by Edith Layton
“Pleasure,” the old man said in acknowledgment, nodding and setting back in his chair after his abortive attempt at rising. “I’m plain John Tryon, my lord, out of London this sennight, and here’s my right-hand man, my nevvy, m’late sister’s boy, George Tyler. Say hello, Georgie,” he ordered, just as though the young man were three instead of the thirty he might soon be, but before the handsome young man could do so, he went on, “I’d be pleased to try a hand with you, Lord Wyndham, but I warn you, I’d be a flat if I didn’t wager only for pins to begin, and I ain’t known for a flat, I can tell you. Mind, neither am I a skinflint, but it’s been a generation since I played this game, and seems to me you’re a regular Trojan at it. Well, my only interest’s been my farm and my prize bulls and getting them to market, do you see, and would still be if my blasted sawbones hadn’t physicked me to death and ordered me on this repairing lease with young George here. So I’ll say it plain in case you want to take on someone more your weight—though I don’t lack blunt, no, for I’m warm enough in the pocket and I haven’t spent any in a generation neither, living alone as I do, and secluded, except for Georgie here. But I ain’t in practice, my lord, not at cards, nor any sort of play. Well, butchers can’t be choosers, can they?” he asked, wheezing at his own wit even before Mrs. Cobb could recognize it as such and join him with her own silvery laughter.
“My dear Mr. Tryon,” Lord Wyndham said amiably, “never fear. I’m here for my health as well, unfortunately. Heart,” he explained solemnly, tapping his waistcoat with one long white finger, and after the company had a second’s silence to acknowledge the diagnosis, he continued, “and I’m not at all an adept at the game either, I only played to oblige Mr. Henderson. And he, poor fellow, had himself forgot half the rules, but he’d such a bad run of luck at the wheel and with the dice that he wanted to try something ‘tamer,’ as he said. But, poor gentleman, his mind is so taken up with his dear wife’s recent demise, he couldn’t concentrate on anything. Lucky for him,” Lord Wyndham said wisely, “that I insisted we play only for pennies, for the pure sport of it.”
If Mr. Tryon had noted that the banknotes, which had disappeared as if by magic into Lord Wyndham’s own pockets seconds after they had touched the table, had amounted to a great many “pennies” indeed, or that Lord Wyndham’s state of health didn’t seem to influence the steadiness of his hands as he absently riffled the cards through them, or even that Mr. Henderson’s leers at Mrs. Cobb as he’d left her had not looked anything like those of a man still grieving for his departed spouse, he said nothing at all, but only grinned widely, rubbed his huge hands together, and promptly settled himself, with a great deal of creaking from his suffering chair as well as his stays, for a “good round game of piquet,” as he put it.
They played for laughably small stakes at first, just as Mr. Tryon had asked. And they played cautiously even after they’d made sure they’d the rules right. For Lord Wyndham had hesitantly explained the game as he knew it, and Mr. Tryon had corrected him on only one or two points, frowning as he tried to remember them exactly.
They seemed evenly matched, at the start. They both played fumblingly and so badly that at first it was a contest merely to see which would lose to the other the fastest. It was so much good fun, and they were so equal in their skills, or lack of them, that soon they agreed to raise the stakes, since they had to add some interest to the game, and it was clear neither would beggar the other. And even then, as they upped the ante again, and yet again, and a treble time, until they were playing for quite respectable amounts of money, they seemed equal in skill and intent. Until, that is, they then looked up and about them, as though the silence there were loud enough to distract them, and saw that their spectators had begun to play as well.
For Mrs. Cobb, it appeared, fantastically enough, had suddenly been possessed by a singularly strong attraction to Mr. Tryon. Or his hands, he thought, or his cravat, he thought again as he noted the general direction of her unrelenting gaze, for his face, red and rounded and wrinkled as it was, could never have attracted the interest of anyone but a surgeon or an artist drawn to the naturalistic and grotesque. Yet when his unusually sharp and knowing hazel eyes beneath his bushy white brows met her wide and unabashedly direct blue stare, she smiled, and then dimpled and ducked her head, only to raise it to bat the lashes above that sky-blue gaze, but never so much so that she ever left off looking upon him with what seemed to be coy embarrassment and absolute invitation. And this, while all the while young George, who had himself, as ever, attracted interested stares from females clear across the room, both smiled and stared and gazed amazed, with something very like the look of a starveling puppy, or a gentleman who’d been instantly smitten, and very hard at that, at Mrs. Cobb. Who, in turn, noted this adoration, but then proceeded to completely ignore him as she continued to ogle his ancient uncle. While her gentleman friend, Lord Wyndham, looked up once, twice, and then again at the byplay of eyes above him, and so could not help but see young George’s worship of his young companion, as clear as it was profound.
If Mr. Tryon could be expected to find it difficult to concentrate while being openly admired by such a charming young female, it would be only understandable that Lord Wyndham would discover it hard to assess his cards while his lovely ladyfriend was being so blatantly sighed over by such a manly young paragon. And so it was even harder to understand then why neither gentleman playing cards made so much as one miscall, or lost count of one card taken in, even as they each took in the situation, or forgot any other card his opponent dealt out, even as all this was going forth.
In fact, it was only after a particularly sharp play by Mr. Tryon that Lord Wyndham gazed at him narrowly, and then only when Lord Wyndham tried an extraordinarily observant ploy that Mr. Tryon laid down his cards and stared at him pointedly. And then the huge old fellow began to grin hugely, showing for the first time a set of strong, even, and dazzling white teeth. And then Lord Wyndham cocked his head to the side before he too laid down his cards and began chuckling. Young George left off languishing over Mrs. Cobb as he noted this, and after a quick look to Mr. Tryon answered his unspoken question, he threw back his golden head and began to laugh outright. At the last, when the other three were all so merry, Mrs. Cobb looked shocked, then annoyed, and then, relenting, gave way to an attack of giggles herself, and the sound was far more infectious than her usual practiced silvery ripples of laughter.
“When did you twig to it?” Mr. Tryon asked at last, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
“That last call,” Lord Wyndham admitted a bit breathlessly, “and young George’s soulful look. Good heavens, Roxie’s a pretty enough chit, but why on earth an Apollo on earth would be consumed with passion for her so suddenly was more than I could discern.”
“Ah,” young George put in sweetly, seeing Mrs. Cobb’s amusement dwindle at the comment, “but that admiration was entirely genuine.”
He followed the compliment by immediately assuming a look of such outsize and pained devotion that Mrs. Cobb, who had begun to preen and look at Lord Wyndham with great affronted dignity, gave it up and began to giggle again.
“Well, as for that,” Mr. Tryon said merrily, “her flaming passion for me was a bit much. There’s only so much lust a pocketbook can generate.”
After their laughter had been spent again, they settled to an awkward, edgy silence. Lord Wyndham, who had been absently shuffling the cards, straining them through his hands until they performed like acrobats there, assuming a dozen different formations, held them quiet at last, and broke the uneasy peace.
“We don’t look either that affluent or that wet behind the ears, friends. What made you chance to try to pluck us?” he asked softly.
“We were looking for you,” Mr. Tryon said quietly, as Lord Wyndham’s shoulders gave an involuntary leap and Mrs. Cobb’s merry face grew cold and wary.
“As a favor,” Mr. Tryon explained seriously, and seeing their reaction, raised one enormous finger
to silence them stiller than they already were. “But calm yourselves, we’re no sort of law. It’s only that my friend and I happened across a wretched young countryman of ours the other night in the gardens of a hell very like this one, near to Fontainebleau. He was, we thought, either attempting to discover how long his pistol’s barrel was by measuring it with his tongue, or more seriously set on self-annihilation. Fortunately, he was too castaway to have remembered to loose the lock on it, or this weary world would have had one less young gentleman in it tonight. When we sobered him up enough to be coherent, he moaned that every last cent he owned was now in the keeping of a shrewd gamester who had plucked him bare. That wasn’t our concern—the world is full of foolish boys with too much of Papa’s money and too little sense to stay out of the hands of sharpers. But when young Lord Waite let fall that he’d also staked and lost the title to his ancestral home in Surrey, and he an orphan, and that the sum of his inheritance, we paid a bit more attention.”
The quartet about the table grew grave.
“And,” Mr. Tryon went on relentlessly, so far from a smile that it seemed his face had never framed one in the whole of its long life, “he described the dapper old gent with the charming young filly at his side. And she, he mentioned when pressed to think on, was not only so taken with him he could scarcely keep his mind on the cards he held, but she often strayed from the old fellow’s side to drift close to him. Or else, he remembered, he wouldn’t have noted that her perfume was lilies and roses intermingled, and that it made him drunker than the wine the lordly old fellow kept him so well supplied with. Now I,” he added lightly, “am wounded. I didn’t get a sniff of the posies or a sip of the wine. Did I look too old for the one and too hardheaded for the other?”
Mrs. Cobb opened her pale pink lips to speak, but Lord Wyndham silenced her with an upraised hand. His austere face was so still that it seemed he scarcely moved his lips when he spoke. But speak he did as he rose from his seat, quietly but firmly biting off each word as if he were slashing it out in bold black ink.
“I may,” he said coldly, “use the lady’s charms as a distraction for the opposition now and again, when needs must. But only that. And only for distraction. I do not scruple to win young men’s fortunes from them if I can do it, nor old ones’ neither, if it comes to that. But I do not bilk them. I am a gamester, sir, entirely, that is true. But never a thief. And certainly not a procurer.”
He paused, and never taking his gaze from Mr. Tryon, took a swallow of wine to wet his lips before he went on. “I do remember the young fool. And I did take his purse, because he was as unlucky as he was impulsive, and played like an ass. And I took his bit of paper in settlement of the larger debt he still owed. Here it is,” he said, reaching into an inner pocket and withdrawing a folded yellowed sheet of vellum before he flung it carelessly to the tabletop, “although I didn’t believe it to be more than the paper it was printed on, and was in fact prepared to wager it off again if I could find someone foolish enough to want it. I can’t return the money. Indeed,” he said regretfully, “I lost it just last night to a better dicer than I’ve met in months. Hence Mrs. Cobb’s cooperation tonight. I must make up the room rent, sirs,” he said on his first half-smile, “but if the young idiot had told me the whole, he would’ve had the whole of it back. No,” he corrected himself quickly, with a rueful grin, “not the whole, for we needed a good breakfast, but the most. For I’m not in the business of fleecing ewe-lambs. It was a very black sheep I thought I was clipping, my friend. And you?” he asked suddenly. “Is it Robin Hood and his merry man I address, then?”
“What, when the only deserving poor we concern ourselves with is ourselves?” Mr. Tryon laughed as he took the deed and tucked it away in his vast waistcoat. “No, not at all. Sit down, my lord, please. We, my cohort and I, are not in the habit of rescuing damsels or fighting dragons in the natural way of things. Say we are, rather, soldiers of fortune in the ongoing war against our own poverty. Only now and again we feel we must lend a hand when one is needed. Come,” he said then, extending his own hand, “take mine, and let’s cry truce. Mr. Arden Lyons at your service, my lord, and my good friend Julian Dylan, the Viscount Hazelton.”
“And I,” the old gentleman said, taking that large hand in a firm grip, “am actually Lord Wyndham, and the lovely lady is truly the widowed Mrs. Cobb, although,” he said with a slightly wicked glance as the blond young man took her hand, “her husband never knew anyone in my family, or we wouldn’t have let her marry away from us in the first place.”
After they’d shaken hands all around, Mr. Lyons called a waiter and asked for some wine to accompany the light dinner he ordered for all, not as penance, he insisted, but because he was hungry too.
They chatted as they waited for their supper, and amused each other by comparing notes on a great many of the same people that they’d met in their travels across the Continent. And if Mr. Lyons and the Viscount Hazelton were not specific as to exactly where they’d passed all of the past year, Lord Wyndham and Mrs. Cobb were never precise when they documented what they did with those they’d met.
“No,” Lord Wyndham said sadly at last, “I’m not very successful, I suppose, because I fancy myself a gamester, not a trickster. The truth is that the luck is seldom in the cards for me—for long. I’ve had more fortunes in my keeping than a shilling-a-sitting seer at a country fair, but I’ve lost more than I can remember having, too. I cannot,” he sighed, “resist a good wager.”
“And cannot,” Mrs. Cobb put in with a little smile, “make one neither. Why, Geoff, you wouldn’t know a good wager from a fool’s errand, and you never wait to tell the difference.”
“Roxie’s not a gamester,” Lord Wyndham explained, not in the least offended. “She likes the traveling and the excitement surrounding it, and doesn’t understand the lure of it in the least. In fact, she’d not wager a pin to your gold watch that the sun will rise tomorrow. A good cautious lass. And yes,” he said with not a little regret in his voice, “she’s only window-dressing for me, Viscount, as much a daughter to me as my own, though if I were a decade or two younger…”
“And I the greatest fool in creation…” Roxanne Cobb laughed.
When the waiter arrived with their dinner, Mr. Lyons heaved himself up and begged their leave to freshen up before he dined with them. He left the remaining three at the table, waving away the baron’s help, declining the viscount’s company as well, and leaning heavily on his cane, sighed, and, uncomplaining, or at least, complaining mutedly, made his way out of the salon to his room abovestairs. His company made themselves so busy when he left, between the wine and their increasingly entertaining stories, that they didn’t begin to miss him until the waiter appeared and began to fret over the chicken growing cold and the aspic growing warm. Then Lord Wyndham eyed a cutlet as wistfully as he’d ever studied an odds sheet at the races, and seeing the cover raised off a steaming stuffed goose, Roxanne Cobb swallowed hard and took an extra-long swallow of her wine.
The viscount immediately began to serve out the food to the others, explaining, as he also heaped Mr. Lyons’ plate high, that his friend was not such a gourmet that he’d mind a tepid dinner, which he deserved if he didn’t shake a leg. It was while both Mrs. Cobb and Lord Wyndham paused, digesting this unusually callous remark about the lame old fellow along with the first bites of their dinner, that another, even more remarkable thing made them pause, forks falling unnoticed to their plates as they sat openmouthed.
For, quite suddenly, a complete stranger paused at their tableside. And then, without a word, had the audacity to pull out a chair, swing into it, and without so much as a “pardon me,” picked up the cutlery and proceeded to dine on the absent Mr. Lyon’s dinner.
Lord Wyndham, the first to collect himself, drew himself up and, swollen with outrage, exclaimed, “Excuse me!” in an awful voice.
“No need,” the stranger said amiably, as best he could around a mouthful, “the capon is excellent, thank you.�
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It wasn’t so much the viscount’s smothered laugh as it was the stranger’s familiar bright hazel eyes that made Lord Wyndham pause as he was about to call the waiters to eject the presumptuous young fellow. Then he sat back and stared, and slowly he too began to laugh. Roxanne Cobb didn’t. She only sat, her napery to her lips, and finally gasped, shaking her head in astonishment, “Well, I never…”
“But he always does, you see,” the viscount whispered in her ear, but she was still so astounded at what she saw that she scarcely noted he left his lips close for an extra second, he so liked the rose-and-lily scent he detected there.
The stranger grinned at them, seeming well-pleased at their reaction. He was a huge but trim and fit fellow, as tall as a young oak, and almost as wide at the shoulders as a tabletop made of one. Before he’d seated himself, Lord Wyndham had briefly noted that his figure tapered from a barrel of a chest to a trim waist, washboard-flat abdomen, neat hips, and then to broad, long muscular legs. A thick neck supported the well-shaped head, his hair was a thick and springy ginger crop, his face tanned, unlined, and smooth with craggy features that seemed hewn from stubborn rock, from wide brow to straight nose, from generous mouth to jut of chin.
