Page 48 of The Companion’s Secret

He had greeted the day with every intention of traveling in the other direction, eager to confront his uncle face-to-face. Determination had burned in his belly, hot and bright. Over the course of the last hour, however, that flame had begun to sputter and smoke. Soon enough, it would be snuffed out entirely.

What did it matter, really, whether he went forward or back? Whether he was charged with treason and hanged? Hadn’t he always expected to meet some scandalous end? And as for Stoke, what had possessed him to believe that its people were better off with him as its master, that he ought to fight to keep it out of his uncle’s hands? Camellia’s reminder, though unintentional, had been timely.

He was and never would be anything more than Ash.

In the doorway of the inn, she appeared in her plain woolen dress, covered by her usual brown pelisse. Once, he had read the loose fit of her garments as a kind of disguise; now, he found himself wondering if they had been cut for a fuller figure that had since been worn away by work or worry or homesickness. In one hand, she carried her bonnet by its ribbons; the stack of papers she held against her breast with the other. Her hair hung over one shoulder in a thick, black braid, and her chin tipped upward when he caught her eye.

Altogether a much more appealing picture than it had any right to be.

With slow steps, but no obvious limp, she crossed the cobbled inn yard to the carriage. To his side. “I hope I did not keep you waiting, my lord.”

For answer, Gabriel held out one hand to help her up. Instead, she laid the bundle of papers on his palm, followed by her bonnet, and clambered into the coach—favoring her right ankle, yes, but determinedly unassisted.

Inside the carriage, she arranged her skirts and her bonnet with care to take up the entirety of one bench. When he looked into the coach, she was sitting primly with the bound stack of pages in her lap. He could order the coachman to drive on and send her away, alone. Or he could take the seat facing the rear, facing her, and subject himself to her tale.

You are curious, I suspect, about what I have written. But what sort of man felt curiosity when looking into a mirror?

With a muttered oath, he hoisted himself into the carriage.

Hardly had the coach rolled into motion when she slipped the knot from the ribbon and took up the first sheet of paper, holding it just high enough before her that she could fix him with those sharp green eyes from time to time as she read. He had the distinct impression she was enjoying herself.

With a slight clearing of her throat, she began. “Róisín Nic Uidhir had been born with a fiery spirit to match her red hair, and so it came as no surprise to her brothers, Cathal and Fergus, when she told them she had been invited to the Belfast Harpers Assembly and meant to go, with or without them.”

Camellia’s voice, which always had a lovely, lyrical quality to it, took on a new and unfamiliar note. There was something at once alienating and compelling about it. On her tongue, the foreign names might have been invocations to a deity—some Celtic god that probably meant Englishmen like Gabriel mischief.

“‘Father needs us on the farm,’ Fergus said. He had learned to stress what was practical when trying to persuade his sister of anything. ‘And it would not be safe for you to go alone.’

“Cathal, the eldest of the three, was more decisive in his refusal. ‘You play well enough, for a girl, Róisín, but the festival will bring bards from every county. You cannot hope to compete with the likes of them. There’s no need for you to go at all, at all.’”

“So Cathal has not learned how to manage women,” Gabriel interrupted, though his tongue felt strangely inadequate to forming the name.

Her gaze flickered up from the paper, then back down. “You assume women need to be managed by men, my lord…or can be,” she countered.

He parted his lips to retort but in the end said only, “Go on with the story.”

“As you please, my lord.”

Oh, she would be the death of him with her prim, distant “my lord” this and “my lord” that. But he supposed there were worse ways to die.

“Róisín merely smiled at her brothers and set to work packing her harp. Fergus argued. Cathal scolded. Nevertheless, on a fine day in June, they left County Fermanagh exactly as she had intended they would, Fergus leading the donkey-cart that carried her precious instrument, while Cathal brought up the rear of the party, muttering dire predictions of the dangers they would face.”

The story did not attempt to disguise its allegorical qualities, as the three wide-eyed characters set out on a sort of pilgrimage. While Camellia read, Gabriel allowed his gaze to drift to the window and found himself vaguely disappointed at being surrounded by ordinary English hills and fields, rather than the rugged, green landscape of northern Ireland through which Róisín and her brothers walked. By midday, the siblings’ journey had managed to incorporate, with remarkable seamlessness, several lessons in Irish history, a description of traditional Irish clothing, and an encounter with a Catholic priest also bound for Belfast who found some excuse to give his presumably like-minded fellow travelers a lengthy discourse on the many misunderstandings to which their faith was subjected by outsiders.

“Rather heavy-handed, is it not?” Gabriel shifted awkwardly in his seat, stiff from holding himself in a position that kept their knees from brushing. “This panegyric on all things Irish? I am surprised Mr. Dawkins made no complaint.”

Camellia laid the page from which she had been reading facedown onto the steadily growing stack beside her. “You didn’t.”

He should have guessed she had noticed. In truth, he was stiff from having sat through the past three changes of the horses, held spellbound by her tale. And when he watched her plump lips curve in a provoking smile, and remembered the feel of them against his own mouth, certain parts of him grew stiffer yet.

“That’s enough for now,” he said, crossing one booted foot over the other leg and glancing toward the window. “We’ll be at the next village soon, and if the inn’s decent, we’ll stop for a meal.”

“As you wish.” She began rearranging the papers, which crinkled as she neatened the two stacks, turning one sideways before placing it atop the other so that the unread pages would not be mixed in with those she had finished.

He felt a sigh of something like relief ease from his lungs. She had at last forgone the damned honorific she’d been wielding all day with the subtlety of a beadle waving a rod at unruly schoolboys to keep them in line. As if they were strangers. As if he had not swept his tongue over every inch of her ivory skin.

Then she lifted her gaze to him and added, with quiet dignity, “My lord.”

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