His eyes closed for a moment, as if in pain. “Lady Acton is being blackmailed?” he asked at last, very deliberately.
“You mean to stand there and tell me that you didn’t know, when I know it’s your doing?”
He spun about and strode away. Eleanor watched him with a terrible dread. Why did he have to be so very lovely? So lovely, yet so damned?
“It is like the punishment of Prometheus to be blackmailed,” he said suddenly. “You stand chained by Zeus to a rock, while vultures tear at your liver. Yet the next day you are still alive and they come, still hungry, again. Day after day, forever—all because you wished to steal fire.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
He spun on his heel to face her. “You may believe what you will, Lady Eleanor. I shan’t gainsay it.”
She stared at him, her heart in her mouth. There was nothing he could have said that was more likely to make her doubt her suspicions. Had he spluttered denials, that would have confirmed his guilt as surely as a confession.
Confused, she looked down at her lap. “You knew the major and my mother were in love, didn’t you?”
“That’s not quite the language I would have used,” he said dryly. “But, yes, I had guessed it.”
“And you knew about the secret cupboards. Frank Garth told me.”
His voice held genuine, sharp curiosity. “Frank Garth?”
“His brother made them.”
“I see. But as it happens I had not known. That’s why I came back and waited here for you.”
She glanced up. “Then it was you who left the window open? I thought it seemed too convenient.”
“I wondered how you planned to get in otherwise.”
“I didn’t have a plan. I just hoped I’d be lucky.”
He smiled. “And you were. Now you had better take those letters back to Lady Acton, hadn’t you?”
“You’re going to let me win, just like that?”
“I am.”
“It doesn’t make any sense at all! If you knew I was coming for the letters, you could have removed them. Why wait for me in the dark, then let me take them away?”
“It must be my innate sense of chivalry, after all,” he said.
“Mr. Campbell, I shall never understand you. Yet I’m not a fool. You really didn’t know about the hiding place?”
“No, I didn’t. Admittedly, I spent some time at Deerfield as a child, but not all of it. I lived at Hawksley, not here, and I went away to school. Mr. Garth the carpenter must have done his work when I wasn’t present.”
She felt devastated. It had been too easy, hadn’t it? If Leander Campbell had her mother’s correspondence and was blackmailing her over it, it was far too great a coincidence for Frank Garth to have mentioned their hiding place. Life wasn’t really so neat. If he indeed had them, Mr. Campbell must have the letters hidden elsewhere. She had been an idiot to think he might keep them at Deerfield.
“Then these papers aren’t the letters,” she said.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “But we may assume they belong to the major and perhaps we should put them back.”
“And perhaps you are bluffing, sir,” she said. “After walking all this way in the dark, I think I must make certain, don’t you?”
Eleanor walked quickly to the table and spread out the papers. It was immediately apparent that they weren’t Lady Acton’s letters. The paper was older, for a start. There were several blank sheets and only a handful of documents. One was even in a foreign tongue of some kind. The crabbed writing varied, but it was that of the clerks of twenty-five years before, not the beautiful copperplate in which her mother took pride.
Nor was there any Acton crest in a red wax seal.
They were, after all, none of her business. She would have to put them back just as she had found them, with the blank paper wrapping the other sheets, and return the bundle to the cubbyhole.
She felt sick with disappointment. She began to fold up the papers when a name on the top sheet seemed to leap out to demand her attention.
Eleanor turned to face Mr. Campbell. He still stood calmly at the fireplace, watching her.
“These papers may belong to the major,” she said in a shaky voice, “but the content would seem to involve you.”
He didn’t move and his eyes did not leave her face. Holding the documents in her hand, she walked back to the sofa and sat down.
“Record of Birth,” she read aloud. “Born this twelfth day of February in the thirtieth year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, and in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety, at Blairgour House, in the County of Argyle, Scotland, to Moira, only daughter of Ian Campbell of Blairgour, and the Honorable Gerald Arthur Richard Hart of Hawksley Park in the County of Norfolk, England: a boy, Leander Gerald Arthur Hart.”
She put the paper in her lap so that he shouldn’t see her hands tremble. “It’s witnessed by one Janet McEwen, midwife, and Fiona Mackay, maid, who has made her mark. It’s also signed by your mother, Moira Campbell—though she signs herself Moira Hart. It is you, isn’t it? It’s proof of your birth.”
“Which is touching, but not odd,” he said quietly. “I have seen it before. Major Crabtree brought it from Ireland. It was one of the ways that he was able to prove to Lady Augusta that I was her husband’s by-blow—apart from my troubling appearance, that is. Apparently my mother secreted it among my clothes when I was taken from her and sent to the convent. She must have cared a great deal about my father’s identity, yet the Irish nuns knew only Gaelic. It meant nothing to them.”
“Then neither did this,” Eleanor said, in a voice oddly choked with a rising panic, as she set aside the top sheet and looked at the second.
“Neither did what?” he asked calmly.
“This next paper.” Eleanor looked up at him, her heart hammering. “She must have hidden it there, too. It’s dated the third day of May, 1789, and signed by two witnesses. One of them is the same Fiona Mackay. The other is a Robbie Stewart, gamekeeper. Then there’s the signature of the rector of the kirk—that’s a church, isn’t it?—at a place called Strathbrae. Is that near Blairgour?”
“Not far, I believe. Why?”
“Because they were married there,” Eleanor said.
“My dear lady, I am completely in the dark. Who was married at Strathbrae?”
She didn’t understand her own emotions, but her eyes burned with tears.
“Your mother, Moira Campbell, and your father, of course, the future Earl of Hawksley. In the year before you were born they were married by declaration, Mr. Campbell—or should I say, my lord earl. Duly signed and witnessed by her maid, the gamekeeper, and a member of the clergy of the Church of Scotland, this would seem to be a legal copy of their marriage lines.”
A deathly silence settled over the room.
“May I see now?” he asked.
Eleanor handed him the papers. The third one was unintelligible, since it was not written in English. She felt painfully embarrassed to have stumbled upon something so intensely personal and of such moment.
“You didn’t know that, did you?” she asked.
He studied the papers, then laid them on the mantel. “That they had married? No, I didn’t.”
“It changes everything for you, doesn’t it?”
Without replying, he spun away, strode across the room, and gazed out into the dark garden.
Through a haze of tears, Eleanor stared blindly at the ranks of books, the flickering candles, the luxurious comfort and security of the major’s home: something Leander Campbell could never have expected for himself—until now.
“No, I don’t think that it does,” he said at last.
She dashed one hand across her eyes. “What do you mean? Are you afraid to claim your inheritance? After so many years of being able to follow your fancy, I can imagine it’d be a burden to have to take up the duties of the earldom of Hawksley. For this does make you earl, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” he said quietly. He turned to face her and the old humor was back for a moment. “So I am legitimate! How very awkward for the House of Lords for such a scandalous rogue to grace those hallowed chambers. Don’t you think I should refrain from so embarrassing that august assembly?”
“My brother says they’re all rogues,” Eleanor said without thinking. “But you’re still the heir.”
His smile held nothing but irony. “Ay, there’s the rub: to my father’s entire estate and inheritance. All of his titles, his lands, everything at Hawksley Park—”
“Which you’ve always wanted. And now that it’s within your grasp, you don’t have the courage!”
She knew she was talking wildly, but she didn’t care. This whole encounter had been too strange and his presence disturbed her too much.
“Perhaps I don’t,” he said.
“But even if you don’t want to be earl, think of the money. You’d have enough to waste as you choose.”
And you wouldn’t need to blackmail my mother!
He came back to her, and to her surprise dropped to the couch beside her.
“Lady Eleanor,” he said gently. “Hush! There is more to this than you know.”
“What else can there be?” She forced sarcasm into her voice. “You’re legitimate and a peer of the realm. It’s like a fairy tale come true.”
He took her hand and turned her fingers over in his.
“Life isn’t anything like a fairy tale, my dear,” he said. “Now listen. I didn’t know about the marriage lines, but I did know about the other two papers. Major Crabtree showed me that third paper, which you could not read, many years ago. It’s in Gaelic, but there’s an English translation on the back. Had you turned it over, you would have seen it. It is a record of my mother’s death. She died in the Highlands, in a township near Loch Linnhe.”
“Does that make any difference?” Eleanor asked.
“It makes a great deal of difference,” he said with a wry smile. “You have just discovered that my father secretly married Moira Campbell on May the third, 1789. He married Lady Augusta on October the fifth, 1793, four and a half years later.”
“Anyone can marry twice,” Eleanor said.
“Yes, but my mother didn’t die until November, 1793, a month after the second wedding. So what we have proved now is that when my father married Lady Augusta, his first wife was still alive.”
“Which means . . . Oh, I see!”
“Which means that Lord Hawksley was a bigamist and his marriage to Lady Augusta was not valid. So Lady Diana Hart of Hawksley isn’t a Lady and doesn’t belong to Hawksley at all.”
A lump blocked her throat. “Your mother’s marriage makes Diana illegitimate?”
His eyes were very dark. “Yes.”
“But why did they marry secretly? And if they were legally married, what made her give you away?”
“When her father discovered that she’d fallen in love with a hated Sassenach, he went a little insane, I think. Ian Campbell had been a young child during the Forty-five. After Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated at Culloden, the reprisals against the Highlanders were terrible. Ian would never forgive his daughter her love for an Englishman. He forbade them to see each other.”
“But they married anyway?”
“Obviously.”
“It can’t have been a very long courtship.”
He ran one hand through his hair. “It wasn’t exactly a long honeymoon. ‘Nor am I loath, though pleased at heart, / Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part.’ My father came right back to England. Perhaps he was going to send for her.”
“But he never did?”
“Ian Campbell wrote to him and told him that Moira had died. My father didn’t question the news. Probably as soon as he came home, he regretted the marriage. When his brother was killed and he became earl, I’m sure he began to look about with some relief for a more suitable wife. He certainly believed Moira dead when he eventually married Lady Augusta. Meanwhile Ian kept Moira at Blairgour House until I was born. While she was still lying in, he sent me to Ireland, then he turned her from the house. I think he wanted me to disappear from the face of the earth, but even my dour grandfather hadn’t the heart to murder an infant.” He gave a wry smile. “I suppose I should be grateful.”
“So you were taken to the convent? Did your mother know where you were?”
“She spent the rest of her days searching for me in the Highlands. She never tried to contact Lord Hawksley. Perhaps she hated him for abandoning her. Perhaps she was too proud. Eventually she was taken in by the local people in a township near Loch Linnhe and died there. The inhabitants speak only Gaelic, but they recorded her death and that third paper is a copy.”
“Her own father stole her baby from her? I don’t know if I ever heard anything so cruel.”
Eleanor felt devastated. Poor Moira Campbell, whose only sin was to love the wrong man! A man whose son looked just like him.
“It’s a long time ago,” he said. “Though it’s small comfort, isn’t it?”
“How could your father not go to Blairgour to find out for himself what became of his first wife?”
The muscles of his face tightened imperceptibly. “There is nothing that can excuse my father.”
Eleanor looked down. It still seemed almost too incredible to believe. Lord Hawksley had been a bigamist and the Scots death certificate from Loch Linnhe proved it.
“You speak Gaelic?”
He smiled. “Not a word, though it was my first language as an infant. Anyway, Irish and Scots Gaelic are quite different. Sir Robert obtained the English translation. When he found me he was interested to discover what had happened to my mother and so he secured the record of her death. There is no question as to its authenticity.”
It didn’t occur to Eleanor to ask herself why she cared so very desperately about his birth, nor why she thought she had the right to question him. Since he seemed prepared to tell her the story so openly, she plunged on.
“How did you learn all these details?”
“I may be a reprobate, Lady Eleanor, but allow me some natural curiosity about my mother. I would have gone to Blairgour myself, but Ian Campbell died when I was still a small child. The local people who knew my mother hated Lord Hawksley—a foreigner who had seduced and abandoned one of their own. And I look just like my father, remember? It would hardly have been politic to turn up in person and stir up painful memories. I hired a man in Edinburgh to go discreetly to Argyle. Everything I’ve told you is what he discovered.”