Page 9 of The Companion’s Secret

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.

Chapter 3

Given the weather, Cami could only assume that her plan had curried the Almighty’s favor. Three fine days in early spring were unheard of—especially three fine days in a row. Yet here she was in Hyde Park beneath a blue sky smudged only by picturesque puffs of cloud, walking four steps behind Felicity and Lord Ashborough.

She walked alone, but she did not mind in the slightest. Although the park was crowded, this was almost as good as a solitary stroll, a pleasure that had been denied her since coming to London. Such moments—among people, yet apart from them—were a writer’s bread and butter, the food on which she fed her imagination. She loved to observe the fashions, the mannerisms, the way the afternoon sunlight turned the rippling surface of the Serpentine into a diamond-crusted path. She breathed deeply and drew in the scent of grass and new leaves and delicate flowers—and underneath those brighter notes, the musky smell of decay and manure and coal smoke that gave the spring air its piquancy.

Under ordinary circumstances, she might have whiled away the time dreaming up new stories, a plot to pair the elegant, fair-haired gentleman with the mousy governess who watched him surreptitiously when her eyes should have been on her charges; another to match the lady wearing too much rouge, trying desperately to look young to her circle of admirers, with the balding but sincere older gentleman who hung back just a bit from the brilliant rays of her wit. Whatever else its failings, London did not lack characters.

But today her attention was focused squarely on the most interesting character of all.

The Marquess of Ashborough walked with his hands crossed behind his back. He had not, to Cami’s surprise and Felicity’s evident relief, offered Felicity his arm. In fact, he kept himself ever so slightly apart from his companion—perhaps to avoid being poked in the eye by the ferrule of her parasol, which Felicity had a habit of twirling nervously. Thanks to that confection of muslin and lace, Cami could not see her cousin’s face; she could only imagine her expression, seeing it refracted through Lord Ash’s attention.

To overcome the slight distance between their bodies, his head was tilted perpetually toward Felicity’s, so much so that Cami began to suspect he would end the day with an uncomfortable crick in his neck. He moved with grace, despite the awkward posture necessitated by walking beside someone so much shorter than he; his stride was easily twice the length of Felicity’s, yet Cami observed no hitch in his gait, no restraint in his movements. He listened far more than he spoke, nodded encouragingly now and then, and if his smile could not precisely be called genuine, she saw no trace of the lupine in it either. He seemed determined to put her cousin at ease.

With eager fingers Cami reached for the little notebook she had once worn on a chain around her neck, forgetting for a moment that her brother had put a stop to it the day she had wandered into the roadway while scribbling and was nearly struck by a passing hack. She would just have to save her notes on these encounters for the privacy of her room.