Page 17 of The Companion’s Secret

“And once to save her the embarrassment of dancing with a man who has forgotten the steps,” she chided, slipping back into her proper place.

When the dance at last ended, he ushered her through the curious but disapproving crowd, which again parted to make way for his passage, as if he were pitch and they wary of being defiled. In the crowded supper room, competing aromas of perfume and sturgeon and bodies combined to form a haze of scent that hung over the assembled company. He saw no sign of either Fox or Lady Felicity, so he steered Miss Burke to the last empty seats he could find, on the far side of the room. A nearby couple scraped their chairs across the floor, drawing away to avoid any appearance of association.

“May I fetch you some refreshment, Miss Burke?”

“No, thank you, my lord. I am not hungry.”

A pity. He so enjoyed satisfying a woman’s appetite. “Some wine, then?”

She conceded to that offer with a dip of her dark head. When he returned, she had drawn off her gloves and laid them aside. As her slender fingers curled around the goblet and lifted it to her lips, he spied a dark smudge of ink along the side of her right hand and speckling her first and second fingers—the mark of someone who had spent hours with her pen. Lady Merrick’s correspondence must be voluminous.

He had had similar stains himself, once, too stubborn for pumice. At school, translations of Latin and Greek had absorbed him, coming as they had at a time when he was desperate to find some meaning in those old adages about beauty in tragedy, desperate to find a way to allay his own suffering.

All his efforts had only proved that those grand truths were nothing more than lies.

“I assumed every English schoolboy was taught the classics,” she remarked as he seated himself beside her. An almost uncanny observation, given the direction of his own thoughts. But her conversation, like everything about her, seemed to be something out of the ordinary.

“Tortured into learning them, more like,” he corrected.

“Then I wonder why Lord Branthwaite should suspect you in particular of naming Mr. Fox’s dogs.”

Gabriel did not fool himself into thinking Branthwaite had meant the remark as a compliment to his wit. “Merely a jest between…” Fox’s eldest brother tolerated Gabriel better than most, knew his love for an ironic turn, though they could by no stretch of the imagination be called “…old friends.”

She was studying him from behind the rim of her cup, watching memories sketch across his brow as if they were written there and she could easily read them. Brushing away that utterly nonsensical notion, he leaned back in his chair and returned her regard. “Speaking of names,” he ventured, “your own is certainly unusual.”

“My brothers and sisters and I are all named after plants. The Linnaean classifications.” As she spoke, she returned her goblet to the table, though her fingertips continued to trace its curves. “Camellia, Paris, Erica, Galen, Daphne, and Bellis. My father is something of an amateur botanist, you see. He calls us his little garden.” That revelation was accompanied by a little spasm of embarrassment and a becoming flush. “Although not a terribly exotic one: just herbs and heather, laurel and daisy.”

“Camellia is the exception, it would seem,” he murmured, caressing her name with his voice. “A rare bloom indeed in this part of the world.”

Once more, she took refuge behind her goblet.

For a long moment, neither spoke. “Forgive me,” he said at last, rousing himself from thoughts that persisted in wandering in directions they ought not. “I have been imagining you tasked with keeping five tender shoots in a neat row. A difficult undertaking, I suppose. I have no siblings, you see. I am perfectly—”

“—independent,” she supplied, her voice tinged with something very like envy.

But certainly he had imagined it, for how could anyone envy his isolation?

At that moment, a mother and her three daughters approached their table, stopped short, and turned back in the direction from which they had come—no easy feat in the crowded supper room. Above the din of chatter and the clatter of silver against china, nothing more of their conversation could be heard than two shocked words, part recognition, part warning.

Gabriel gave a wry smile. In his experience, there were only two types of women: those who sought him out, and those who shunned him. The society matron clearly belonged to the latter camp—or wanted everyone around her to believe that she did.

“Why do they do it?” Camellia asked when the foursome was well out of earshot. “Why do they all call you ‘Lord Ash’?”

She was studying him again, her head tilted ever so slightly to one side. She seemed to be one of those women who was drawn to his darkness. But what drew her? Some misguided hope to save him from his sins?

Or a far worldlier—and more interesting—desire to share in them?

“I believe the general consensus is that I earned the name by blackening reputations and charring hopes.” Would the answer warn her off, or intrigue her? Which effect was he hoping to produce?

In fact, Fox had fallen into the habit of addressing him as “Ash” when they were boys at school and “Ashborough” had seemed a pretentious mouthful. At the time, Gabriel had been glad of the respite from the weight of a title he had never expected, and certainly had not wanted, to bear so soon.

Others had taken up the nickname afterward, for far less genial reasons. He might have challenged them, called out their blatant disrespect, but why trouble himself to deny such a fitting soubriquet? Everything he touched turned to cinder.

He was Ash.

Her skirts rustled as she uncrossed her ankles and sat more upright. Her right forearm flattened against the table. She was preparing to take flight.

As she should.