“Cathal, the eldest of the three, was more decisive in his refusal. ‘You play well enough, for a girl, Róisín, but the festival will bring bards from every county. You cannot hope to compete with the likes of them. There’s no need for you to go at all, at all.’”
“So Cathal has not learned how to manage women,” Gabriel interrupted, though his tongue felt strangely inadequate to forming the name.
Her gaze flickered up from the paper, then back down. “You assume women need to be managed by men, my lord…or can be,” she countered.
He parted his lips to retort but in the end said only, “Go on with the story.”
“As you please, my lord.”
Oh, she would be the death of him with her prim, distant “my lord” this and “my lord” that. But he supposed there were worse ways to die.
“Róisín merely smiled at her brothers and set to work packing her harp. Fergus argued. Cathal scolded. Nevertheless, on a fine day in June, they left County Fermanagh exactly as she had intended they would, Fergus leading the donkey-cart that carried her precious instrument, while Cathal brought up the rear of the party, muttering dire predictions of the dangers they would face.”
The story did not attempt to disguise its allegorical qualities, as the three wide-eyed characters set out on a sort of pilgrimage. While Camellia read, Gabriel allowed his gaze to drift to the window and found himself vaguely disappointed at being surrounded by ordinary English hills and fields, rather than the rugged, green landscape of northern Ireland through which Róisín and her brothers walked. By midday, the siblings’ journey had managed to incorporate, with remarkable seamlessness, several lessons in Irish history, a description of traditional Irish clothing, and an encounter with a Catholic priest also bound for Belfast who found some excuse to give his presumably like-minded fellow travelers a lengthy discourse on the many misunderstandings to which their faith was subjected by outsiders.
“Rather heavy-handed, is it not?” Gabriel shifted awkwardly in his seat, stiff from holding himself in a position that kept their knees from brushing. “This panegyric on all things Irish? I am surprised Mr. Dawkins made no complaint.”
Camellia laid the page from which she had been reading facedown onto the steadily growing stack beside her. “You didn’t.”
He should have guessed she had noticed. In truth, he was stiff from having sat through the past three changes of the horses, held spellbound by her tale. And when he watched her plump lips curve in a provoking smile, and remembered the feel of them against his own mouth, certain parts of him grew stiffer yet.
“That’s enough for now,” he said, crossing one booted foot over the other leg and glancing toward the window. “We’ll be at the next village soon, and if the inn’s decent, we’ll stop for a meal.”
“As you wish.” She began rearranging the papers, which crinkled as she neatened the two stacks, turning one sideways before placing it atop the other so that the unread pages would not be mixed in with those she had finished.
He felt a sigh of something like relief ease from his lungs. She had at last forgone the damned honorific she’d been wielding all day with the subtlety of a beadle waving a rod at unruly schoolboys to keep them in line. As if they were strangers. As if he had not swept his tongue over every inch of her ivory skin.
Then she lifted her gaze to him and added, with quiet dignity, “My lord.”
* * * *
Róisín played for their supper or a room for the night, and all who heard her were enchanted.
When she had written those words, Cami had never imagined they would be a sort of premonition of her own fate. As soon as they sat down to a simple luncheon in the public room of the Green Hart Inn, she drained her cup of tea in a single swallow, though it was hot enough to sear her throat in passing. As soon as she returned her cup and saucer to the table, Gabriel picked up the teapot and refilled it without being asked, looking ever so slightly guilty for having kept her at her task for so long. Lady Merrick’s considerably more limited span of attention had never required her to sit and read for hours at a time.
“I have been thinking about our conversation at Lady Penhurst’s,” he said. “So, you decided to come to London in hopes of finding a publisher for a book I assume you wrote in secret?”
She nodded. No point in denying it now.
“But why not stay in Dublin? A work of such obvious Irish pride, as Dawkins himself noted—”
“My intention was not to reach an Irish audience, my lord, but an English one.” Picking up her spoon, she prodded at the bowl of lamb stew the servant set before her. “There are those who know nothing more of my country than what may be displayed on the London stage or sketched in a broadside cartoon. How can they be expected to imagine Ireland as a country with its own culture and traditions, a place quite apart from Britain, and worthy of its independence? I hoped to help them see another side of the story.”
As she spoke, she could feel his eyes on her, watching her shift the peas to one side of her dish. A childish habit. Reluctantly, she swirled her spoon through the brown gravy, mixing them back in again. Then she forced down a bite, peas and all, swallowing too quickly to taste them.
“And Dawkins believes he will find readers for that story? To be honest, I had not thought a novel the proper medium for politics.”
“I suppose you mean to imply it is an improper one?” Crumbs scattered across the table as she gestured impatiently with the hunk of bread she had torn from the loaf to chase the dreadful stew. “Because ladies read novels?”
“And write them, it would seem. As do
