Rogue's Reward (17 page)

Eleanor clenched her fists. How dared these mean old biddies disparage Leander Campbell! She knew him to be a rake and accepted it, but she was also slowly coming to realize that what Richard had said must be true. Her brother was a superb judge of character, and his friendship wasn’t lightly given.

Over and over again she had thought about that extraordinary night when he had burned the evidence of his mother’s marriage.
Which means that Lord Hawksley’s marriage to Lady Augusta wasn’t valid and that Lady Diana Hart of Hawksley isn’t a Lady and doesn’t belong to Hawksley at all.
He had done it to save Diana from the stigma of illegitimacy, which he had borne unfairly all his life.

No one knew better than he did what that meant, yet he had sacrificed everything for his sister. Eleanor knew now that nothing in her experience had ever been a finer or more selfless action. And then he had rescued her mother from someone who would have blackmailed her, even possibly at some cost to himself.

Choked with anger, Eleanor spun on her heel and walked directly after Mr. Campbell.

He turned with surprise when she appeared at his elbow. The gentleman to whom he’d been talking raised both brows, but bowed and took his leave. Several pairs of eyes began to swivel in their direction.

Eleanor no longer cared.

“I would like to ask you to dance, Mr. Campbell,” she said.

“What on earth has brought on this sudden desire for unsuitable exercise, Lady Eleanor?” he asked with a smile.

“The unfairness of this whole place,” she said indignantly. “Why shouldn’t you dance?”

“Because the band is striking up a waltz, for a start,” he replied instantly.

“Does it make a difference?”

“Perhaps not. After all, I am expected to sweep ladies into my arms every day. Why not include Lady Eleanor Acton? Of course, the waltz offers a most discreet embrace, though so very public. Surely you can understand that I prefer those which are both less elegant and more private?”

“You are deliberately trying to embarrass me,” Eleanor said, furious that he could so easily make her blush.

“On the contrary, I am trying to make you retract your request, brown hen. Do you always charge in with the cavalry when you think something is unfair?”

“I hate meanness.”

“And I think I prefer being the recipient of your heavy guns to being the beneficiary of them. It’s simpler.”

“You’re impossible, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” he said with a devastating smile. “I take pride in it, remember?”

“Then damn you for a stiff-necked—”

“Bastard,” he finished. “Now retract your invitation to this waltz, or I shall make you very seriously regret it.”

“How?”

“Good God, brown hen! Do you really think I can’t make good on my word?”

Eleanor was already regretting her impulsive action very bitterly. She had no idea what he might do, but there was no question in her mind that he had no intention of dancing with her, and the more she persisted, the less dignity she would have left.

“All right, you win! I am suitably humiliated and chastened. And anyway the next dance, being a staid promenade, is promised to Lord Ranking. I suppose I should go and prepare myself to be mauled about like a piece of dough.”

She turned and left him.

Lee watched the silver skirts as they retreated toward the ladies’ powder room. Her neck rose like a slender column from the perfect skin of her shoulders, shadowed only by her brown hair. She was wearing the gold locket that he had found at the Three Feathers: the one she had so bravely been prepared to rescue from the clutches of a rogue.

“I say, old chap, are you all right?”

Walter stood beside him, his open face unusually clouded with concern. Lee turned to his friend and laughed.

“A devilish thirst has come on me—like a thunderbolt, you might say. Lead me to some fine brandy and a gaming table, for I think I’m ready to lose a great deal of money. What say you to hazard?”

Eleanor managed to survive the rest of the evening, yet not even Lord Ranking’s absurdities were able to lift her spirits. Why on earth should it bother her how Diana’s profligate brother behaved?

She had been a fool to expose herself to him once again, when she knew that it would only cause her pain. Yet she was involved, because Diana was her friend. If only Lord Hawksley had waited another two months to marry Lady Augusta! Then both marriages would have been valid, and Mr. Campbell could have been recognized as Earl of Hawksley and probably already been wed to an heiress, and Diana could freely marry Walter.

Eleanor remembered the spiteful comments that the dowagers had made about Lee’s mother. What kind of girl had Moira really been? Surely Blairgour House was more than a cottage? Even if it was the simplest place in Scotland, she had won marriage to a future earl. How could she have known that he would abandon her?

For Eleanor knew now just how deeply Gerald Hart must have entranced poor Moira Campbell.

It was because of his son that she herself wasn’t interested in any of the beaux she was meeting on the marriage mart. It was the most humiliating thing to have to admit. His smile, his eyes, the way he moved. However disgracefully Leander Campbell acted, everything about him bewitched her.

Well, besotted or not, Lady Eleanor Acton was not going to sit about and mope. The morning after Lady Augusta’s ball, she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper from her writing case and sharpened a new pen. If she wanted to find out about Moira Campbell—if that would somehow help lay to rest this insistent longing for the Highland woman’s arrogant son—then there was no better time to start than the present.

It took several drafts before she had penned something tactful enough and with a sufficiently plausible reason for her curiosity. Eventually she sanded and sealed the final version, and addressed it to the minister who had witnessed the wedding in Strathbrae, Scotland. She remembered quite clearly all the details she had read before Lee had burned the marriage lines, and knew the man’s name.

The only problem was that she had no idea if the fellow was even still alive.

* * *

The message from Mr. Campbell arrived the next day. Eleanor unfolded the paper, which was clearly and correctly addressed on the outside to Lady Eleanor Acton, Acton House, Park Lane. Inside it was short and to the point, and she could almost imagine one violet eye half-closed in a wink:

“By the Curzon Gate. Wednesday morning at ten. L.C.”

* * *

Wednesday morning dawned bright and warm. The girls walked arm in arm to the park. It was not the innocent walk that Lady Augusta assumed, for Diana very soon spied a closed carriage waiting at the corner by the Curzon Gate.

“Oh, look!” she whispered. “It’s Lee’s man.”

“It is?” Eleanor replied. “Then he’s waiting for us, silly. Come on!”

The footman helped them into the dark interior. Five minutes later, they were being shown into an elegant set of rooms where Walter eagerly awaited his beloved.

“Welcome to my humble lodgings, Lady Eleanor,” Mr. Campbell said with a grave bow.

Eleanor looked around with only the slightest dismay. If they were seen entering or leaving, it was almost unexceptionable that a lady should visit her half-brother, even if he did keep bachelor apartments. That Lady Augusta wouldn’t see it that way, however, accounted for the discreet carriage and the careful servants.

Immediately, Diana sat beside Walter and he took her hands.

“Perhaps it will be politic to leave them?” Mr. Campbell asked Eleanor. “Poor Mr. Downe loses all faculty for polite conversation when in the presence of my sister, or even when thinking about her. Love makes people so tiresome.” He gave her a wicked grin. “I have a very fine library here. You have an interest in libraries, do you not?”

Eleanor refused to be fazed by the reference. “I should be very happy to admire your books, Mr. Campbell, but may I trust your manners?”

“Of course. You refer to my disgraceful behavior at Deerfield? Would you believe it was only a moment of madness, or would you prefer to think I wanted to make my wicked point? Either way, I would never dare kiss a lady when Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and Chaucer were in the room, not to mention any number of medieval saints and scholars. Their dry disapproval robs even me of nefarious intent. Come, you are quite safe and you should see my collection.”

She followed him out of the room and into the library.

Instantly, Eleanor was enchanted. From floor to ceiling, on every wall and in rank after rank of freestanding cases, were books. It didn’t take very long to realize that many of them were of remarkable antiquity and presumably extremely valuable, but Eleanor was more enthralled by the sheer beauty of the volumes that Mr. Campbell began to take down to show her.

He laid a large vellum tome on the table in the center of the room and unclasped the metal hasps that held it shut. Before he began carefully to turn the pages, he pulled on a pair of fine white cotton gloves to protect the ancient parchment. The action only drew Eleanor’s attention to the elegance of his hands. Beneath his gentle touch, the pages revealed breathtaking illuminations in rich blue and red and gold. Something about the deft and tender way he touched them made Eleanor’s heart catch in her throat. It was the caress he might give a lover, she thought blindly. Can he tell that it makes my pulse race just to stand next to him like this? But then, that was the way all girls felt during their first crush, wasn’t it?

“You really do love these books,” she said after a while.

He glanced at her and smiled. “Of course. You find that odd, don’t you? I wonder why? Because it seems strange that I haven’t sold this collection to support my dissolute career? And you find that even odder, because you believe me incapable of loving anything, perhaps?”

Eleanor couldn’t look up at him. She let her eyes feast instead on a tiny vine that trailed around an entire page of the manuscript. Every leaf was perfect.

“I wouldn’t deign to offer an opinion of your character,” she said quietly.

And then she had to glance up when he laughed, even if the sight of his smile turned her limbs into water.

“Then you are in a particularly reticent mood,” he said. “I can’t remember you being too shy to offer your judgment of me before today.”

“Well, then, I can only have become even less concerned,” she said.

“And I am properly put in my place. You realize, of course, the indifference of a lady I have kissed is the most terrible insult imaginable to my pride?”

“Fiddlesticks, Mr. Campbell! Since I’m sure you bestow your attentions in a purely random manner, it can hardly matter, can it?”

He closed the book and carried it carefully to its case. “Ah, brown hen, it’s a sorry thing to be a rake. You will choose your acquaintances more carefully in the future, won’t you?”

Eleanor pretended not to hear him. Instead, she was looking about with a new and dreadful suspicion. This collection was indeed immensely valuable. In which case, how had he acquired it? An officer’s pay and the proceeds of his success at the tables might be enough to keep him in horses and send a little extra down to Hawksley to Frank Garth, but it could never have purchased the most famous book collection in London.

Had her mother been wrong? Was he the blackmailer, after all? Yet Lady Acton had said that Sir Robert had told her the villain’s true identity and that it hadn’t been Leander Campbell. She could hardly doubt that. When he left for Belgium and then India, as her brother had said he intended, it would no longer matter, she supposed.

“Richard told me you might live abroad some day,” she said as casually as she was able. “What will you do with all this when you leave?”

“It could go into storage, of course, for I want to think that these volumes await my eventual return. But scholars should continue to have access to them. I intend to put the more valuable and ancient books out on loan to a museum.”

He was quite serious. Eleanor gazed at him as he moved through the room. His lean hands rested for a moment on a row of spines. The dim light softened his dark hair to a shadow. She felt the most disturbing rush of desire. How could she have thought that he could forget all honor and sink to blackmail, simply because he so loved to buy books? It wasn’t possible. Yet he was still a rogue.

She could make no sense out of it at all. All that was left was the most insistent wish that everything had turned out differently.

She is sick with longing,
he had said about Diana
. It’s known as love.

* * *

Lee watched from the window as his sister and her friend climbed back into his carriage.

Walter Downe took up his hat and cane. “I owe you my sincerest gratitude for arranging this meeting, and you have it,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I want to hang about and be victim to your dashed odd mood and that sarcastic tongue.”

“Indeed, you had better go, my friend,” Lee replied gently. “Otherwise you’ll no doubt be the recipient of several unnecessarily wanton remarks about your feelings for Diana.”

The door slammed shut.

Lee cursed silently as Eleanor looked up one last time toward his window, and the sun caught her profile. Then he spun about and strode back to the library. Very deliberately, he took down the vellum he had shown Eleanor and kissed the cover. Whether it was in benediction or farewell was impossible to say.

And so Leander Campbell was left to his thoughts.

* * *

As Eleanor was left to hers. Once again she thought through everything she knew and was convinced anew that her mother couldn’t be mistaken. Whatever else he might be, Leander Campbell was not the blackmailer. And for Diana’s sake, she would see him again whatever it did to her own composure.

The next note came the following morning.

“Vauxhall Gardens. Saturday evening at nine. L. C.”

Lady Acton expressed no surprise at her daughter’s sudden desire to see the famous gardens. Diana, of course, knowing what was planned, longed to go. Lady Augusta, however, didn’t think it quite suitable unless the girls were properly chaperoned. Yet she was afraid her own sensibilities and the dignity due her station would preclude her from attending.