The Rake Revealed

The Rake Revealed

Kate Harper

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www.kate-harper.com

Chapter One

Camille paused, taking a deep breath. Ever since she had arrived at her husband’s home in England six days ago, Mrs. Hibbert had been less than helpful. Not straight out insolent, not that, but it was extraordinary how much stolid indifference could hinder an investigation of a household. She knew perfectly well that her arrival had been a blow to the couple that managed her new home, but when necessary, she was happy to forgo the discreet approach for something more direct.

‘Mrs. Hibbert. Please turn around when you address me.’

The woman went still, then slowly turned around. She had a round, doughy face, a solid body, and the lovable personality of a rat catcher (with a husband that looked disconcertingly like a rat) and from the moment Camille had turned up she had done everything she could to make life difficult.

Camille was used to difficulties. She had fled France with nothing more than a small portmanteau and a bandbox – all of her possessions in life, condensed down into two containers – along with an address and seven pounds in her reticule. She had left behind a home and a husband, buried in a field somewhere outside of Barcelona. She was damned if she was going to let a surly servant who resented that her easy living had been disrupted get the better of her.

Resentment flickered for a moment in a pair of small, current-colored eyes, but she’d been there when the lawyer, a stuffy little man from Kingsdown, had come to the house just two days after Camille had arrived. The legality of her marriage to Lord Edward Durham, the last baron of Kirkham Manor, was unquestionable and this conversation was long overdue. Mrs. Hibbert might dislike the fact that Camille was a foreigner, although only half foreign, for she was French on her mother’s side only, but the woman could say nothing about the fact that there was a new Lady Durham in the house.

‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘And yet, from the moment I have arrived you have taken great pains
not
to be helpful.’ Camille said calmly. ‘You have served meals that are both cold and unappetizing, you have refused to illuminate the household accounts for me, such as they are, and I am certain that you have been helping yourself to the furnishings, which,’ she added coolly, ‘belong to me.’

Fear and resentment blazed up in the woman’s eyes. Camille had taken a good look around when the woman had gone into town earlier in the day and had found the rooms Mrs. Hibbert and her unlovable husband occupied on the third floor to be remarkably luxurious, filled to capacity with soft furnishings, silver candle holders, and a rather nice collection of linen.

‘I dunt know what you mean!’

‘Of course you know,’ Camille said briskly. ‘You have been stealing things from the house to make yourself comfortable. You have probably been selling other things off to subsidize your income. And unless you wish to find a new position, or a trip to the magistrate’s office, I suggest that you undergo a change of attitude. I am not a fool, Mrs. Hibbert. Try to remember that and we may be able to rub along together well enough. Forget it and I will find another housekeeper to replace you.’

The woman’s sallow face had taken on a ghastly color, pasty skin turning ashen. She opened, then closed, her mouth. ‘I… I haven’t done nothing wrong.’ The protest was feebler now. The knowledge that her new mistress could not only dismiss her, but have the magistrate investigate her and her unlovable husband for thieving had taken the wind out of her sails completely.

‘Do not be
absurde
,’ Camille said impatiently. ‘Of course you have. Just do not do it again. I am newly arrived here and, as such, am prepared to go forward with a clean slate. Of course, I’m going to want the things in your rooms returned immediately.
Comprendre
, Mrs. Hibbert? You know what I am saying to you?’

This time, the woman could do nothing but nod. Satisfied, Camille turned on her heel and left the kitchen.

She was slowly catching up with things, now that she was finally in England. The first two days had been spent sleeping off the effects of an unpleasant crossing and the weeks of tension that had gone before while she finally accepted that she would have to flee France. Her parents were dead, her mother from an infection that had carried her off within a week, her father on the battlefield, caught up in the fighting when he had been treating wounded soldiers. Their deaths, along with that of her husband nearly nine months ago, meant that there was nothing left for her in France.

Camille didn’t know if there was anything for her in the quiet hamlet of Lymstock, where Kirkham Hall lay, either, but she desperately needed a place to rest and recover. Somewhere far, far away from the conflicts of a world that had taken everything she had, but spared her, leaving nothing before her but a life of memories.

England was to be that refuge.

It had not been quite what she had anticipated.

Her marriage to Ned had been punctuated by long separations once he had returned to the fighting. Truthfully, if she put all the time together that they’d shared in the year they had been married, it would have numbered no more than two or three months. Ned had been gone so frequently, but he had told her about his home and how he wanted to show it to her, when they were done fighting Bonaparte.

Instead of Ned sitting beside her, however, she had seen Kirkham Hall for the first time alone.

Camille sighed and looked around the main drawing room. It must have been lovely once, but like everything else at Kirkham, it was faded and outdated. Ned had been a soldier for ten years before his death and had been away from Kent a great deal of the time, leaving its care to the likes of Mrs. Hibbert. No wonder the woman resented the sudden – and unwelcome – advent of a new mistress. She must have come to regard the place as her own. Camille wandered over to one of the large, floor-length windows that overlooked the sadly neglected gardens.

The lawyer, Mr. Mowbray, had informed her that his lordship had written to him upon his marriage to Camille. There were enough funds to survive on; more than enough. It seemed that Ned had an income of two thousand a year, which had been accumulating for some time.

Camille glanced behind her at the room and was suddenly gripped by a listlessness that she had come to know all too well in the past few months. There was so much to do here. She knew that she should probably spend some of those accumulated funds on redecorating a house of which her husband had not seen much in the last few years, but had loved dearly. She felt strangely reluctant to do anything, but she hoped the feeling would pass. It was probably the last vestiges of shock, but she disliked this sense of removal from life, as if she were viewing everything from a distance. It was so alien to how she usually felt.

One thing was certain; she needed to find a way to occupy her time
some
how.

The view from the window was impressive. Set on the Kentish coast, Kirkham Hall had been built on a rise overlooking the shifting waters of the North Sea, which glinted below in the feeble shafts of sunlight that had broken through the cloud cover. Ned had told her that the area was redolent with smugglers, or free traders, as they preferred to be called, and that the area around Kirkham was littered with caves and tunnels that had long been employed to handle the trade that came in from France. Smuggling seemed like an odd occupation to Camille, but as long as the smugglers kept their affairs to themselves, she didn’t care what the locals got up to.

Turning away from the window, she made an effort to push away the ennui that threatened once more. Things could be so much worse. She was rested, she was, if not particularly well fed, then certainly adequately, and she was safe. She was also Lady Durham, windowed wife of the last lord of Kirkham Hall.

That surely had to signify something.

Her arrival would have been noted by now. Word would slowly circulate that there was a new lady in residence at the Hall. She wondered if she would be welcomed or ostracized? Half French, half English, she and her family had nonetheless lived in Paris for much of her life and French was the language she was accustomed to speaking, although her English was excellent.

Of course, her parents had not been sympathizers of Bonaparte’s regime, but would that matter? Like Mrs. Hibbert, suspicious and unfriendly to the arrival of a foreigner, Camille would not be surprised to discover that the feeling was widespread.

Ned had not come back to introduce her to his neighbors, after all.

After an afternoon of attempting to play lady of the manor, counting sheets and chasing the household accounts, occupations she had never attempted before and found that she had very little taste for now, Camille retired to bed early with a volume of Voltaire. Her evening meal had been considerably better than luncheon, served promptly by an unsmiling Mrs. Hibbert, and she had requested hot chocolate before retiring, which had irked the woman even more. Still, she had received it without delay. It would be difficult for the woman to find another position if the new mistress of Kirkham Hall dismissed her.

Extra staff would help dilute the woman’s resentment and the place could certainly do with additional hands.

‘The house is too big for you to manage by yourself,’ she had said, when the woman had brought in the soup. ‘I’d like you to look for several girls to work here. There must be some in the village, yes?’

The housekeeper had hesitated, torn between the idea of employing others to lord over and the innate desire to keep her kitchen to herself. But really, Camille had left her no choice.

It had been a tiresome chore, tackling the housekeeper, but it had had to be done. The woman had made the mistake of thinking that Camille’s reticence and her status as a stranger in a strange land made her vulnerable, but Camille had the deep auburn hair of the warrior women in her bloodline, or so her father always liked to say, and hadn’t been intimidated by much of anything since she was nine years old.

‘
Ce lieu sera la mort de moi
,’ she muttered, pulling up the covers and settling in the bed. But, for better or worse, she was here now.

Her new home in England.

Something, some sound, woke her from a deep sleep.

Camille lay still, listening. It had started to rain sometime during the night and the wind had picked up, lashing the walls of Kirkham with considerable force. She had quickly learned that the ocean breezes could be a great deal more than brisk, but it wasn’t the wind, or yet the rain, that had woken her up.

It had been the sound of a door closing heavily, somewhere nearby.

One of the Hibberts? She sat up, fumbling for the tinderbox and striking a spark, lighting the candle by the bed. Pushing the covers aside, she pushed her feet into slippers and pulled on a robe. It was very cold.

Leaving the bedroom, she paused in the hallway to listen. Nothing. But then, somewhere from down below, the creak of a door. Someone was certainly about tonight and, tempting as it was to lock her bedroom door and ignore the entire thing, as the newly instated lady of the manor, Camille supposed that she had better investigate. It might be the Hibberts helping themselves to what was left of the silver before escaping into the night. Briefly, she wondered if she should bring the pistol that was still tucked into the bottom of her portmanteau, but rejected the idea. This was England. This was her home. She was no longer living in the middle of a war.

Slipping across the landing and down the stairs, she paused at the bottom, eyes drawn by the faint glow coming through the crack in the door that lead into the yellow salon. Moving forward softly, she pushed open the door then stopped on the threshold, eyes widening with shock.