Although she told herself she had imagined it, Wafford seemed to smile as he showed her in. Hardly had she crossed the threshold when Felicity approached, arms outstretched. “Cousin Camellia, oh, thank goodness. I’ve been so worried. Did you make it to Dublin safely?” Cami nodded. “And your family—?”
“We were fortunate, compared to many.”
“When did you return to town?” As she reached Cami, she hesitated. Her brow furrowed, as if she had just remembered something unpleasant. “It was really very heartless of you not to have written.”
“I’m sorry,” Cami said, scrambling for an excuse. “I—I feared my aunt would take a dim view of my letters.”
“Oh, well, you needn’t have worried about that.” Ready and willing to forgive, Felicity linked their arms and led Cami up the stairs. “Mama is in Derbyshire with Stephen. Since shortly after Papa returned. He is busy with the House of Lords most every day, of course, and—”
They were passing Uncle Merrick’s study at that very moment, and Cami could not help but catch the sound of voices. A familiar voice. Not raised, but clearly angry.
“I would have succeeded, you know, if not for your interference.” The speaker hesitated between phrases, as if his lungs were too weak to draw a full breath.
“I would not call it success, sir, if threats were needed to get the votes.” Her uncle’s voice, considerably calmer.
“But it was you, was it not, who put it about to the papers? His—his philanthropy?” He spat out the word. “Well, it doesn’t mean he’s not a rat. A rat with a guilty conscience.”
Felicity tried to urge her to continue down the corridor, but Cami’s feet felt glued in place.
“Five thousand pounds to St. Luke’s,” the rough voice continued, “with the promise they’d never reveal his name. Now, what I’d like to know is how you found out about it.”
“I had a letter.”
Cami’s heart leaped. She knew her uncle must be referring to her letter, in which she’d told him what Mr. Hawthorne had said. From the sounds of things, it had helped to sway opinion in Gabriel’s favor and thwart his uncle’s plot.
“Hmph. Anonymous, I suppose.” Before she and Felicity could move, the door flew open and Lord Sebastian Finch stomped through, leaning heavily on his cane. “Out of the way, girl. You?” He caught sight of Cami as he passed, and now paused to look her up and down. “This is your niece, isn’t it, Merrick? Your Irish niece?”
Her uncle now stepped into the doorway, and a smile warmed his blue eyes, so like his daughter’s. “Why, Camellia. This is a pleasant surprise. Welcome back.”
“So you’re the one my nephew took to Dublin, eh?”
Cami snagged her lip between her teeth, while her uncle’s eyes widened at this revelation and Felicity looked down at her hands.
“Didn’t think I’d know, did you?” Lord Sebastian sneered. “But the coach came from Finch House, and there are those who remain loyal to me.”
Oh, that ill-fated journey. Why, why had Gabriel ever undertaken it?
But she knew the answer to that question now. The terrible, wonderful answer.
He had done it for her.
Lord Sebastian crossed his hands over his cane. “Strange place for an Englishman to be, on the eve of a rebellion.”
“What are you insinuating, Finch?” Uncle Merrick demanded.
Cami, however, had already begun to put together the scattered pieces of the man’s puzzling words. It sounded as if he hoped to find a way to associate Gabriel with the rebellion, to implicate him in something illegal, as he had, thank God, apparently failed to do with the assassination attempt on the king.
Only this time, as she well knew, his talk of treason would be true.
“And then there’s that story everyone’s blathering on about,” Lord Sebastian continued, “The Irish Something—”
“The Wild Irish Rose?” Felicity chimed in. Only sheer force of will kept the gasp of shock from passing Cami’s lips. “Oh, isn’t it thrilling?”
“It’s dreck, girl,” he declared, thumping his cane against the floor for emphasis. “But there’s a character in it who seems more than a little familiar. Almost as if the author had a close, personal acquaintance with such a villain…” He sized Cami up once more. “An Irish writer, of course. Has to be. And likely a woman…”
“Enough, Finch. Surely you’re not suggesting my niece is acquainted with the person who penned a popular work of fiction, merely because they are both Irish?” Her uncle glanced her way, and with the eye farthest from Lord Sebastian, out of that man’s line of vision, he gave a slow wink. Again, she fought to keep her reaction from showing on her face. “Or that your nephew is somehow involved with the United Irishmen? Have done with your tiresome theories about Ashborough. They grow wilder than The Wild Irish Rose.” Lord Sebastian scowled, but Uncle Merrick’s expression remained remarkably pleasant. “Won’t you let me walk you out?”
With another smile of welcome for Cami, he motioned her and Felicity down the corridor while ushering his unwelcome guest in the opposite direction.
In another moment, she found herself in Aunt Merrick’s sitting room. “Well,” Felicity said as she seated herself, “that was an odd encounter.”
“Yes,” Cami agreed, taking a chair. Her head whirled with the strange and surprising things she’d heard, along with a few new questions. She decided to begin at the beginning. “I gather you knew that Lord Ashborough took me to Dublin?”
“Of course. I sent him after you. I could not let you travel alone.”
Cami parted her lips to reply, though she could not think what to say. The cousin who had worried over her reputation on the public stage had thought her safer in the hands of a notorious rake?
“Oh, Camellia,” Felicity said with a laugh, “I suppose you thought you were keeping a great secret, but if you could have seen your eyes every time the man spoke to you.” She shook her head in a mock scold, and her golden curls caught the room’s primrose-tinted light. “He was relieved, I think, not to have to make me an offer. But you could have knocked me over with a feather when he wrote a letter for Papa and in it—why, what do you suppose?” Cami shook her head. “He agreed to waive Stephen’s debt and restore my dowry.”
She had known of the former provision, of course, but not the latter, even more generous, one. “On condition of your father’s assistance with the treason charge, I suppose,” she said, thinking of Lord Sebastian’s complaint.
Felicity’s lips lifted in a small smile. “Papa was grateful, to be sure. But no. He asked only that my father be willing to consider an honorable suitor for my hand: Mr. Fox.” From the sparkle in her cousin’s eyes, Cami could guess his suit had been successful. “We are engaged! And we shall be married as soon as he is ordained. Lord Ash has gifted him the living on his estate.”
“How shall you like being married to a clergyman?”
That question, Felicity did not need to answer. “Oh, but Mama was furious. When I told her I saw very little use in being trotted around to garden parties and balls and soirees after that, she took King and went into the country.”
Cami leaned forward and took her cousin’s hands in hers. “I envy you your happiness. You were truly named, Felicity.”
Felicity accepted the compliment with a blush. “Now, let’s see,” she said, tapping her lips with one finger. “What else have you missed while you were away?”
“Lord Sebastian said something about a scandalous book…?” she prompted, feeling certain her eagerness was once more plainly to be read on her face.
“Oh, yes. The Wild Irish Rose. Every tongue is wagging about it. What with the uprising, people are intrigued by anything to do with Ireland. One of the papers called it…what was the phrase? Oh, yes: ‘a prescient allegory for the present troubles.’ But it’s not a book. At least, not yet.”
&nb
sp; “I beg your pardon?” Cami said, although she had heard every word.
“The story is being published in parts in some gossip sheet called The Quizzing Glass.”
Cami knit her brow. “In parts?”
“A section at a time,” Felicity explained. “They began appearing a month ago. Papa says it’s really quite innovative—far more people can afford a penny for The Quizzing Glass than can afford a guinea for a novel. The idea is that each installment builds up interest for the next.”
Cami’s mind flooded with more questions. Had Mr. Dawkins changed his mind? Gone to print with what she’d first sent him? Decided the story was too timely to wait, the appetite for scandal too great, to risk forgoing the potential profits? But she asked only, “Have you read it?”
“Everyone has, Cousin.” Felicity rose from her chair to search through the papers on her mother’s escritoire. “Ah, here it is. The latest installment. See for yourself.”
Hesitantly, Cami took the periodical from her cousin’s hand. Her words. Róisín’s story. In print. And in the hands of half of London, according to Felicity.
She had expected to feel joy at having realized her dream. Instead, it felt a great deal more like she’d swallowed a lump of lead. “Is the author known?”
“‘A lady.’ That is all the printer will say. One of your countrywomen, evidently, as Lord Sebastian said. And something of a radical.”
Remembering her uncle’s wink, she tried to detect any hint of slyness in her cousin’s voice or face. Did she, too, suspect?
To hide her own expression, Cami dropped her eyes to the page Felicity had put before her, some early bantering exchange between Lord Granville and Róisín. The villain’s similarity to Gabriel struck her afresh. No wonder Lord Sebastian seemed sure he could use the story against his nephew.
“Why, Cousin Camellia, are you ill?” Felicity rose and hurried to her side. “I should have realized the story might upset you. It has made you think of things you would doubtless rather forget.”
Cami looked down and realized she was crumpling the pages of the magazine. With trembling fingers, she tried to smooth them out.
She’d given Gabriel the story for safekeeping. Oh, what had he done?
Chapter 22
“I would not wish to complain, my lord.” From the doorway, Arthur Remington spoke in his starchiest voice. “But that…creature would seem to have found another of my shoes.”
The rumbling, gnawing sound of a beast worrying its prey drew Gabriel’s attention from what he had been reading to the carpet that stretched between the doorway and his customary chair near the window. Nearly half of what had been a fine Turkish rug was covered by the sprawling form of a large tan dog whose enormous feet indicated it still had a great deal of growing to do.
“Has she?” He dropped onto one knee to scratch the dog’s ears with his left hand, while the right snatched away her plaything. “Now, Elf, my girl. We both know Remy has decidedly poor taste in footwear, but you mustn’t keep tormenting him about it.” As Gabriel held up what remained of the shoe, now dripping with slobber, Remington regarded both master and dog with an uncharacteristically fastidious shudder. “Remember, he only agreed to let me bring you here after I gave him his ticket to leave, and if we are too bad, he might just decide to use it.” He dropped his voice lower, as if taking the dog in confidence. “I confess I did not write him a glowing character, for I did not wish it to go to his head, but I suspect he’s more than capable of forging a better one.”
Remington only arched one brow. “If you are quite through, my lord? You have a visitor.”
“In broad afternoon? Surely Foxy has better things to occupy—”
“It is not Mr. Fox, my lord. I’ve taken the liberty of letting her in.”
Her?
With the slightest tip of his head, Remy stepped to the side, and the doorway now framed a slender, bespectacled woman with raven hair.
“Camellia.”
He was quite certain he must be hallucinating, until Elf lumbered to her feet and began to snuffle around the apparition’s hems. Camellia did not flinch—more proof she was a product of his wayward imagination. He reached out one hand to catch the dog’s collar, discovered he was still holding the battered, slobber-coated shoe, and dropped it. Delighted at the unexpected return of her plaything, Elf snatched it up and resumed her prior occupation.
So many times in the weeks since he’d left Dublin, he’d been on the point of throwing caution to the wind and going back to her. Then he would remember: She had made her choice. A wise woman, as he’d once said. Too wise to plan a future with him.
Still kneeling, hand outstretched, Gabriel held his breath when Camellia reached out and laid her fingers in his.
She was warm. Flesh and blood. Real.
“Gabriel?” As usual her green eyes were scouring him from head to toe.
At the questioning note in her voice, he gave a self-deprecating laugh, rose to his feet, and led her around the dog and into the room. “When did you return to town?”
“Only yesterday.” She was clad in one of her plain, loose-fitting dresses. Remy must already have relieved her of her pelisse and gloves and bonnet.
“Alone?”
To his relief, she shook her head. “Erica is with me. She was eager to leave Dublin.”
“Understandably so.” He gestured her to a chair and returned to his own. “Is she otherwise well?”
The question required more reflection than he had expected. “I—I am not entirely certain. Erica is my sister, and dear to me, but she and I have never…” She paused again. “I am not in her confidence.”
“I see.” It was Gabriel’s turn to hesitate. “And you? Are you well?”
“I hardly know that, either.” Her voice acquired a sharper edge. “Over the past six weeks, I have been torturing myself, thinking what might have become of you.” He’d been torturing himself, too, trying not to think of her and certain she had not been thinking of him. “I made myself picture you with my cousin,” she said, and he could tell by the uncomfortable set of her jaw precisely what that picture had entailed. “I even told myself you must be dead. I thought I had imagined every conceivable scenario. I did not, however, picture you cozy at home with a dog.”
Hawthorne had foisted the mastiff pup on him when he’d passed by Stoke on his way back to London, insisting Gabriel would benefit from the responsibility of caring for her, as well as from the canine devotion he would receive in return. Whether the steward had been right was a secret Gabriel intended to carry to his grave.
Realizing she was the topic of conversation, Elf paused in her destruction of the shoe, looked from one to the other of them, then heaved herself to her overlarge feet and came to lay her head on Camellia’s knee. Gabriel reacted swiftly to spare her, leaning forward to pull the dog away, but to his shock, Camellia laid her palm on Elf’s head and smoothed the wrinkled skin there.
“I met Mr. Fox today,” she continued, and her voice seemed to him to have lost some of its sharp edge. “He was walking his dogs on Hampstead Heath, near where Erica and I have taken a house.”
“Was it he who brought you here?” Gabriel asked in genuine surprise. Fox could be a stickler for propriety, and it was most improper for a lady to call on a gentleman—to say nothing of bearding a rogue in his den.
“No. He took me to Trenton House to see Felicity. I came away with a great deal of information.” That, Gabriel suspected, was a bit of an understatement. “From there I walked to Grosvenor Square, but the butler at Finch House insisted you were not at home. I had not yet decided what step I should take next, when your downstairs parlor maid—a French girl by the name of Adele—whispered to me I might find you here.” She paused. “Is she the one? Did you manage to help her once more?”
“Remy did it, actually. By the time I returned to London, he’d rounde
d up proof she could not have been involved in the assassination attempt. After that, it was no great matter to secure her release.”
“And to clear your name as well.”
“Yes.” Though the resolution to his uncle’s threat had been rather anti-climactic, the thought of what might have happened still had the power to make him wake in a cold sweat. Or perhaps that was simply a consequence of waking alone. “Of course, that was not all I had to do in town. You had given me a commission to execute.”
“You refer, I suppose, to taking The Wild Irish Rose to Mr. Dawkins. But I had not considered it a commission.”
Without conscious thought, he reached into his coat pocket and rubbed his fingertips over the length of silk ribbon he had secreted there. “Perhaps not. Still, Dawkins was glad to have it.” It had required all Gabriel’s strength to part from the pages over which she had labored, however. “He told me he considered it an ideal test for his new publishing method.”
Her eyes were fixed on the motion of her own thumb, stroking the dog’s short fur along the line where the black mask of her face met the tan of her body. Elf gave a blissful groan, and a damp spot began to form on Camellia’s knee beneath the dog’s drooping jowls. After a moment, Camellia said, “What if the story provides society with fresh proof that what your uncle says about you is true?”
“Because of Granville, you mean?” He made a scoffing sound in his throat. “People see what they wish to see. And in any case, it’s only a story, as someone once told me. It’s hardly proof of a crime. A solicitor’s daughter ought to know that.”
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