The Companion's Secret. Susanna Craig

She hardly knew what word to apply. Sensual? Seductive?

      Realizing she was in danger of lapsing once more into caricature, she turned the paper over and prepared to begin again, only to discover that she had made her sketch on the back of Mr. Dawkins’s letter. With a shake of her head, she put aside the drawing and took up a clean sheet of foolscap. Mustering her neatest hand, she wrote:

      Mr. Dawkins,

      I thank you for your very kind words about The Wild Irish Rose. I shall begin the revisions you have requested immediately.

      C. Burke

      Pulling a tattered copy of her manuscript from her writing desk, she prepared to set to work. But not before tucking the publisher’s note into her bodice like the billet-doux it was.

      Chapter 3

      Given the weather, Cami could only assume that her plan had curried the Almighty’s favor. Three fine days in early spring were unheard of—especially three fine days in a row. Yet here she was in Hyde Park beneath a blue sky smudged only by picturesque puffs of cloud, walking four steps behind Felicity and Lord Ashborough.

      She walked alone, but she did not mind in the slightest. Although the park was crowded, this was almost as good as a solitary stroll, a pleasure that had been denied her since coming to London. Such moments—among people, yet apart from them—were a writer’s bread and butter, the food on which she fed her imagination. She loved to observe the fashions, the mannerisms, the way the afternoon sunlight turned the rippling surface of the Serpentine into a diamond-crusted path. She breathed deeply and drew in the scent of grass and new leaves and delicate flowers—and underneath those brighter notes, the musky smell of decay and manure and coal smoke that gave the spring air its piquancy.

      Under ordinary circumstances, she might have whiled away the time dreaming up new stories, a plot to pair the elegant, fair-haired gentleman with the mousy governess who watched him surreptitiously when her eyes should have been on her charges; another to match the lady wearing too much rouge, trying desperately to look young to her circle of admirers, with the balding but sincere older gentleman who hung back just a bit from the brilliant rays of her wit. Whatever else its failings, London did not lack characters.

      But today her attention was focused squarely on the most interesting character of all.

      The Marquess of Ashborough walked with his hands crossed behind his back. He had not, to Cami’s surprise and Felicity’s evident relief, offered Felicity his arm. In fact, he kept himself ever so slightly apart from his companion—perhaps to avoid being poked in the eye by the ferrule of her parasol, which Felicity had a habit of twirling nervously. Thanks to that confection of muslin and lace, Cami could not see her cousin’s face; she could only imagine her expression, seeing it refracted through Lord Ash’s attention.

      To overcome the slight distance between their bodies, his head was tilted perpetually toward Felicity’s, so much so that Cami began to suspect he would end the day with an uncomfortable crick in his neck. He moved with grace, despite the awkward posture necessitated by walking beside someone so much shorter than he; his stride was easily twice the length of Felicity’s, yet Cami observed no hitch in his gait, no restraint in his movements. He listened far more than he spoke, nodded encouragingly now and then, and if his smile could not precisely be called genuine, she saw no trace of the lupine in it either. He seemed determined to put her cousin at ease.

      With eager fingers Cami reached for the little notebook she had once worn on a chain around her neck, forgetting for a moment that her brother had put a stop to it the day she had wandered into the roadway while scribbling and was nearly struck by a passing hack. She would just have to save her notes on these encounters for the privacy of her room.

      But before she could commit to memory the way Lord Ashborough’s gray duster rippled over the breadth of his shoulders, like sheepskin over a wolf’s back, she saw Mr. Fox at last hie into view, walking—correction: being dragged along by—four large dogs, and the blood in her veins turned to ice.

      “Foxy!” Lord Ashborough called and tipped his hat to his friend.

      The gesture of greeting drove the dogs wild. Three pulled harder in his direction, while one shied sharply away. It looked for a moment as if Mr. Fox’s arm might be wrenched from its socket. Somehow, he managed to separate the tangled leashes, so that each arm now bore a share of the strain. At the same time, he spoke to the dogs in a calm voice, with none of that fierce authority one expected from a handler of unruly animals and all of the good-natured affability one might expect of Mr. Fox.

      Miraculously, blessedly, his quiet words had some effect.

      Just a few feet away now, one dog sat abruptly, still leaning against his restraint. The other three stopped and stood, leaving Mr. Fox surrounded by a quivering mass of canines, their tongues lolling almost to the ground.

      “Good afternoon, Lady Felicity. Miss Burke. Ash,” he said, nodding to each in turn.

      Apparently having been reminded of her existence by his friend’s greeting, Lord Ashborough turned slightly to invite her into their circle. Mr. Fox smiled in welcome, clearly considering her a part of the group. Oh, God…what if he expected her to walk with him?

      She knew her fear of dogs was irrational. Why, if others had not repeated the story, she would not even remember the details of the childhood trauma that had led to it.

      But she could not make herself move closer.

      Closing her parasol, Felicity extended one hand to the sitting dog. “Oh, you darling thing,” she cooed. The dog’s tail thumped the ground, but he did not rise. “What’s your name?”

      “That’s Tiresias,” Lord Ash supplied on behalf of the dog.

      Lady Felicity did not look up. “Are you a sportsman, then, Mr. Fox?”

      Mr. Fox, already pink from the exertion of keeping the dogs in check, colored further. “Oh, er, I—that is, well… No,” he managed finally.

      “No? Then how did you happen to come into possession of four such fine animals?”

      “Oh, well, they’re not, you see. Not fine dogs, I mean.” A frown sketched across Felicity’s brow, and she drew back her hand. “That is, not to my brother’s way of thinking.” He gestured with his chin to the trio on his left. “Achilles was the runt. Lelantos won’t point. And Medea here has lost two litters already.”

      Despite herself, Cami smiled at the fanciful names, the warrior’s for the weakest of the litter, the legendary hunter’s to the dog who could not spot his prey. Felicity only shook her head. “And this one?” she asked, ruffling the sitting dog’s ears. But if the name of a blind prophet proved an insufficient clue, Tiresias’s cloudy eyes revealed quite clearly the liability that kept him from the field.

      “They were all to be put down,” Fox explained, “so I—”

      “You rescued them?” she interjected.

      Fox demurred. “Foolish, I know.”

      It might have been foolish—in the extreme, to Cami’s way of thinking—but it was difficult not to like Mr. Fox in the face of further evidence of his kind heart. She wished there were any hope at all that her cousin could marry such a man, rather than Lord Ashborough.

      Felicity was looking up at Fox with an expression of admiration. “Generous, I should say. Your brother is Lord Branthwaite, is he not? I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.”

      Fox nodded. “I will introduce you, if you would like.”

      “Very much,” she replied with an enthusiastic nod. “Then I will be at liberty to give him a proper dressing down for his negligence.” Her gloved fingers traveled along Tiresias’s leash, clearly intending to snake it from Mr. Fox’s grasp.

      He hesitated. “I don’t know, ma’am. They’re not very well mannered.”

      “Then they must learn how to behave around ladies,” she insisted, tucking her parasol