“I’m Daphne,” said the older girl, the one who had spoken first. “And that’s Bellis—Bell for short.” Both of them had light brown hair and blue eyes; he could see something of the Trenton features in their faces, and he supposed they must take after their mother. “How do you know Cami?”
Cami. Given his own experience, he wondered how Camellia felt about having her name clipped. But perhaps she preferred it. Perhaps with those who were privileged to call her Cami, she was another person entirely.
“I am an acquaintance of your uncle, the Earl of Merrick,” he explained, careful not to claim anything that wasn’t the truth. Children could always tell when an adult was lying—at least, he had always been able to tell.
“You’re English,” Daphne pointed out.
“I am.”
She took in his admission with an expression of interest. “Well, go on.”
“When Miss Burke received Miss Erica Burke’s letter—”
“Oooh, Paris is in trouble, isn’t he?” Bellis exclaimed, somewhat gleefully.
“I—I don’t know,” Gabriel replied. “In any case, your sister wished to return to Dublin immediately, of course. But it would not do to have her travel all this way alone, so I offered my assistance and the use of my coach.”
The answer seemed to satisfy them. “Maybe now,” Bell opined solemnly, “Erica will stop shrieking at us like a banshee. Would you like tea?”
“Yes, thank you.” He looked about for the tea table and found that the girls had already put it to other uses in their building project. With care, he slipped one chair from beneath the tablecloth and seated himself near the desk. “What happened to your brother Galen?”
“Dunno,” Daphne said, handing him an impossibly tiny cup and saucer, then filling it with airy nothing from an equally tiny teapot.
Biting his lip to keep from laughing, he raised the cup to his mouth and pretended to take a noisy sip. “Mmm. Just how I like it.”
After a while, when it became clear he was too big to fit into their fortress made of chairs, he ceased to be an object of interest, and the girls returned to their play. He rose and went to the window, but it afforded no view of the street.
“Gabriel?” Camellia’s voice was high and brittle.
He turned to find her in the doorway, white lipped and wide eyed.
“Cami, you’re home!” Knocking over a chair, Bellis flew to wrap her arms around her eldest sister, followed quickly by Daphne. Camellia hugged them and kissed them, running her hands over their heads as she exclaimed at how they’d grown and expressed her hope that they’d been good.
Tangled in her skirts, clinging to her, the girls seemed to drag her already weary frame lower with the weight of their affection. Gabriel stepped forward. “How is your brother?”
Camellia quickly shook her head and darted her gaze at her young sisters, refusing to answer in front of them.
“Daphne, I think your sister could use a cup of tea too. A real one,” he added, lest there be any confusion. “Is there anyone in the kitchen who could—?”
“Cook left,” Bell piped up. “The same day Paris did. Won’t Papa be angry?”
“I can do it myself,” Daphne declared.
“Thank you, dear,” Camellia said. “I’ll send Molly down to help. In the meantime, Lord Ashborough, if I could trouble you for a piece of advice?” She turned, indicating he was to follow her upstairs. “Galen has sustained an injury to his leg. Erica has been doing her best to treat him, but…well, I remembered how neatly you were able to bandage my ankle, and I thought, perhaps…”
He thought of infection, gangrene, or worse. Injuries no one could treat. “Of course,” he said, with more confidence than he felt.
Two flights up, they entered a bedchamber. Erica bent over a young man of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, with red-brown hair a few shades darker than her own and a face nearly as pale as the linen against which it lay. His eyes were closed, but his grimace of pain indicated he was not sleeping.
When Camellia laid her hand on her sister’s shoulder, Erica readily conceded her place to him. “Galen,” he said, and the boy’s eyelids fluttered. “I’m Ashborough. I’m going to have a look at your leg.”
Taking his groan for assent, Gabriel lifted the quilt to find the young man still wearing his boots. “He was in too much pain for me to pull them off, and he wouldn’t let me cut them,” Erica defended herself. Muffling a curse, Gabriel ran one hand along the supple leather and felt what was almost certainly a protrusion of bone, immobilized by the shaft of the boot. Above the cuff, the leg was swollen. Good God. Had the boy’s concern for his tight-fitting, fashionable footwear cost him his leg, or saved it?
“He needs a physician,” Gabriel declared, straightening.
“I know it,” Erica said. “But I didn’t dare fetch one.”
“Why not? The streets are quiet.”
“They are quiet today, your lordship. Was I to leave my brother and sisters here alone and go out and perhaps not—?” With every word, her voice rose.
“Erica.” Camellia spoke firmly, but quietly. “Lord Ashborough understands. I understand. Sir Owen Sydney lives just on the opposite side of the square. I’ll go now, and—”
“And abandon me again?” Erica looked stricken. “Not on your life.”
“I’ll go,” Gabriel said, leaving no room for argument. “While I’m gone, cut up strips of linen for bandages, rummage up something firm and straight to use for a splint, and find whatever you can to dull your brother’s pain. Laudanum, if you’ve got it. Spirits. Anything. He’s going to need it.”
* * * *
Sometime after she had managed to get Daphne and Bell into bed, and hopefully to sleep, Cami found Gabriel in the sitting room, restoring to their proper places the chairs that the girls had apparently turned into some sort of fairy cave or…or fortification. She shuddered at the word. Even inside the house, they were not safe from the rebellion.
When had darkness fallen? Earlier, she had felt nearly overwhelmed by her own exhaustion, but she had denied it so ruthlessly for so long, she knew it was useless to try to sleep now. Sir Owen had left some time ago, his expression grim, but hopeful. They’d eaten, although Cami, who’d lost track of the hour, was at a loss to know what to call the meal the girls had scrounged from the larder and proudly set before them. Erica had dozed over it, propping up her head with her elbow on the table. Afterward, Cami had helped her to bed too.
While she watched from the doorway, Gabriel finished with the chairs, folded Mama’s best damask tablecloth, which the girls must have filched from the linen press while Molly was distracted, and found her father’s decanter of Irish whiskey, still open on his desktop, now half-empty. A good deal of it had been poured down Galen’s throat, to blunt the pain of having his boot removed and the broken leg set. Eventually, he’d fainted, for which small mercy Cami had offered up a whispered prayer of thankfulness. Still, the house seemed to echo with the memory of his screams.
When Gabriel poured a tumbler-full with trembling hands, tossed it back, and poured another, she could guess he still heard them too.
Stepping toward him, she spoke into the dimness. “Does it help?”
He twisted sharply in surprise, then offered her a grim smile. “Not enough.”
In half a dozen steps, she was before him. Wordlessly, she plucked the glass from his fingers, gave its contents a little swirl, and took a searing gulp. “You’re right,” she agreed, returning the glass to the desktop.
“Come,” he said, taking her hand. “Sit.”
She waited, though, until he had settled into a chair, then nestled into his lap and let herself sag against the breadth of his chest. Idly, she straightened the knot of his cravat. Was it really only a week ago that she had weighed whether or not to kiss him? The events of the past few days had woven them together like the war
p and weft of the finest Irish linen. Not just physically, either, although the mere memory of their joining made her body thrum with pleasure, despite her exhaustion. He might believe his heart to be broken, capable of nothing more than breaking other hearts in turn. But she knew acts of love when she saw them. Without Gabriel’s strength, the elderly physician would never have been able to set Galen’s leg. Without his playfulness, the little girls might have succumbed to fear. Without his support, she would surely have collapsed hours ago. “Thank you,” she murmured against his neck.
When he said nothing in reply, she decided he too must have fallen asleep.
Sometime later, whether hours or minutes she could not say, she heard the rattle of a door. Before she had time to decide what to do, footsteps bounded up the back stairs and a figure loomed in the doorway.
“Cami? Is that you?” Paris’s voice. Then, “What in the hell are you about?”
She scrambled to her feet, and behind her, Gabriel rose, his motions so swift and smooth and silent, she wondered if he had really been awake all this time. “My lord, may I introduce my brother, Mr. Burke?” she managed to say. “Paris, this is the Marquess of Ashborough. He has been kind enough to bring me all the way from London.”
“Burke,” Gabriel said in his deep voice, stepping forward, hand extended, as to an equal.
Paris, however, did not accept his hand. “You’re English.” Even in the darkened room, she could see the glitter of hatred in his eyes.
“So is our mother,” she reminded him.
“How dare you touch my sister?” Paris demanded, ignoring her.
“That’s enough, Paris,” she snapped, stepping between them. “How dare you leave Erica to manage alone? And Galen—”
The question softened him slightly. “Is he all right?”
“Of course not. It’s a miracle he didn’t lose his leg. Sir Owen Sydney came this afternoon. He’ll never walk without a limp, if he walks at all. And you left him—”
“If I’d left him,” Paris countered, jerking his chin a notch higher, “he be dead in a ditch outside Rathmines where the horse threw him. And if I’d stayed here with him, you might soon have had the militia breaking down your door.”
“My God,” she breathed. “What have you—?”
Paris held up a hand to stop her. Behind them, she heard Gabriel rattle a tinderbox; then a light flared to life, casting shadows across her brother’s face and its hard lines of dirt and grief and hate. “Not another word. Not in front of him.”
Gabriel calmly continued to light candles until the room’s darkness had been driven back. “I’ll excuse myself,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “Unless Camellia wants me to stay.”
She had never wanted anything more. But Paris’s fierce expression belonged to a man she hardly knew. “Go on,” she choked past the sudden knot in her throat. “I’ll be fine.”
Gabriel searched her face, then nodded and was gone. Hardly had he crossed the threshold before her brother bit out, “Ashborough? Not the man who was going to marry our cousin?”
“No,” Cami said without thinking. “I mean, yes. But he’s not marrying her now. And he’s not marrying me either, lest you get any ideas.”
“I should say not, Cam,” he declared. “I’d have thought you’d learned your lesson there.”
Her hand itched to slap him, as she would’ve done when they were young. But though he stood just half a head taller than she, the man before her now, darkly handsome and coldly arrogant, was clearly beyond her reach.
“Tell me what’s happened,” she said instead, leading him to a chair.
“Everything’s botched,” he declared, polishing off the tumbler of whiskey still sitting on their father’s desk. “I knew of the plans, of course. The idea was to seize the mail coaches as a sign for the rest of the country to rise. Then someone else swore it was off. Do you think I’d have let our parents leave town if I’d thought the rebellion was about to begin? I’d have been asleep in my bed if I hadn’t got word that Galen had sneaked off to join in the fray.” He shook his head, his expression a mixture of pride and disapproval. “Well, it was pretty much chaos. Dublin went out like a damp squib. But it seems the embers are still burning in the surrounding counties. I’ve just got word from Wexford—”
“Wexford?” The Nugents’ estate lay in that county to the south of Dublin. “Where Mama and Papa are?”
He nodded soberly. “The people there fought back and cut the militia down. It might be just the spark we need to set the whole country ablaze,” he added, his face animated with a grim sort of energy. “Dublin Castle is scared.”
“So am I.” She got to her feet and began to pace. What might become of her parents, trapped in the center of the fighting? What might become of them all? “If it’s known you’re involved, you shouldn’t have come home,” she told him. “You’ll bring this war right to our doorstep.”
“I had to come,” he insisted, catching her hand as she passed. “Henry Edgeworth was shot. He’s…he’s gone, Cam.”
Tears stung in her eyes, but she refused to close them. Still, her mind conjured the image of Erica’s face when she learned of her intended’s fate. “Oh, Paris.”
“Thank God you’re here,” he said, squeezing her fingers.
And then she did allow her eyelids to drop, for she understood he meant for her to deliver the news to their sister. After blinking back her tears, she searched his dark eyes. “Is this really what you wanted?”
“It means freedom,” he reminded her. “For us. For Ireland.”
One of Róisín’s brothers would have said as much. Oh, how had she ever imagined that a mere book could change the stubborn hearts of men?
Cami shook her head and released his hand. “It means death.”
Chapter 20
Gabriel made his way upstairs, but not before overhearing Camellia’s sharp retort to her brother: He’s not marrying me, either.
Was it the truth? There’d been no discussion of marriage between them, certainly, beyond his own insistence that he couldn’t marry anyone. He knew the source of his own hesitation, but now he saw more fully what lay at the root of hers. With marriage came children, the management of a household, and as she’d told him, she’d had her fill of those things already. From the moment of her arrival, her family had been only too eager to lay their burdens at her feet, and he had watched her siblings drain what strength and energy she had, then demand more. To be sure, today had been an extraordinary day, but he suspected that even an ordinary one left her very little time to follow her own passions, nor the peace to dream her own dreams, just as this house, filled to overflowing with the people she loved, left little space for the work she also loved. He understood, suddenly, the appeal spinsterhood held out to her, even if it meant serving as a lady’s companion.
An undeniable passion had flared between them. She’d spoken words of love that he longed, even now, to return. But there was truth in what she’d said aboard the ship as they crossed the Irish Sea. England and Ireland were too close to be fully independent of one another, but too different to be successfully joined. Couldn’t the same thing be said of an Irish patriot and an English rake? If Granville and Róisín could not find happiness, even in the pages of fiction, how could he and Camellia hope to find it in this world?
Outside the door to Galen’s room, he paused, then went in. The boy was sleeping fitfully. Soon, he would wake and call for his sister. This, at least, was a burden he could lift from her shoulders. After checking to see that Galen was not feverish, Gabriel settled himself into the chair in the corner of the room to keep watch.
Twice during that short night, he soothed the boy back to sleep, the second time administering a dose of the laudanum the physician had left. Sometime after that, he dozed and was awoken by the patter of rain on the window. By the gray light of dawn, he could just make out a dark-h
aired figure kneeling beside the bed. Paris gripped his younger brother’s hand and appeared to utter a silent prayer.
Despite the dissimilarities of their circumstances, Gabriel could recognize in the man something of his own brashness, a confidence that a combination of good looks and brains would carry him over any rough patches, even those of his own making.
He also knew guilt when he saw it.
After a few minutes Paris rose and left the room, giving no sign he had noticed Gabriel. Galen slept soundly now, and some of the color had returned to his face. Satisfied that the boy would rest quietly for some time, Gabriel ventured downstairs.
His better nature, such as it was, hoped Camellia was asleep somewhere. The rest of him was selfish enough to be glad at finding her in the cozy kitchen, though she was not alone. Paris sat, head in hand, poring over papers spread before him on a scarred table.
“Camellia,” Gabriel said quietly as he crossed the threshold. She looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes.
Paris turned with a scowl, covering his papers with one arm. “Still here, Ashborough?”
“His presence is not a danger to this family, Paris.”
“I’m not so sure.” He shared his sister’s black hair and slender build, but his eyes were dark and they cast a disapproving glare between him and Camellia before returning to his reading.
“It’s you who’s the danger, Paris.” Erica brushed Gabriel’s shoulder as she passed into the room. Like her sister, she was red eyed and haggard. “Look what you’ve already done to your brother,” she demanded shrilly. “And to me.”
“Shh.” Camellia stepped between them. “You’ll wake the girls. And Galen—”
“Was resting comfortably when I left his room a few minutes ago,” Gabriel said.
Her eyes flared with a mixture of gratitude and surprise. “Thank you for checking on him.”
Paris’s expression was more wary. “I shouldn’t have let Galen get involved in all this,” he admitted, rising. “But Henry was his own man.”
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