroll in the park. She had forgotten in the rush of excitement about the letter.

Papa had cautioned her against taking the post as her aunt’s companion, insisting that there was bound to be more to the task than managing correspondence and reading bad novels aloud. But she had never imagined her role would extend to chaperoning a sweet but sometimes heedless girl of almost nineteen.

She would do it, of course. She had always felt a strong sense of duty to family—even the branch of her family of whose existence she had learned just a few months ago. It was not why she had come to London, but if Felicity’s parents were too weak to stand up for their daughter, then she would have to be strong.

Lord Ash might have cowed her aunt and uncle into accepting his suit, but he had not reckoned on Camellia Burke.

“You have nothing to fear,” she assured her cousin.

Besides, it’s May. It will likely rain.

When Felicity left, Cami felt suddenly restless. Leaping from the bed, she made her way to the window. Far below, Brook Street was mostly empty. A nurse pushed a pram in the direction of the park, while the three older Bates children toddled behind her in a ragged line. A few houses up, a carriage waited to take Lady Mercer calling. And directly below, so close to the front of the house that he almost escaped her eye, the Marquess of Ashborough still leaned against the area railing.

At the far edge of her vision, nearly out of sight, she saw Mr. Fox striding up the street. Such a kind gentleman deserved a better friend than an outcast from society. A rake.

A murderer.

Her mind caught at the word. Lord Ash did not look like a murderer.

Not that she knew what a murderer looked like. She certainly could not recall having seen one before. At least, not to her knowledge. She knew from her father’s stories that criminals could be quite deceptively charming. And the phrase “deceptively charming” fit Lord Ash all too well, she feared.

But he had been a boy when the alleged crime had occurred. Perhaps there was more to the story than Mr. Fox had related. There must be, else Lord Ashborough would not be—well, Lord Ashborough.

She was not so naïve as to believe that children were incapable of committing crimes, even heinous ones. But she suspected they usually had provocation—ill treatment, misguidance, desperate need. She did not hold with the popular notion that some children were simply born bad. Had his father been cruel? Or had it been a tragic accident?

Whatever the circumstances surrounding the terrible event in his childhood, she knew that if he had been born just a few miles to the east—in St. Giles, say, rather than Mayfair—he would have been hanged for what he had done, deliberate or not. Instead, he had paid an entirely different price. To have that sword dangling over one’s head, always… Cami shook her head. No wonder a shadow clung to the man, even on this sunny day. What a terrible story it was.

Against the rough nap of the attic’s curtains, her fingertips tingled. In the right hands, what a story it could be. Hurrying to her bedside table, Cami jerked open the drawer, snatched up her letter, and read it again.

Might Mr. Dawkins be right? She was not in the habit of considering men as terribly complex creatures. They rarely took the trouble to disguise their motives or their desires. But she supposed it was possible that her portrayal of the villain in The Wild Irish Rose left something to be desired. When she began the book, she had known no English noblemen on which to base Lord Granville. Now, however, she could draw from life….

She flew to her desk, snatched up a pencil, and began a rough sketch of Lord Ash’s face. Thinking back over their exchange in the drawing room, she tried to capture his mien, the way a rake and a murderer dressed and walked and spoke. The way he called forth an ingénue’s blush. The way he…

Good heavens—Felicity! Here she was mapping out a shocking work of fiction when a truly scandalous story was unfolding right in front of her. And if Lord Ash was a suitable model for the villain of her novel, then Felicity might pose for an equally convincing portrait of Róisín, its credulous heroine.

But if Cami spoke in her cousin’s defense, what good would it do? After all, Aunt and Uncle Merrick had already given their consent to the man’s courtship of their daughter, despite his reputation. If only there were a way to protect Felicity and still acquire the information, the experience, I need to make Lord Ashborough’s story my own….

Then she remembered that walk in the park. Tomorrow, she would have an opportunity to begin a thorough character study of the man. If she was clever, she could use the information she gathered to convince her aunt and uncle to sever all connection to a man of Lord Ash’s ilk. She would find a way to use his courtship of Felicity to expose the depths of the man’s depravity.

And if it also happened to benefit her book, what harm could there be in it?

She paused to examine the picture she had drawn. Her skill with words had always far outstripped her abilities with lines and shading, and this effort was no exception. The portrait was, to use Mr. Dawkins’s words, all shadow, no light. Lord Ashborough’s eyes and hair were, well, darker than was strictly just, dark enough that her pulse quickened ever so slightly under the force of his scowl. He looked more menacing than she had intended. The real man was more… She hardly knew what word to apply. Sensual? Seductive?

Realizing she was in danger of lapsing once more into caricature, she turned the paper over and prepared to begin again, only to discover that she had made her sketch on the back of Mr. Dawkins’s letter. With a shake of her head, she put aside the drawing and took up a clean sheet of foolscap. Mustering her neatest hand, she wrote:

Mr. Dawkins,

I thank you for your very kind words about The Wild Irish Rose. I shall begin the revisions you have requested immediately.

C. Burke

Pulling a tattered copy of her manuscript from her writing desk, she prepared to set to work. But not before tucking the publisher’s note into her bodice like the billet-doux it was.