The Companion's Secret

by Susanna Craig

  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.

  But before she could commit to memory the way Lord Ashborough’s gray duster rippled over the breadth of his shoulders, like sheepskin over a wolf’s back, she saw Mr. Fox at last hie into view, walking—correction: being dragged along by—four large dogs, and the blood in her veins turned to ice.

  “Foxy!” Lord Ashborough called and tipped his hat to his friend.

  The gesture of greeting drove the dogs wild. Three pulled harder in his direction, while one shied sharply away. It looked for a moment as if Mr. Fox’s arm might be wrenched from its socket. Somehow, he managed to separate the tangled leashes, so that each arm now bore a share of the strain. At the same time, he spoke to the dogs in a calm voice, with none of that fierce authority one expected from a handler of unruly animals and all of the good-natured affability one might expect of Mr. Fox.

  Miraculously, blessedly, his quiet words had some effect.

  Just a few feet away now, one dog sat abruptly, still leaning against his restraint. The other three stopped and stood, leaving Mr. Fox surrounded by a quivering mass of canines, their tongues lolling almost to the ground.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Felicity. Miss Burke. Ash,” he said, nodding to each in turn.

  Apparently having been reminded of her existence by his friend’s greeting, Lord Ashborough turned slightly to invite her into their circle. Mr. Fox smiled in welcome, clearly considering her a part of the group. Oh, God…what if he expected her to walk with him?

  She knew her fear of dogs was irrational. Why, if others had not repeated the story, she would not even remember the details of the childhood trauma that had led to it.

  But she could not make herself move closer.

  Closing her parasol, Felicity extended one hand to the sitting dog. “Oh, you darling thing,” she cooed. The dog’s tail thumped the ground, but he did not rise. “What’s your name?”

  “That’s Tiresias,” Lord Ash supplied on behalf of the dog.

  Lady Felicity did not look up. “Are you a sportsman, then, Mr. Fox?”

  Mr. Fox, already pink from the exertion of keeping the dogs in check, colored further. “Oh, er, I—that is, well… No,” he managed finally.

  “No? Then how did you happen to come into possession of four such fine animals?”

  “Oh, well, they’re not, you see. Not fine dogs, I mean.” A frown sketched across Felicity’s brow, and she drew back her hand. “That is, not to my brother’s way of thinking.” He gestured with his chin to the trio on his left. “Achilles was the runt. Lelantos won’t point. And Medea here has lost two litters already.”

  Despite herself, Cami smiled at the fanciful names, the warrior’s for the weakest of the litter, the legendary hunter’s to the dog
who could not spot his prey. Felicity only shook her head. “And this one?” she asked, ruffling the sitting dog’s ears. But if the name of a blind prophet proved an insufficient clue, Tiresias’s cloudy eyes revealed quite clearly the liability that kept him from the field.

  “They were all to be put down,” Fox explained, “so I—”

  “You rescued them?” she interjected.

  Fox demurred. “Foolish, I know.”

  It might have been foolish—in the extreme, to Cami’s way of thinking—but it was difficult not to like Mr. Fox in the face of further evidence of his kind heart. She wished there were any hope at all that her cousin could marry such a man, rather than Lord Ashborough.

  Felicity was looking up at Fox with an expression of admiration. “Generous, I should say. Your brother is Lord Branthwaite, is he not? I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.”

  Fox nodded. “I will introduce you, if you would like.”

  “Very much,” she replied with an enthusiastic nod. “Then I will be at liberty to give him a proper dressing down for his negligence.” Her gloved fingers traveled along Tiresias’s leash, clearly intending to snake it from Mr. Fox’s grasp.

  He hesitated. “I don’t know, ma’am. They’re not very well mannered.”

  “Then they must learn how to behave around ladies,” she insisted, tucking her parasol under her arm and grasping the lead more firmly. As Cami knew very well, and Mr. Fox was about to discover, Felicity was unaccustomed to being gainsaid.

  His grip on the other three dogs slackened slightly, but before they could take advantage of their shocked master’s moment of leniency, he had reined them in again. A puff of breath escaped Cami’s lips, and she allowed herself to relax ever so slightly.

  As she watched Felicity and Mr. Fox walk back in the direction from which he had come, she realized she was being left behind with Lord Ashborough. He seemed to have reached the same conclusion at the same moment, for he stepped closer to her. Too close. One could not observe at such proximity. It distorted the vision and muddled the senses. She could not seem to raise her eyes past the green-striped silk of his waistcoat, or clear her nose of the warm, spicy scent that lingered about him.

  Then he spoke, and she would have been willing to swear that she felt his voice as much as heard it. “We’ll have to hurry to catch them, Miss Burke. Unless, of course, you’d rather we be left alone?”

  * * * *

  Miss Burke stood frozen, face pale, shoulders raised and tense, hands balled into fists at her side. Her posture put him in mind of a small woodland creature hoping to escape the notice of a predator. Vulnerable, just as he had said.

  But he found himself suddenly disgusted by the thought. He much preferred yesterday’s show of strength. Despite the obvious alarm Fox’s revelation had produced, he did not think it was he—or at least, not he alone—that she feared.

  “Do Foxy’s dogs bother you?” he ventured, keeping his voice light.

  She stiffened further, this time in righteous indignation. “I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean, my lord. Whatever would make you say such a thing?”

  Her denial was too sharp, too swift, to be entirely honest. “The, er, enthusiasm shown by the pups seemed to startle you,” he explained. “You are no doubt accustomed to the more sedate behavior of your aunt’s pug.”

  Her throat worked up and down. “I have reached a—an accommodation with Chien, yes.”

  Chien? He could not prevent his eyes from rolling. Who named a dog Dog? Good God, Lady Merrick was lazier than he had thought. Lazy, and also so callous that she ignored her niece’s terror in favor of her own ease. A flicker of anger kindled in his belly.

  Against his better judgment, he held out his arm to her. It was not an intimate gesture, per se, but nevertheless one he generally avoided. He was a gentleman in nothing but name, and women ought not to be encouraged to entertain romantic notions to the contrary. Whatever he had to offer them, it was not safety.

  He noted the tremble of her hand as it grazed his forearm, fancied he could feel the chill of her gloved fingertips through the layers of his coats. Although she had followed them through the park as diligently, as unobtrusively, as a shadow, her mud-brown pelisse was as ineffective as yesterday’s dress at disguising what lay beneath. He easily identified the swell of her breast, the gentle curve of her waist. A straw bonnet at least as unbecoming as the pelisse hid her hair almost entirely, but a few wayward black wisps refused to be contained. Had she adopted this costume to ward off unwanted attention? Were there men who did not see past it?

  “We needn’t follow them too closely, Miss Burke,” he assured her. “You can have no concern for your cousin’s reputation in Fox’s company.”

  She shook her head. “You seem perfectly at your ease around dogs,” she said after they had walked a few steps, drawing no nearer to the others. “I suppose you are a sportsman.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “That sort of hunt has never captured my interest. The hounds, the horses…a ridiculous extravagance. Only rarely do I take on the responsibility for another’s care and feeding, Miss Burke,” he explained. “And when I do, I expect more than a few partridges as recompense.”

  If she suspected the conversation had lapsed into metaphor, she did not blush at it, though her dark brows rose.

  “Yes,” he continued, testing, “any pet of mine must do something to earn her keep.”

  “I suppose that is only fair. Perhaps it is the lack of useful occupation that renders lap dogs so vicious,” Miss Burke countered, the fear in her voice now replaced by the more familiar bite.

  “They are tame enough when well handled.”

  “You are never treated to bared teeth or a snarl, then?”

  “A nip now and then can be a sign of affection,” he said, his lips twisting wryly. “Or so I’m told.”

  Such banter was foolhardy, for more reasons than one. He was meant to be charming her, gaining a measure of her trust. Not scandalizing her further. Certainly not flirting with her. But he could not seem to help himself. He stole a glance in her direction, but she had turned her face away. The brim of her bonnet hid all from his view but the silvery rim of her spectacles.

  “You needn’t walk with me, you know,” she said after a moment. “It was not my intention to deprive you of more interesting company.”

  He narrowly suppressed a laugh. Miss Burke was even more innocent than he supposed if she imagined his conversation with her cousin had been anywhere near as interesting as this one. “If I resumed my stroll with Lady Felicity, would you then walk with Fox and his dogs?”

  He felt, rather than heard, her sharp intake of breath. “That would not be necessary,” she insisted in a small, rough voice. “I am quite used to being alone.”

  “No matter,” he said, covering her hand with his where it lay along his arm. He had not schemed for this outcome. But he meant to take advantage of it. “I for one am perfectly satisfied with the present arrangement.” They walked a few cautious steps in silence. “How do you pass your time in your uncle’s house?”

  Her head tilted quizzically as she turned toward him. “Pass my time? I read and answer Lady Merrick’s letters, respond to her invitations, and so forth.”

  “Do she and Lady Felicity receive a great number of invitations?”

  “I have no standard against which to measure such things. It certainly seems so to me.”

  He tried to decide whether she sounded petulant. “As Lady Merrick’s niece, you are included in them, I hope.”

  “As Lady Merrick’s companion, it would be perfectly inappropriate for me to attend social functions with the family.” A soft breeze fluttered the ribbons of her bonnet, and she jerked them firmly back into place. “I did not mean to make it seem as if I fault my aunt and cousin for making merry while they can. My uncle has indicated that this will be the family’s las
t London Season for some time. Because of Lord Trenton’s…indiscretions.”

  “Ah. I see.” He ought to have been surprised by her forthrightness. He was not. In fact, he found it rather attractive.

  A few steps farther, then she stopped once more. When he followed her gaze he saw that their absence had been noted by the others, who were returning to join them. His brief tête-à-tête with Miss Burke was coming to a close.

  Before he could decide the best use to make of their waning moments of privacy, she spoke. “I—I wish to know, Lord Ashborough,” she stammered, twisting around as if to face him but refusing to meet his eyes. “Is it true?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to feign ignorance, although he knew full well what she meant. No one had ever dared ask him before—at least, not for a very long time. Her insistence on confronting him seemed in keeping with what he had seen of her character, however. He suspected very few challenges went unmet by this woman.

  In any case, it would serve no purpose to deny his guilt, for there was very little of which he was not guilty.

  When he made no reply, she at last lifted her chin. Her eyes darted over his face, as if she were making a mental sketch of the hard lines into which he had schooled his expression.

  “I do not know all you have heard of me, Miss Burke,” he said softly, holding her curious green gaze until she blushed. “But I believe I can safely say yes.”

  Relieving her from the burden of a response, he released her hand and strode quickly toward the others. “I’ll take the mutts, Foxy,” he said, extending a hand. “You walk with the ladies.”

  Fox was clearly surprised by Gabriel’s request—and clearly reluctant to accede to it. Despite the conventional wisdom that sporting dogs were never to be thought of as pets, that their sole value lay in their ability to be led or bred, Fox lived with these dogs—in his house, not a kennel. Ate with them. Likely slept with them. In short, since their rescue, he had taken all their care and handling to himself, trusting no one else with the task. Until today, upon Lady Felicity’s request.