CamillasConsequences by Helena Harker Read Free Book Online Page A

orange flare, only ashes remain.
    “Correct. The note did not mean much at all.” I remove another envelope from my bulky handbag and deposit it on his desk. I sit in the leather armchair opposite him, enjoying the cool leather under my fingertips. “These, however, are incontrovertible proof of your misdoings.”
    His countenance is wooden. His eyes are cold, and the veins in his neck throb. With a letter opener, which he brandishes in a suggestive slicing motion, he opens the envelope. He takes a series of nervous puffs on his cigar. As five Panoptographs drop to his desk, his cigar almost falls from his lips, and his feet return to the floor.
    “Set them aflame if you like, for I have many more. As a matter of fact, I have an entire reel of cellulose that documents the encounter.”
    Aldridge’s face turns grim. He scowls, and for a moment he reminds me of the lion I encountered in Africa, dangerous and unpredictable.
    “Put out your cigar.”
    Slowly, he removes the cigar from his mouth and stamps it out in an ashtray.
    “Obedience becomes you, Aldridge.”
    “Who are you and what do you want?” he growls.
    “My name, as you already know, is Camilla Covington. I am a sexual blackmailer. I enforce society’s unwritten moral code, if you will.” Not that I am proud to call myself a blackmailer, but the term strikes fear into the hearts of my victims, and fear is my initial goal. “Unlike you, I have impeccable morals.”
    “Impeccable morals?” he ridicules. “A blackmailer with impeccable morals?”
    “Do not make light of your situation.” I cross my legs and relax in the chair. “Those Panoptographs have the power to obliterate your career and your marriage.”
    “Don’t be melodramatic.” He swallows, and his features are sullen. “Blackmailers are cowards. Their prime motivation is greed. What must I do to avoid being ruined?”
    “You must be punished for your sins.”
    “Only God can do that.”
    “I can do far more than God.” So much more. “This is what I want.” I hand him another piece of paper, which lists my demands.
    He peruses it, his fist pounding the desk as his eyes flit down the page. “You are insane!”
    “No, I am quite rational, I assure you. I will acknowledge that I am greedy and vindictive. But insane? Certainly not.”
    “You want me to sign over forty-nine percent of all my assets?”
    “Of your shipping company, your tea plantation in India, the foundry in Lower London. However, I require your full ten percent share of the diamond mine in East Africa. A lady can never have too many diamonds. And I want your five percent share in the British National Locomotive Company. Steam power is the future, after all. Contact your barrister in the morning. He will draw up the necessary paperwork, and then these incriminating pictures will never be sent to the London Post or distributed to your fellow politicians.”
    He balls up a Panoptograph in his fist. “So if I refuse, you will make these public.”
    “That is indeed what I said.” Neville Mountbatten, the vice president of the National Bank of England, kept a mistress despite being engaged to a young woman half his age. He chose not to give in to my blackmail, so I worked in tandem with Devlin and distracted his fiancée’s maid, who was about to post the wedding invitations. I spent the afternoon steaming open every one, inserting an incriminating Panoptograph into each envelope, and then returned them to the post office. I can imagine the shock on the faces of the prim and proper society ladies who opened those invitations. Needless to say, the wedding did not take place, my victim lost his position at the bank and last I heard he was on his way to Brazilia to work as a bookkeeper on a rubber plantation.
    “If I give in, I will be ruined.” The color leeches from his face. He is as white as his starched shirt.
    “Not at all,” I say encouragingly. “Let me define ruined. Ruined is losing your seat in the