The Many Sins of Lord Cameron

Chapter 26

Cameron walked in while Ainsley was packing. Her upstairs rooms were a mess of boxes and bags, the maids hurrying in and out with articles of clothing. Ainsley had known she’d have to confront Cameron sooner or later, but she’d rather hoped his training would keep him out of doors a little longer.

She took the telegram from her pocket and thrust it at him. “Before you ask, this is what it’s all about.”

Cameron’s eyes flickered as he read the words. Mr. Brown is gone. Come to me at once.

“Brown?” Cameron rumbled. “He’s dead?”

“Apparently.” Ainsley stopped a maid. “No, not the blue. I need the gray and the black. The queen will expect me in mourning.”

Cameron held the telegram between two fingers. “Why does she want you? She must have other ladies who can hold her hand.”

“She confided deeply in me about John Brown, how fond she was of him. He saved her life, really. I understand what she’s feeling.”

“What I mean, Ainsley, is why the devil are you going?”

“It won’t be for long,” Ainsley said. “A few weeks, maybe a month.”

“No.” The word burst out of Cameron, and Ainsley looked at him in surprise. “A month is far too long.”

“It will give me a chance to finish a few things I left hanging. To make a clean end of them.”

“What things?”

“Things from my old life. I packed and left rather abruptly, as you know, once I’d made up my mind to.”

Cameron slapped his hand to her open trunk lid, and the thing clattered shut. The maid looked startled then discreetly faded out the door.

“The queen has a houseful of servants and ladies at her beck and call,” Cameron said. “Why should you go?”

Ainsley had seen Victoria grieve before, how ill she made herself with it. The queen was a robust woman, but she did not handle loss very well. She loved hard and she grieved hard, rather like Cameron in that respect.

“I had another telegram, from one of her ladies,” Ainsley said. “The queen can’t walk, is unable even to rise from her chair. If I can ease some of that, if I can help her again, take my leave of her as friends, then I can return here and begin my life.”

“Begin your life? What the devil have you been living these past five months?”

“Please, Cam, this is important. She needs me.”

“Damn it all, I need you!”

Ainsley watched him in silence. Cameron held himself rigidly, fists clenched in dusty gloves.

“Cam,” Ainsley said. “I’ll come back.”

“Will you?” The words were bitter.

“Of course. We’re married.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s rather a lot, to me.”

Cameron knew she didn’t understand. Her gray eyes were still, hands halted in the act of folding a shawl. The shawl complemented her, silver and satiny, dripping down her arms the same way her hair slid over Cameron’s body when they made love.

Ainsley was leaving—Cameron losing her. The very thought made him break into a cold sweat.

“By the time I return, Daniel will have come home for his short holiday,” Ainsley said. “We’ll be a family again.”

A family. Again. She sounded so certain, as though everything were simple. Cameron and Daniel had only ever been tense satellites circling each other, and they had both known it. Until Ainsley. Daniel had tried at every turn to shove Ainsley into Cameron’s life, had turned up to winter with them, to make sure his father and Ainsley stuck it out. Now Daniel had gone, believing that everything was well.

“You won’t come back,” Cameron said.

“Yes, I will. I’ve just said.”

“You’ll intend to. But the queen will get her clutches into you, drag you back into her world, where she is the sun and the moon. She doesn’t like the Mackenzies, and she’ll do whatever she can to get you away from us.”

Ainsley looked puzzled. “The queen takes your advice on horses. You even turned up at Balmoral to speak to her about it.”

“Because she wants her horses to win. That doesn’t mean she likes or even respects me. Victoria knew my mother, thought her a fool for putting up with my father. She pitied my mother and despised her at the same time. She thinks Mackenzie sons are cut from the same cloth as the father, and she’s not far from wrong.”

“She is wrong. I know that. Isabella told me about your father. He sounds horrible.”

“But he’s here.” Cameron pressed his chest. “He’s in here. The bully who beat us, who killed my mother, who locked Ian away in an asylum—he’s in here with me. He’s in all of us. You might have noticed that my family is not exactly sane.”

She gave him her little smile. “Eccentric, certainly.”

“Stark, raving mad. I ease the madness with the horses, but between seasons, I barely keep it contained. Until this year, with you. Instead of drinking and sexing until I couldn’t remember which day was which, I strolled in parks and went to museums and to gardens, for God’s sake. I watched you and Daniel discuss the virtues of pastries and play draughts together on rainy evenings. My friends in Monte Carlo told me I’d gone domestic, and I laughed, because I didn’t care.”

Ainsley sent him another puzzled look. “You were miserable in Monte Carlo.”

“Restless, yes. Miserable, no. Hell, no. There, and in Paris, I was seeing everything as though it were new. All the things I took for granted for years suddenly had color and substance. Why? Because I saw them anew, through your eyes.”

Ainsley couldn’t know how beautiful she was standing there listening to him, brow puckered in confusion. “But your heart is here,” she said. “In Berkshire. With your horses at Waterbury Grange. I’m not wrong about that.”

“My heart is where you are, Ainsley. So when you leave . . .” Cameron made an empty gesture.

“I’ll come back,” she said stubbornly.

“To this wreck of a man? Why should you?”

“Because I love you.”

Cameron stopped. She’d said that before, though not often, as though worried how he’d respond.

But damn it, Ainsley could say it as often as she bloody well pleased. Plenty of women had told Cameron they’d loved him, even Elizabeth had. Usually they cooed it after he gave them some expensive present. Ainsley stood forlornly in the middle of a room and said it.

With Ainsley, something whispered to him, it just might be true.

“Then why go?” he asked.

“Because of the things I need to do. Important things. I would ask you to accompany me, but I know you can’t leave the horses, and you being with me would complicate things.”

“What things?”

“Cameron . . .”

Cameron unfolded his arms and moved to the window. Out in the paddock Angelo was letting the horse he rode slowly canter, winding down from a gallop.

He felt her come up behind him then her soothing touch on his shoulder. “That night six years ago in your bedchamber,” she said in a soft voice. “When you tempted me so sorely, and I refused you . . .”

“I remember.” The horse was going well, Angelo riding as though he were one with the beast. “What about it?”

“I refused you because I wouldn’t betray John, my husband. And I won’t betray you now. I’ll come back, Cameron. I promise.”

Cameron turned and pulled her to him. They stood together, swaying in the sunshine. He felt Ainsley relax, relieved that he’d stopped fighting her. But Cameron was far from yielding.

“I don’t want you back because you feel obligated to me, love,” he said. “That’s the devil of wedding vows—they make you do things for a person you maybe should run away from. Come back to me because you want to, not because you think you ought to. Do you understand?”

Ainsley looked up at him, her eyes a mystery. “I think I do understand you, Cameron.”

Cameron heard more in the sentence than the bare words, but he couldn’t decide what. He kissed her, dissolving in her warmth, and then he let her go.

Angelo went with her. Cameron insisted. Cameron said that he trusted Ainsley but not whatever fools she might meet on her journey. A maid and a footman weren’t enough to guard her. Angelo, he knew, wouldn’t let a damn thing happen to her. So Angelo went, without argument.

Once they reached Windsor, Angelo left to join his family on their canal boat that wandered up and down the nearby Kennet and Avon Canal. Ainsley loaded Angelo with packages of food and clothing, toys for his nieces and nephews, and sent him off.

She found Windsor cold, damp, and sorrowful.

My dearest Cameron,

The queen is quite distraught and most days cannot walk on her own. She has expressed relief that I am here and relies on me most strongly.

I am happy I came, because the others of the household, while sad that the queen is grieving, did not have much love for Mr. Brown. They grow impatient with Her Majesty’s eulogizing and her talk of mausoleums and monuments to him. Their line of thinking is that Mr. Brown was only a servant, and one who got above himself at that. He deserves a proper burial, yes, but nothing more.

But they forget what a true friend Mr. Brown was to the queen after her husband’s death, when her heart broke, and she hid herself away from the world. It was Mr. Brown that got her to do her duty as queen again and gave her the will to continue. He should at least be remembered for that.

I doubt, despite vicious gossip, and despite those letters over which Mrs. Chase was delighted to blackmail her, that the queen and Mr. Brown were ever lovers. A couple can be quite intimate without sharing bodies—though you will likely not believe that, my Cam.

But it can be true. What I feel for you is highly intense, whether you are standing next to me or living a hundred miles away. I do not have to be touching you at all to experience what I feel.

The queen and I go out seldom, and I look longingly across the fields from my high window, wishing I were at Waterbury with you. Here lambs wander across green fields and crocuses sprout the colors of spring. I imagine that Waterbury must look much the same, all misty and soft.

Unhappily I do not see much of spring because I sit most of the time behind thickly draped windows with nothing to do but read to Her Majesty, or embroider, or perhaps play on the piano. At least I have time to work on the pillows I’m doing for our parlor, in very bright and cheerful colors. I enjoy picturing what they will look like in our house.

I will write as often as I can, but truth be told, I don’t have many moments to myself. The queen is in a very bad way and needs everyone who can be at her side.

But whenever I undo my buttons to ready myself for bed, I think of you. I imagine your fingers unfastening my gown, opening me like a Christmas parcel for your pleasure. I tingle even now as I think of it, and so I will close before I quite combust and burn the paper.

Please greet our household for me, and your trainers, and the lads at the stables, and the horses, and McNab. I so miss you all!

With my deepest love, my dearest husband,

Your,

Ainsley

“Now, my dear, I will speak to you about your unfortunate marriage to the Mackenzies.”

The queen must be feeling better, Ainsley thought, if she’s bringing up the topic of my elopement.

Ainsley kept her gaze on her embroidery, blue violets on a cream background. She was redoing the parlor at Waterbury in shades of blue and yellow, brightening it from Cameron’s decorating scheme of “whatever happened to be in the house when I bought it.”

She makes it sound as though I married the whole lot of them. Although, maybe I did.

“Their father was a brute,” Victoria said decidedly. “I knew the duke, and he was awful. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, you know. Marriage to a Mackenzie is no marriage for a genteel young lady, especially one as well brought up as you were.”

Isabella and Beth were genteel young ladies too, Ainsley reflected. The queen, however, made no mention of them.

“Lord Cameron and I are managing to rub along quite well,” Ainsley said. “You’ll see us at Ascot, of course, but I imagine he’ll win the Thousand Guineas Stakes at Newmarket with his new filly. You ought to wager on her. Chance’s Daughter is a brilliant runner.”

The queen gave her a severe look. “Don’t change the subject. You eloped. You disgraced yourself. For once, I am glad your poor dear mother is not alive. You’d have broken her heart.”

While Ainsley hadn’t known her mother, she refused to believe that Jeanette McBride would have minded seeing her only daughter marry happily, if a bit unconventionally.

“What’s done is done,” Ainsley said. “Water under the bridge. I must make the best of it.” She winced as the clichés fell from her lips, but all clichés held a grain of truth.

“I heard of your goings-on on the Continent,” the queen went on. “Cabarets and the casino at all hours of the night. Your brother and sister-in-law hid their faces in shame.”

Ainsley rather doubted that. Patrick, for all his emphasis on hard, honest work, could understand a bit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake now and again. Plus, Patrick was far more open-minded than his rather dour countenance suggested. As she’d told Cameron, Patrick and Rona definitely did not have separate bedrooms.

“And it’s not quite true that what’s done is done,” Victoria said. “The marriage can be put aside. I’m certain that Lord Cameron tricked you into believing you married him legally. He knew you wouldn’t let him seduce you until you had a ring on your finger.”

Ainsley decided to keep quiet about the fact that Cameron had seduced her long before the ring was on her finger. “Ma’am, Lord Cameron isn’t a stage villain. We had a license. I saw it. And a vicar, and witnesses.”

“Hired actors and a forgery. I have caused letters to be sent to Hart Mackenzie, instructing him to take the legal means to declare the marriage null.”

Ainsley imagined Hart Mackenzie’s reaction on receiving those instructions.

But the queen’s presumption that she could so coolly interfere with Ainsley’s life and that Ainsley would simply obey, made her at last lose her temper.

“How dare you?” she said in a low but fierce voice. Victoria’s eyes widened, but Ainsley plunged on, bravely taking to task the Queen of England and Empress of Britain. “After all I did for you. I risked everything to get those letters back for you, because I respected you and didn’t want to see you embarrassed. Lord Cameron helped—did you know that? He gave me the money for the letters so that you’d not have to pay one farthing.”

“You told him?” The queen’s whisper cut through the room, and ladies on the other side looked up. “Do mean to say, Ainsley Douglas, that Cameron Mackenzie, of all people, knows about my letters?”

“If not for him, you’d have had greatest difficulty getting them back.”

Victoria stared at her in outrage. “You little fool. Lord Cameron will have told the duke, and copies will be circulating even now.”

“Cameron has told no one. I asked him to keep the secret, and he complied.”

“Do not be ridiculous. He is a Mackenzie. He cannot be trusted.”

“He can be perfectly trusted,” Ainsley said. “But if you succeed in breaking up our marriage, do you not think Lord Cameron might retaliate with what he knows?”

Ainsley didn’t truly believe Cameron would take his revenge with petty gossip, but then again, who knew what Cameron might do? She remembered his look when he’d watched her leave Waterbury: raw, empty, angry.

Victoria, on the other hand, did believe it. “That is blackmail.”

“Yes, it is. It seems to be the only thing that anyone understands.”

Ainsley was suddenly tired of this life—the court, the gossip, dealing in secrets and tittle-tattle. She had always been an outsider looking in, the nobody daughter of a nobody gentleman, hired by the queen for the sake of Ainsley’s mother. Ainsley had never been important enough to be bribed for favors or blackmailed into them; she’d only watched others do so to each other. No one had much noticed Ainsley at all.

Now, as wife of one of the notorious and powerful Mackenzies, heir to the dukedom, Ainsley could be used, or she could be dangerous. She preferred to be dangerous.

“Therefore, I believe that I will remain married to Lord Cameron,” Ainsley finished.

The queen glared at her, but Ainsley saw Victoria looking at her in a new way: not as a sycophant who could be sent on delicate errands, but as a woman to be reckoned with.

“Your poor dear husband will roll in his grave,” Victoria said. “Mr. Douglas was a respectable man.”

“My poor dear husband was quite generous, and I believe he’d want to see me happy.” John had been kind to the end, and Ainsley had always been very, very glad that she’d stood by him.

The queen continued to regard her with cold eyes. “I will pretend that I never heard this outburst. The conversation never took place.” She lifted her needlework from her lap. “If you had not been so rude, Ainsley, I would have told you that your brother has arrived. I’d arranged for him to take you home to wait for your annulment, but now, of course, you may do whatever you wish. We are finished. But there is a saying, my dear, that you might well heed, that those who make their beds must lie in them.”

My, they were full of old adages today. But as long as that bed held Cameron Mackenzie, Ainsley would happily lie there.

Ainsley thrust her embroidery into her work basket. “Patrick is here? May I go?”

“Please do. Send Beatrice to me. I do not believe we shall be seeing you again.”

Ainsley rose and curtseyed, relieved rather than dismayed to be dismissed.

On impulse, she leaned down and kissed the queen’s faded cheek. “I hope you’ll learn to be proud of me, one day,” she said. “And I assure you, your secrets are safe with me.”

Victoria blinked in surprise. Ainsley felt the queen’s gaze on her as she made her way across the room and out of it. The click of the door that a footman closed behind her seemed to signal the end of Ainsley’s old life.

Patrick McBride waited in a corridor not far away, looking uncomfortable and a little drab amidst the splendors of Windsor. Ainsley tossed down her sewing basket and ran the length of the hall to him, arms outstretched. Patrick’s smile as he swept her up was worth every one of the queen’s disapproving words.

“I’m so pleased to see you,” Ainsley said, smiling into his dear face. “I need a cohort in crime, Pat, and you, my so-respectable older brother, will be perfect.”