Page 61 of The Companion’s Secret

“I had an escort, Molly,” Camellia replied, turning the maid’s eyes on Gabriel. “Don’t fret. Where’s—?”

Her question was lost in a screech as another young woman came thundering down the stairs. It was easy to guess her appearance had inspired Róisín’s. Red hair streamed down her back, and the bridge of her nose was sprinkled with freckles. “Oh, thank God,” she said, throwing her arms around Camellia. Her hands, he saw, were as rough and ragged as a scullery maid’s, and nearly as ink stained as her sister’s.

“Erica, may I present Lord Ashborough?” Camellia was holding herself back from the embrace, an effort to maintain some semblance of decorum in front of a guest, he guessed. “Lord Ashborough, my sister, Miss Erica Burke.”

Gabriel bowed. “Ma’am.” Erica managed a distracted curtsy in reply.

“Now,” Camellia said, in a voice he had never heard her use before, “where are my parents?”

“At the Nugents’ country house near Enniscorthy. For two weeks. They were reluctant to go without you here to watch over us, but Paris persuaded them to leave him in charge here.”

“And where is Paris?”

She scowled. “Gone, God knows where. Molly told me that Galen left before dawn the day we—the day the mail coaches were seized,” she corrected, with a glance at Gabriel. “Paris left soon after, and a few hours later, he brought Galen back. Then he left again straightaway, and I haven’t heard from him since. Galen is—oh, come and see,” she cried, dragging her sister up the stairs. The maid disappeared after them, leaving Gabriel alone in the entryway.

“Psst!” A girl’s face peered out from behind the back of the staircase. “You can sit in here with us, if you’d like.”

Intrigued, he accepted the invitation. The room at the back of the house was a large family parlor filled with comfortable, not quite shabby furniture, most of which had been rearranged to create a maze of table legs and chair backs, over which a damasked tablecloth had been thrown to make a hideaway of sorts. The far end of the room contained a large desk and several packed bookcases: a gentleman’s study, which could be closed off from the rest by a pair of doors, though by the look of things, they were rarely shut. On all the walls hung framed sketches of plants and flowers, some taken from books, others the work of more amateur hands.

While he had been examining the room, a second child, younger than the first, had crawled from between two chairs and now stood before him, a familiar expression of curiosity and defiance on her face. He guessed she was perhaps six or seven years old.

“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.