Free Rogue's Reward by Jean R. Ewing Page B

No doubt it was somehow a way to steal his sister’s inheritance. And now it seemed that he had stolen her mother’s letters and was blackmailing her and the major about it.
    Mr. Campbell might be Diana’s half-brother and used to the blind adoration of females, but he hadn’t met Acton determination before and he didn’t know that Lady Eleanor Acton knew about his game.
    Virtus Actonorum in Actione Consistit . It was the Acton motto: Action is the Acton virtue.
    If he planned to blackmail Lady Acton, the arrogant Leander Campbell was going to find out very soon that he had at last met his match.
     

Chapter 6
     
    At that moment the arrogant Leander Campbell was indeed thinking about blackmail. He and Walter Downe were sitting comfortably before the fire at Deerfield. Each man sipped gently at a glass of the finest brandy from the major’s superb cellar. Lee held his up for a moment to the light and watched the seductive change in its color.
    “Have you learned anything, Lee?” Walter asked.
    “About Manton Barnes? No, I haven’t. Sir Robert was never close to his nephew. Certainly, Barnes was rarely here as a child. We met for the first time at Eton. Sir Robert claims to know very little about Manton’s private life and to take little interest.”
    “Then he kept his secret from his uncle?”
    Lee looked thoughtfully into the hearth. “It would appear so. Sir Robert said all the correct things when he learned of our friend’s death, but I don’t think it touched him very deeply. I’m afraid that the impeccable military gentleman you have met at every rout and soirée for the last several years has never been a man to show much genuine emotion.”
    “Then he wouldn’t suspect suicide?”
    “Why should he? There’s no reason to think he knew Barnes might be facing the gallows. No, someone else knew, and I suspect it was Blanche who told him.”
    “Miss Blanche Harrison?”
    “Who else? She was devastated when Barnes broke off their engagement. I suggested he make some excuse, but perhaps he told her the truth and in her distress she went to someone else for help, someone who used that knowledge for blackmail.”
    “ You suggested he break off the engagement? I didn’t know you’d had a hand in it.”
    Lee stood up and refilled his glass. “May God forgive me! It’s too easy, isn’t it, to give advice? When Barnes told me he’d proposed to Miss Harrison, I gave him the worst dressing-down he’d ever received in his life. Poor fellow! He hoped marriage would be a cover for him, but he’d never given a thought to the consequences for Blanche.”
    “Well, you couldn’t stand aside and let him ruin her life.”
    “And I would do it again, even knowing the consequences—though as it turned out, one might lay Barnes’s death at my door, I suppose.”
    “That’s nonsense, Lee, and you know it! If he hadn’t been blackmailed, he’d never have taken his own life.”
    “And if I hadn’t interfered, he’d have married and kept his secret forever. There’d have been no grounds for blackmail.”
    “No, you did the right thing to save Miss Harrison. But if you think she told someone the truth, why don’t you ask her? Where is she now?”
    “In America,” Lee said with a wry smile. “And no one knows where.”
    “Then there’s no way to find out anything at all?”
    “Not from her, certainly. And I have no other leads. Yet—” He stopped.
    “Yet, what?” Walter asked.
    “Yet Major Sir Robert St. John Crabtree isn’t telling me the truth. God knows why! I’ve known the man since I was five years old and I owe him everything.”
    “Yes, he found you in Ireland where you’d been sent as a baby and brought you back to Hawksley.”
    “But though it may have been gallant to rescue a by-blow of the English peerage from the bogs of the Emerald Isle, it also meant that it was excessively awkward for Lady Augusta to dump me in the foundling hospital. So though she took me in, she was never