The Companion's Secret

by Susanna Craig

  “Do you know,” he said, taking up his glass, “I think I’d rather have another chapter of The Wild Irish Rose instead.”

  She hiccupped, her expression still half-hidden by the square of linen. “Now?”

  “Why not?” The last of the day’s light was fading from the sky, but the room glowed with the light from a brace of candles.

  “I should think the better question would be why.”

  “I thought, my dear, you wished to show me the error of my ways,” he said with a mocking smile. “Consider me your test case, the skeptical Englishman to be taught to regard Ireland in a more positive light. Though I must confess I’ve really given the country very little thought, either good or bad. Until recently.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Intolerance is a great ill, certainly. But indifference is worse.”

  “Well, then…” He eased back in his chair, resting the foot of his wineglass against his waistcoat. “Do your best to correct me.”

  With an expression he would not exactly call obliging, she rose and went into the other room. When she returned, she was carrying just a few pages—the chapter he had requested and nothing more, signaling that tonight, he ought not to expect carte blanche from her. He applauded her resolve, yet the scoundrel in him warmed to the challenge it represented.

  She settled into her chair with the papers in her lap, then took a drink to wet her lips before picking up the topmost sheet. He gestured with the wine bottle for her to begin as he tipped the last of its contents into her glass.

  “Róisín had never seen the likes of Belfast,” she read. “The city hummed and thrummed with the beats of ten thousand Irish hearts and the notes of a thousand Irish harps. In her ears buzzed the varied accents of her countrymen, who hailed, as Cathal had predicted, from all the four kingdoms. To her great surprise, though, not every voice was Irish. Travelers had come from far and wide to take in the spectacle, and as she pushed through the crowd to the Assembly Room, where the harpists were to convene, she heard an Englishman say to his friends, ‘There is the one who will triumph.’

  “He was not speaking of her, of course. Rather, the ancient blind bard, Donnchadh Ó hAmhsaigh, had just passed, and a hush had fallen over the crowd, else the Englishman’s voice would have gone unheard. Hear it she did, though, and she turned toward the speaker, whose eye had likewise been caught by her flaming red hair.”

  At last, the arrival of the long-awaited villain.

  Gabriel sat up a little straighter in his chair, awaiting the catalog of his own features. But it never came. The man whom Róisín glimpsed above the heads of the other festivalgoers had golden hair and blue eyes. All boyish good looks and charm.

  A strange sort of unease settled somewhere behind Gabriel’s ribs.

  “As the man stood between her and the doorway through which she wished to enter,” Camellia read, “Róisín could not avoid his scrutiny. Nor did it occur to her that she ought to avoid it, for though her lips had sung many a song about treachery in the guise of love, she had not lived enough to know that she might be its victim.”

  Now, suspicion began to prickle along his spine. Difficult as it was to imagine the quick-witted and sharp-spoken Camellia being duped by a rogue, it seemed clear someone else had plied the author of this portrait with seductive wiles. Was it possible she had once been as naïve as her heroine? Had she fallen prey to the same sort of man?

  Or, more accurately, had she fallen prey to the wrong sort of man twice?

  For the first time, the memory of Camellia’s body beneath his produced a twinge he might have called regret. The knowledge that some other scoundrel had been the one to take Camellia’s innocence offered no salve to his conscience. Twisting the stem of his wineglass between his fingers, he forced himself to return his attention to the story.

  “‘Do you play?’ the man asked as she passed, for he could guess the direction of her steps.

  “She paused. ‘That I do, sir.’

  “He gave her a sweeping bow. ‘May I make so bold as to ask the favor of a name? I should like to be able to tell my friends I have seen the one who will win.’”

  Inwardly, Gabriel winced on Róisín’s behalf. He knew precisely where such flattery led. Camellia resolutely kept her eyes on her paper.

  “Róisín turned to look for the harpist who had passed. ‘Indeed you have, sir. ’Twas Denis Hempsey you saw.’

  “Her modesty brought a smile to his lips. ‘I meant your name, my dear,’ he said.

  “‘I’m called Róisín Nic Uidhir, sir,’ she said, when she could find her tongue. ‘In English, Rosie Maguire.’

  “‘Delighted to meet you, Miss Maguire,’ he replied with a bow. ‘Granville, at your service. And one day soon, I hope you shall play for me.’”

  Pausing, Camellia pressed the page from which she had been reading against her knees. Gabriel cleared his throat. “So Granville’s the one, eh?” he asked with false heartiness. “Clearly, a thoroughgoing rake.”

  “But it is not too clear?” She looked up at him with something like alarm in her eyes. “It’s essential readers understand that Róisín embodies Ireland, of course, its beauty, its culture, its—”

  “Its vulnerability to the rapacious appetites of England, in the form of one despicable Lord Granville?” He did not fault her approach. Readers would devour many things in the guise of a tragic love story. Even politics.

  “But Mr. Dawkins disliked my portrayal of Granville, in particular. He thought it a caricature. Hence my need to study the habits and history of someone more…complex.”

  “Complex.” He knew better than to think it a compliment.

  “Mm, yes. It seems that England’s exceptional villainy with respect to Ireland cannot be represented by a run-of-the-mill rogue.”

  In spite of himself, Gabriel laughed. What would she say if she knew that her paragon of English vice was suspected of treason against that very crown?

  “I’m sure your revisions will satisfy Mr. Dawkins’s concerns. Most readers will not share my particular interest in the character,” he said, then paused. “To tell the truth, I expected to find him more…familiar.”

  “He—” She reached for her wine and took one swallow, then another. “I confess I did not have you in mind when I first crafted this portrait,” she admitted when she lowered the glass. “He was based on another Englishman I once knew. The son of an old school friend of my father’s who stayed with us a few weeks one autumn on his way to join a shooting party in the south.” She paused, and the silence told him all he had not wanted to know. “I was young,” she added in a rough whisper. “Younger than Róisín. That, at least, is my excuse. We—I—I foolishly imagined we would marry when he returned to Dublin.” She restored the empty goblet to the table with fingers that did not look quite steady. “He took another route home.”

  Gabriel reached out and caught her hand on its way to her lap. Even in the candlelight, he could see that the wine had brought a flush of color to her cheeks, but her fingertips were cold. “How young, Camellia?”

  “Not quite seventeen.”

  “He—he did not—?” He could not seem to push the necessary words past the anger that swelled his throat like the stings of a swarm of bees.

  She took pity on him. “Force his attentions where they were not wanted? Oh, no. I threw myself quite willingly into his arms.” He could hear the anger in her voice too, the frustration. Along with a ripple of shame. Once more, she freed her hand from his.

  “Why did your father not insist he make amends? Or your brother?”

  “Paris was fifteen. Had he known, I’m sure he would have gone off half-cocked and got himself killed. And as for Papa…well, what was to be done? A duel? Only brash young men imagine those spectacles can make up for the honor that was lost.”

  So much for his hope that either Cathal or Fergus would run Granville through t
o avenge the poor Irish Rose once she’d been plucked. Reluctantly, Gabriel nodded his agreement and tried not to think of Fox’s parting words to him.

  “Papa found out only later that his friend had sent his son away from London in hopes of separating him from undesirable acquaintances and bad habits. A plan that seemed to have failed quite spectacularly, in my view…” Camellia’s voice trailed off as she gazed at the flickering candlelight like a distant star. Then she shook off the memory and met his eyes. “The following spring, when my friends could talk of nothing but come-outs and finding husbands, I was of course deemed perfectly ineligible for any desirable match, spared from all but a few pitying glances. I decided to embrace my fate—my freedom. I did not need a man. With five younger siblings, I had had my fill of raising children. All my life, I had been jotting down stories, but now that I was to be a spinster, I began to write in earnest.” Behind her spectacles, her green eyes sparked with familiar energy. “And if by chance the gossip about my indiscretion did not immediately deter a gentleman, I would simply say or do something rather outlandish to prove to him I would not suit.”

  Recalling their first meeting, he had no difficulty at all imagining what those outlandish things might have been.

  “Will you tell me what happens to Granville?” he asked after a moment, nodding toward the unread pages.

  Her fingers tightened around them. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Surely Róisín’s seducer would be subject to a more fitting reckoning than Camellia’s had been.

  “That is, I do not—I do not know anymore,” she said, rising. “Originally, I intended for Róisín to return to Belfast the following year, carrying her broken harp as if it were a child, playing the song of a woman scorned by her lover, who died when she pushed him off a cliff.”

  It was a chilling image, both for what it revealed about the characters and what it foretold about the future of Anglo-Irish relations. But he took some comfort in Camellia’s hesitation. At least she was having some small bout of conscience about killing him off.

  Gabriel, too, got to his feet, and in the small room they stood for a moment, toe to toe, separated by little more than the half dozen sheets of paper she held, close enough that he could feel her tremble. How he longed to take her in his arms, to prove he was something more than a convenient villain. Was any part of her hoping he would?

  He leaned his body away from the possibility. “About last night…”

  Her eyes darted nervously around the room, looking anywhere but at him. “Oh, please do not.”

  “Do not what? Speak of it?”

  One hand released the papers and fluttered in search of a word. “Apologize. Scold. I—I had done with all that nonsense years ago. A woman of my age and situation may, I trust, be permitted to indulge her curiosity from time to time, and I merely wanted to know if certain rumors about…Lord Ash were true.”

  He dared to catch her chin in his hand and bring her gaze to his. “And were they?”

  Rebelliousness sparkled behind her spectacles. “No.”

  He recognized the challenge in that word. The invitation. The lie he did not dare to correct. As he lowered his mouth to within an inch of hers, her eyelids fluttered down obligingly. “Then I’ll wish you a good night, my dear,” he whispered. “So sorry to disappoint.”

  Five minutes later, when he stopped at the stable door and looked back, he could still see her at the window, backed by the candles’ flickering light.

  * * * *

  Cami made certain to rise early enough that she was dressed and waiting downstairs when Gabriel came to fetch her. No more intimate moments behind closed doors. No more courting disaster. The Wild Irish Rose was not a romance. She knew how the story had to end, and she must not try to rewrite history, neither his nor her own. He was an English nobleman, unmoved either by Ireland’s past glory or its present plight, and—

  In her mind, she heard him ask for another chapter of Róisín’s sad story. Heard the quiet fury in his voice as he reacted to her own tale of woe. No, not unmoved. Whatever his reputation for heartlessness, she knew at least a portion of it to be false.

  Oh, that had been the worst of it from the beginning, the discovery that “Lord Ash” was a creation, a fabrication, no more real than her pen and ink one, but crafted with a far more malicious intent, and not by Gabriel alone, either. How, in all these years, had no one managed to catch a glimpse of the pain-filled eyes behind that mask? Or why, among all the women he had purportedly known, had he chosen to reveal himself to her?

  But perhaps he didn’t have a choice in the matter, any more than she seemed to have.

  Her fingers tightened on the handles of her valise. All her bravery had deserted her. She found herself wishing he would not ask to hear more.

  “Good morning,” he called to her as he approached, looking infuriatingly better rested and less rumpled that she, although she had been the one to enjoy the benefits of a proper bed. Dare she hope that with all that energy he would elect to continue on horseback and leave the carriage to her?

  But after he handed her into the coach, he followed and settled in across from her like a sultan awaiting his entertainment. “What adventure now befalls poor Róisín?” he asked as soon as the driver had chirruped to the horses.

  Masking a sigh, she dug the manuscript from her bag. After she had delayed as long as she could, shuffling through the stack of paper twice as she pretended to look for her place, she began.

  “The next morning dawned cool and bright, and Róisín’s harp was tuned and ready with the sun. With every bard that played and sang, the trembling of her fingers increased. How could she presume to play before them?

  “When her turn came, she tilted her instrument against her breast and plucked the first notes of the keening melody she had written, weaving together the stories of Deirdre and Meadhbh and all the strong women who had made Ireland proud.

  “She did not win the competition, of course. She was, as Cathal had said, only a woman, and the only woman who competed, at that. But she won the hearts of many of those who heard her, a prize more valuable to her than gold.

  “She also won the attentions of Lord Granville, which value I shall leave it to the reader to determine.”

  From that point on in the story, myriad scratches and scribblings made her own hand more difficult to decipher. More slowly, she read of how Granville showed an interest in Róisín’s song and the history that lay behind it. Her friends whispered that his interest was pretended. The women of her village shook their heads and declared that even though St. Patrick had long ago driven all the serpents from the green isle, Róisín still ought to be able to recognize one when it slithered across her path.

  Meanwhile, in her innocence, Róisín imagined she might turn a stranger to Ireland into a friend.

  “Where in God’s name are Cathal and Fergus while this preening dandy attempts to have his way with their sister?” Gabriel demanded, dashing Cami’s hope that he had begun to doze.

  “Do you know what had happened just a few months earlier in Belfast?”

  He waved the question away in obvious annoyance.

  “Several young men, men who spoke with great admiration for the revolution in France, met and formed a society they hoped would bring together both Protestant and Catholic in the cause of an independent Ireland. After the festival, they took the harp as their symbol.” Between the sentences she left a little prompting pause, willing him to put together the pieces.

  “The United Irishmen, you mean. So this festival was a real event? And they were there, recruiting members to their cause?”

  “Yes.”

  The answer did not seem to satisfy him. “So the Maguire brothers are off raising a glass to freedom while their sister—”

  “Their goals are the same, Gabriel,” she said, holding up one hand to settle him. “To make English
eyes see Ireland in a new light. And besides…” It was her turn to study the landscape as it slipped past the window. “It’s only a story.”

  “Well, go on with it, then,” he grumbled, folding his arms across his chest.

  Reluctantly, she took up her pages once more. To earn Róisín’s sympathy and trust, Granville plied her with stories of his troubled childhood and misspent youth. It was here where the character had ceased to be based on a man from Cami’s past and had become a version of the man before her now. A man whose father had died under mysterious circumstances, who had been raised by a cruel uncle, and whose skill at hazard had led him to commit more than a few cruelties himself.

  “Hazard?” Gabriel’s mouth was twisted slightly to the side as if he had ground the word between his teeth before spitting it out. “I thought you intended to craft the image of a clever rake, Miss Burke, not a boy shooting marbles with his chums.”

  Had she really once quibbled with Felicity’s description of him as dark? A thundercloud was building across his brow. Of all the things she had expected him to find objectionable, a villain who diced had been the least of her worries.

  He had let her read without interruption, without even much change in his expression, until that moment. Before she could think of a suitable reply to his critique, the carriage gave a lurch, drawing their eyes to the window. She had not noticed that the scenery beyond it had been growing increasingly rugged, while the road had narrowed until it was barely wide enough for the coach.

  Gabriel swore under his breath.

  “What is it?” she demanded. “Is one of the horses injured? Have we damaged a wheel?”

  “We should be so fortunate.” He shoved himself back into his seat, folded his arms across his chest, and shook his head. “No, it would seem we’re nearly to Stoke.”