Chadbourn had asked what more he had to fix.Only this, he thought. His story would be a tiny restitution for a great wrong, but it gave him something to take back to Nora, one small shred of pride to show for his time in London. He had nothing else.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
A smile started in the left corner of Richard’s mouth and spread across his face.Damn his devious hide!He had known about the Avante and planned Jamie’s anti-slavery efforts all along.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Where the devil is Archie Campbell?” Nora demanded of an empty room. She paced the foyer of Casa Beaumont, as empty as it was cold. She slapped one hand that held a piece of folded vellum against the other one in a rhythm that matched the tap of the heels of her fashionable half boots.
What,she wondered,could be keeping Wentworth’s blasted clerk?They were two days short of the final hearing that would make Isabella hers and give Nora legal authority, and now she had been sent a notice of a challenge from the court.
She had no idea why there could be a challenge so late in the process. The notice burned in her hand. She needed advice. She needed to talk to Archie Campbell.
She needed Jamie more. He may have lied and deceived her, but he would have known what to do.Blast the man. He had been gone for weeks and had not bothered to so much as to answer her letters. He knew their case depended on married respectability.
“Lady Ross! I came as soon as I could. What has upset you so?” Campbell bounded through the door and practically tossed his hat at a frowning Wat Jones. He bowed over her free hand and pressed his look of concern on her. “What is it?”
“Castellimonte. He has challenged the guardianship.” She handed him the papers.
Campbell let the air empty from his lungs. “You had better tell me everything.”
Moments later she watched anxiously while he reread the court summons seated in her courtyard.
“There isn’t much to go on,” he said. “It is simply a notice that the Count di Castellimonte challenges the petition for guardianship. Has the count contacted you?”
“I haven’t seen him since he left Rome for Turin a month ago. I thought we had satisfied him. I thought he came to trust me. I thought he agreed to the arrangement.”
“Obviously not.” Campbell ran a hand through his hair and twisted his neck as if to free it from the high collar above his intricately tied neck cloth. He gave Nora a guarded look. “Have you heard from Baron Ross?”
“No.” If Jamie were here it might be different. The count made it clear from the beginning that he didn’t approve of a single woman as guardian for Isabella. “No, and I believe that is the heart of the problem.”Damn you, Jamie, she thought.
“I fear you may be right, but we can’t tell from the notice. All I can do is look into it. If we understood the challenge, we could be prepared to counter it.”
“If he challenges my marriage, what then?” Nora wasn’t sure how to finish.
“He can’t. We covered that. Your marriage is perfectly legal, at least in Italy.” Archie had explained that even in England the withholding of full title might not have invalidated the marriage.
“But Jamie is gone,” she said.
“Do you mean Castellimonte might pose you as an abandoned wife?” he asked.
Nora felt the blood drain from her face and the hope from her heart. Campbell voiced the thought that haunted her nights.
“Nora!” Campbell sprang in alarm, “Lady Ross,” he amended, “are you well?”
Nora sat up straighter. “I’m well,” she said, “but Isabella deserves better than being used this way.”Isabella, she reminded herself.Isabella matters, not my pathetic love life.
She saw Archie Campbell to the door with some hope and more relief. The man’s obvious attraction to her, one he made less and less effort to hide, had become a problem. Whether he would prove capable enough to ensure that she obtained sole guardianship of Isabella constituted a different problem.
When the case concluded, she would find a kind way to send him away. For now, she needed him, her only English ally in Rome.
An hour later she sat with her one true friend. Mother Margarita, her black eyes warm with concern, watched Isabella dance around the convent garden chasing butterflies.
“No word from the major?” Mother Margarita asked. Nora never heard the woman call him “Baron Ross.”
“No.” Every week it was the same answer. Jamie had not written. Nora conversed comfortably in Italian these days.
The older woman’s face lost none of its serenity. “You will hear from him.”
