They stayed like that for a few moments, but finally he said, “What is troubling you, my girl?”
“I have a dilemma.” She stood, moved his glasses over, and hopped up to sit on the edge of the desk. Her father leaned back in his chair and gazed up at her in the dimness. Again, the curtains were closed. Ever since her mother’s death, Phaedra had had the feeling that her father couldn’t bear too much sunlight, as if it reminded him of his beloved, mourned-for wife. “Papa, is it justified, in God’s sight, to risk something, to sacrifice something of great importance to oneself for another’s benefit?”
“It depends, I suppose.” Mr. Gillian scratched his nose and furrowed his brow. “Are we talking a material sacrifice, or some other kind?”
“Some other kind.” She could never tell him exactly what kind of sacrifice she had in mind.
He gazed at her steadily for a minute, and then said, “Are there moral issues involved?”
As always, her father could read her mind, or at least some portion of it. “Yes,” she said doubtfully. “But there is a kind of biblical precedent for what I—”
“Stop!” He gave her a look of reproof. “Do not attempt to use the bible or religion as justification for something you’re not sure of. You must be sure in your own heart that what you are doing is right.”
“I’m thinking of a risk, the possibility of a great sacrifice, but an even greater reward, not—not to the uh, risker, but to someone else.”
Her father’s gaze stayed on her face and she felt him reading her, as if he was touching her heart and soul. He finally said, “I believe that God looks charitably on anyone willing to sacrifice greatly for others. But sacrifice is inevitably a risk, and one must be willing and able to live with all of the consequences. And live without blame, Phaedra, my dear. Live without blame. One must look deeply into one’s soul for the answers, and really and truly decide if your motives for doing what you plan to do are clearly understood. Are your motives pure? Are they truly known to you in your heart? Sometimes we do things for one reason, only to find we had a different expectation of the outcome all along.”
She reached out and touched his cheek. No matter what, her father would love her; she knew that and it comforted her, for if her risk went wrong, if she failed, she would need his love and understanding. It would change her life.
“I will think about what you’ve said, Papa. And now I will leave you to go back to your books, for I have interrupted you for long enough.”
He covered her hand. “I would give up anything for you, my dear, and not count the cost as too high.”
“I know that. It’s a comfort to me.”
“I have been thinking about the Codex, my dear.”
His rapid shift in topic did not faze Phaedra in the least, for he had always been thus. “Yes? And do you still think that Mr. Proctor is wrong, or have you come to see his point of view?”
“What I think is that I would like to go to Oxford for one day and sit down with him. Letters will never substitute for a face-to-face meeting. One day will uncover much of our disagreements.”
Fondly she patted his shoulder as she slipped off the desk. “Then go to Oxford, Papa. I will man the guns here.”
“How martial a metaphor, my dear. I will go, then. Within the next couple of days.”
Phaedra slipped out of the room as her father went back to his books. She was almost convinced now that her intended path was the right one. With one grand risk she could rectify everything. Or lose so much. But what did it signify if what one lost was never much use in the first place? She headed up the stairs toward Lord Hardcastle’s room.
Chapter Fifteen
“You are very good at this, my dear,” Hardcastle said, laying his cards down in defeat. “Out of our last five hands you have won three, and very few people in London have done as much.” He watched his opponent as she shuffled and dealt out another hand, trying to puzzle her out, a process he suspected might take a lifetime. She was so many layers and subtleties. His one complaint about women over the years had been that they were too uncomplicated, sometimes even brainless. They were necessary to one’s bodily release, and there was nothing so pleasing to the eye as a beautiful woman, but beyond enjoying their charms and as far as carrying on a conversation, one might just as well engage one’s spaniel in political talk. At least the spaniel would listen and not natter in one’s ear about gossip or other trivialities. He had heard much made of political hostesses and their ilk, but it seemed to him that the level of talk that went on at their parties was tittle-tattle disguised as deep thinking.
He was prepared now to contemplate that he had dismissed a whole sex’s intelligence based on faulty observation. Perhaps it was not the women who were at fault but the milieu in which he had observed them, between the sheets or at balls. He laid down a card, which Phaedra took with a whoop of competitive zeal, and wondered how many women in the world were such an endearing blend of intelligence, sweetness, moral strength, courage . . . and if his thoughts went on in that way, he would have her up for sainthood soon.
“And you win again, my dear,” he said as she took her third trick. “That makes game for you, I believe.”
She smiled. “How many times have I beaten you? What is the percentage, do you think?”
“Enough,” he said, laying the cards aside and leaning back.
“But how much? Has it been over half the time, do you think?”
Puzzled by her persistence, he paused before answering and watched her eager expression. “I think it has been over half,” he said. “Perhaps two-thirds of the time you beat me?”
“That is a good percentage for winning, is it not? If you were betting something of importance, you would bet it based on that chance of winning?”
“I like the odds to be significantly higher, but I will not play drunks and I will not play idiots, nor will I play anyone who I think is not a skilled enough player to provide a challenge, so that is about the best percentage I can usually hope for.”
She crossed the room and put the deck of cards in the drawer of the table by the open window. She gazed out at the steady rain for a moment, and then turned back to him, her expression significantly altered. There was uncertainty in her eyes, he thought; she was unsure about something.
Lovely, sky-blue eyes, they were. The man who married her would always have a sunny day in his own home, even when the weather closed in and was as gloomy as this evening had become. The room brightened with her presence.
She crossed back and sat down on the edge of the bed. He took one of her hands in his own and rubbed it with his thumb, caressing a raised callous, wishing he could do more. She was trembling. A longing to pull her into his arms and hold her swept over him, but he restrained the urge. He was not exactly in her good graces, no matter how fair and impartial she was attempting to be. She still did not see his side and likely never would. And he could not tell her why the ideal of honor was so deeply ingrained within him.
Or could he? Why not? It was not as if no one else knew the old story; Mercy Dandridge, his friend from school days, knew it.
“My father,” he said, before he had consciously decided to divulge the whole sordid story, “was an odd mixture of terrible gambler and parsimonious miser. How he got that way, I will never know.”
She was startled by his odd choice of subject matter, he could tell, but interest flared in her eyes. “Your father was a gambler?” She brought her knee up under her and gazed down at him.
“Oh, yes, indeed. He was addicted to it as some are over-fond of snuff and others secretly drink. He was a hard man, Phaedra, hard in ways that went bone deep. His heart was petrified like the stone shells one sometimes finds at the seashore.”
“It could not have been easy, being son to such a man. What of your mother?”
“She died when I was very young.” He looked away toward the white-painted wall, where a watercolor landscape, indifferently painted, hung over the small desk. “My father to
ld me about her death in the postscript to a letter he sent me at school; it was my first term. I never forgave him for that, for the nonchalance of his delivery.”
Phaedra squeezed his hand and held it in her lap, cradled in both her hands. “He may not have been comfortable with emotion. Some men are like that.”
“You excuse him too readily, my dear. He just didn’t care. She was a drain on his purse, you see. Had to have London physicians because she was sick, and so her dying provided him with financial relief. He never spoke of her again.”
Phaedra examined his face. Twilight was approaching, and with the rain still pattering on the windowsill the room was becoming dim. “I understand your bitterness. You have thought of her often over the years, I think.”
Hardcastle shifted up higher in the bed and pushed away the old pain. They were off track from what he had intended to speak of. “I have a much older sister. The few times I was home before she married, she tried to speak of Mother, but I would not listen. It seemed to me to be of no use, for I could not bring her back. I was telling you of my father, though.”
“Yes, you were,” Phaedra said, her tone indicating that she was still puzzled as to why, but would go along with his chosen topic.
This was supremely uncomfortable to him, talking about the past in this way, and yet he felt some deep urge to present to Phaedra his genesis, the explanation behind his rigorous insistence on honesty in all dealings and the prompt and honest settlement of debts. And so he stumbled into speech again. “My father and I would occasionally fall into card playing when I was home from school.” He pulled his hand from her grasp, finding it hard to concentrate with her fingers caressing his, twining around them tenderly like the soft green shoots of vines. “It was the only time we spent together. He usually had some woman in the house that he was sleeping with—he was successful with women for some reason—and other than that, he spent all of his time looking for something to gamble on.”
“He doesn’t sound like the ideal parent,” Phaedra ventured.
Hardcastle leaned back on the pillow and closed his eyes. “You are the mistress of understatement, my dear.” He missed her touch. Maybe it was better to feel her closeness, the connection between them making his confession easier. He took her hand in his own, and when she would pull away, clutched on to it tightly. Opening his eyes, he said, “This may seem like a strange rambling form of conversation, but I do have a point.”
“All right,” she said calmly. “I am listening.”
Would she ever let him kiss her again? He didn’t think so. She despised him for what he was about to do to the young Baron Fossey, and he could not change that. His gaze traced the pursed outline of her rosebud lips, and he remembered their velvety softness.
“My lord, you were saying?”
“Yes, uh, I was saying that we used to play cards on occasion, generally when he was trying to stay away from London and the gambling table. If he lost a great deal his miserliness, always at odds with the wastefulness of gambling, would cause him to attempt a reform. It never lasted long.”
“He sounds like a truly tortured individual.”
“Do not feel sorry for him. He lived the life he chose, as we all do. One particular time we were playing cards and we were gambling, as usual. I was doing reasonably well and he was becoming angrier by the minute; I think I was up a hundred guineas or more. There was a vein that would throb at his temple whenever he was reaching a breaking point. I knew it, and knew he was becoming incensed. I disliked him enough that I almost wished the vein would burst. And then he did the most extraordinary thing.” Hardcastle paused.
Phaedra said, “Go on. What did he do? Have an apoplectic fit?”
“No. He asked me, how would I like to double my allowance?”
“Really? And yet he was a miser.”
“Yes. He said, since I was doing so well, I might like to take a chance. He would wager me double my allowance until my majority—which was three years away, yet—on one game of cards.”
“And should you lose?”
“I would lose my allowance.”
“Ah,” said Phaedra. “It must have been tempting.”
“It was. I took the bet.”
“And?”
“And I lost.”
“You lost your entire allowance for three years?”
“Yes. When I returned to school I had nothing. No money for better food—the food at school was wretched unless you could go down to the bakeshop and buy a penny bun every day—no money for stabling my horse, no money for anything. I lived for a time like a charity student.”
“Your father was a hard man,” Phaedra said, her expression hidden by shadows. “You would think that pride of name would not allow him to let you live like that. How did you get through the next three years?”
“I gambled. I became very good. I was rusticated twice, almost sent down, but just got cannier.”
“And so you learned to live with the harsh realities of a losing wager,” Phaedra said. “Just as you mean Charles to.”
“There is that,” he said, unable to tell by her voice if she understood or not. He had not really meant to equate his losing his allowance for three years with a young man losing his entire estate, and forever. “But there is more to the story. When my father died, his mistress—you would know her if I said her name, for she was a notorious byword in the ton—told me a story about that night, about how he came to bed with her later and chuckled about how he had cheated me. How he had marked the cards and cheated me out of my allowance, and now he could go back to London and gamble more because it was like gambling free money. My money.”
“So Papa was right,” Phaedra said softly.
“What are you talking about?”
“He told me about a conversation you had with him, and that he advised you to live your own life, rather than living how you did to spite your father.”
“But I don’t live the way I do to spite him, I live how I do to prove that not every Hardcastle is a cheat, a-a bounder, a filthy—” He took a deep breath and wondered how the conversation could, again, have gone so profoundly off track.
“I understand,” she said softly. “But still, even if it is not spite, you are living as you do in response to your father’s behavior.” She put out one hand and touched his hair.
There was gentleness in her touch, a world of forgiveness and sympathy. He turned his face and felt her caress his cheek. It was cold comfort to know that she understood, that she forgave him his hard and unyielding nature. He would have given much, at that moment, to say to her that now he could move past it, that he could let Fossey off from his debt. But he just couldn’t.
“I have been hesitating,” she said, “to offer this resolution to our dilemma, but after pondering it for a while now, I can think of no reason not to. Your story explains much about why you cannot let Charles go, why you feel you must persecute this debt to the end. I will not say I understand completely, but I accept that you feel that you cannot act in any other way without betraying some code of ethics. What if—what if someone were to wager Charles’s freedom from his debt against something of value to themselves. Would that suffice? If they won, would that satisfy the debt?”
Hardcastle frowned into the gathering gloom. What on earth was she getting at? “Do you mean someone else would bet his freedom from the wagering debt against something of their own, some property?”
“Mmmm, something like that,” she said softly.
Her hand was still in his and she caressed his palm. He felt a thrill that left him breathless travel his body at that simple gesture. He could hardly think and he sternly quelled his body’s response. Did she know her affect on him? He would wager that she did not.
“I would think that would suffice. But I doubt whether the young man has any friends with a possession of such worth to equal his estate.” He felt her start.
“What—what would you consider equal to his estate? Would it have to be property? Or c
ould it be anything that you wanted?”
Hardcastle shrugged, not understanding the conversation. It made him irritable not to know what was going on. “It would be a subjective measure, indeed, but there are some things I would consider adequate exchange for the Fossey estate.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “How am I to answer that? Tell me what you mean.”
He felt her get closer in the semi-darkness until her body was pressed to his. He was startled by her lips on his, but then he was overtaken by the passion that surged through his veins and he pulled her close, taking her lips in a kiss of surprising heat and surpassing softness. Before he realized it, she was laying close to him and he was exploring her ears, the hollow of her neck, the soft peach fuzz near her hairline, while his body throbbed to life. He had been seduced by duchesses, had lain with courtesans of extraordinary beauty, had bedded a European princess once, but this simple country vicar’s daughter was the first to stir his loins with a mere kiss, the touch of her lips to his. Did she have any idea of the intoxicating force of his desire for her? How much he would give at that moment if he thought she would give herself to him?
She pulled away after a moment, and then lit a candle from the tinderbox on the side table. Her cheeks were pink, her breath was short and her tightly bound hair was adorably disheveled. He swallowed back his yearning for her.
“I would be willing,” she said, her gaze directed at the table next to her rather than at him, “to wager you whatever you wanted in exchange for Charles’s freedom from his lost bet.”
His breath caught in his throat. “Whatever I wanted?”
“Whatever you wanted, my lord,” she said softly. “If there is anything I have that would please you, I will lay it on the table as collateral for Charles’s debt. Would that be a satisfactory wager?”
Chapter Sixteen
For a moment she thought he was offended. How horrible that would be, to offer him whatever he wanted, only to find she had misjudged his passion for her. She had thought about it long and hard, but had seen no alternative. She did not know men very well, but she knew enough to realize when a man wanted her. For some mysterious reason, Hardcastle found her pleasing. She had not understood how much until the kisses they had just shared. She watched his face carefully.
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