by Edith Layton
Oh, she was well-enough-looking. She wasn’t so modest that she was blind. She knew that much, without excessive vanity, and without exaggeration. Her eyes were large and darkest brown beneath thin winged black brows, her mouth generous but shapely, her nose straight and small, her skin clear with a russet blush when she was flattered by being told of its beauty, for it was brushed with gold even when it wasn’t exposed to sun, and her long thick hair was ink on a cloudless night and shone with silver or fire, depending on whether it was sun or moonlight that touched its shining silken surfaces.
And her form, she thought, eyeing her outline in the shadowed pane, was long-waisted and slender enough for current fashion, which dictated wearing next to nothing, and yet she had curves at waist and hip, and full, high, pointed breasts that both pleased and sometimes even excited her with the possibilities she saw in men’s eyes when they gazed at them. When they had looked at them, she thought, so long ago, last winter, when she was allowed to be young. She’d been touched by a man only once, and then only for a brief moment—before she took fright and he took a deep breath and remembered he was her brother’s best friend—by Harry, when she really was so very young.
That year, by some monstrous good stroke of luck, Father had been in funds. He’d rented a manor house grand enough to house Queen Elizabeth in, perhaps as a nod to what he’d lost, and he’d invited his son to it for his leave, perhaps as another. It was to be a summer of reparations. Francesca had come home from school for the vacation too, and although she was rising eighteen then, it was only the third time she’d ever done so, and never to so fine a home, or to find such wonderful company within it.
Lieutenant the Honorable Bramwell Carlisle was tall, but fair and pale-eyed as her father, and he constantly teased his young sister about the ancient bold Gypsy in the family closet that peeked out at him from her eyes. Father laughingly protested it was actually that mythical Welsh highwayman that had stolen beneath some ancestral sheets, but when they were alone, it was Harry, her brother’s best friend, who had sighed at her and said it surely was a Spanish grandee or Italian prince that had lent his grace and charm to his dark and lovely love.
They played at love that summer, she and Lieutenant Harry Devlin. It was more play than love, she realized now, as he must have then, at eight years her senior and with the experience of foreign nations and their women to his benefit. Perhaps that was what gave him his patience, and the control to give her only his light kisses and gentle embraces and accept her hesitant compliance and close-lipped chaste kisses in return. For the one time he relaxed, that night toward the end of their summer idyll, he taught her to open her lips beneath his, and when she did and came closer into his arms, his hands stole up to hold her more intimately, and then she didn’t know who took more alarm first—the shy but excited young girl, or her rueful suitor, who remembered his stronger bond to her brother even as he felt the strong pull of desire for her.
Slender, brown-haired, and brown-eyed, with ready laughter and enormous charm to more than make up for the great good looks he swore he lacked, he enchanted her and she had, in her innocence, loved him. Then, that winter, when she continued to write to him, his prose became more ardent. Her feelings for him grew, and she began to believe that she could love him beyond innocence, and regretted that interrupted embrace in the garden, planning how to give him more when next they met.
But that would have to be in the next world now, she thought, deflated from present anger to indulge in past sorrow, for he’d perished with Bram, brothers-in-death as they’d been brothers-in-arms, at their unit’s glorious victory at Waterloo.
His monument was not only in her heart but also in her assumed name. She’d taken it when Father had said, and said rightly, she knew, that she’d never be hired on, not even by the social-climbing Deemses he’d met at the hotel where he’d awaited her, as a companion for their eighteen-year-old daughter if she were scarcely past twenty herself, and an unwed chit at that. So if it was a small lie to add a few years to her name, it was, she’d felt, a tribute to add his memory and become Harry’s wife as well, at least in death. For if in life he couldn’t offer her the protection of his name that he’d sworn he’d give her when his tour was over, she knew he’d never mind giving it to her now when she needed it so badly.
She might as well take on the guise of a married woman, she’d decided, for she doubted she’d ever become one now. Even if she were of a mind ever to love again, a dowerless daughter of a self-exiled gambler was not likely to be in great demand in any social set.
The false Mrs. Devlin suppressed her tears. She was very good at doing that. She’d never had her own room before, except for those few times when she’d visited her friends or Father in his several rented houses, and so had learned that sobbing is no balm for a sore heart when it disturbs a dormitory full of sleepy girls, since lack of sleep eventually hardens the most gentle hearts. Nor would it help her now, she decided. She sniveled instead, and blew her nose, and, defeated and subdued, not even bothering to put on a night-rail, climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
But being alone and awake beneath the covers with a warm naked body, even if it was her own, didn’t help either, since it brought up thoughts she’d been forbidden to deal with, so she soon poked her long legs out from the coverlets and scurried to her wardrobe to get a nice thick long flannel robe to cover both her cold from the chill room and her warmth from herself. Then, perhaps seeking a way to divert her wakeful mind from its problems, she rehearsed what she’d say to Father when she got him alone the next day. She had to chastise him, but she didn’t want to alienate him forever, and so was glad in a way that he hadn’t been in his rooms tonight, even if it meant she’d had to deal with that monster of a man instead.
Thinking of the enormous Mr. Lyons refueled her anger. How could her father have brought such a man to the Deemses’ notice? Rich as he was, and clever as he doubtless was, the rotund Mr. Deems knew business and ironmongering, but nothing at all about the sort of creatures that inhabited gaming hells, the sort that had drained her father dry for years. It was not only the loss of her own position Francesca feared, for all that she wanted to earn the generous wages the Deemses had offered her so that she might find her way home to whatever home she could find. But she fretted for the Deemses and their plans for themselves as well.
They’d dragged Cecily clear from Manchester to London, and from thence to France, where they’d met up with Francesca and her father not a week before. And, they’d admitted, in straightforward Deems fashion, with never a blush or a stammer, it was all to seek out a husband to get their dear girl into society. There were three older sisters with more intelligence than comeliness who had already wed from home to local lights, and two brothers who helped with the business and had taken good practical wives from similar families.
But they all wanted far more for Cecily. Perhaps because she was beyond beautiful, and as canny business persons it seemed uneconomical not to make more of her. Perhaps because she was as obedient as she was dependent, and the notion was irresistible once it had occurred to them. Or perhaps only because the Deemses, who found themselves thriving in these incredible modern times of discovery and invention, when any common man with wit could make as much money as any nobleman might have inherited a generation before, wanted to establish their own little empire now, with Cecily as the dowager empress. It might be a vain and foolish dream, for although Cecily was good and kind and sweet, as well as lovely, graceful, and flower-faced, she was so empty-headed that Francesca often found herself wondering what gnomish ancestor in the shrewd but squat and homely Deems clan had once carried off a thoughtless fairy child and so was responsible for her appearance in this generation. But for all her intellectual lacks, she was a dear child, and so it was irresponsible to expose her to smooth and subtle fortune hunters such as the incredibly handsome viscount and his huge and evil companion.
Not only did Francesca instinctively distrust such
a glowingly attractive male as the viscount, but especially one met in a gambling establishment, so she doubted the viscount had more than his handsome person and his title to his name. And for all his cleverness, his gigantic friend couldn’t hide all the keen intelligence in his searching eyes, and so whatever he said, she didn’t believe he’d fortune enough to feed himself for a week,
Moreover, and overriding all other doubts and instincts, she thought- on a sigh as she embraced her pillow with both arms and buried her face in its depths, there was one certain irrefutable fact that damned them utterly. It was the certainty that any friend of her father’s was not to be trusted, and likely had his own little game to be played. Thus it was her responsibility, morally, and also as someone who had lost so often, to see that this time he lost too. She was not in the least a gamester, but still she responded to a challenge. There might be nothing for herself in winning, but it would be, she thought drowsily as she willed herself to sleep so she could be alert for the contest sure to come in the morning, pleasant to win for a change. Or, if she didn’t quite know what winning would feel like, then, at the least, it would be novel.
3
The hour was advanced; all the houses in the French countryside surrounding the great house were shuttered and still. All save for the elegant manor house that dominated the landscape, of course, for now it was a hotel for gamesters, and true gamblers didn’t note the passage of hours by clock or sunrise or moonset. They were far more mathematical. Just as they counted every number on every card and pair of dice and wheel they watched, they measured out their time carefully too, but only by the amount of money they’d left in their pockets to lose. Even then, they left the tables to sleep only if they could no longer keep accounts, either because they’d no more money—no one to beg it from, nothing to barter or sell to obtain more—or because their traitorous eyes refused to focus on their sport any longer.
As Arden Lyons came lightly down the stairs, he found the several salons on the main floor as busy now that the new day had begun as they’d been when he’d originally come to the hotel in the early evening of the previous day. He headed for the small salon where he’d lately left his companion and their newly met friends, the Baron Wyndham and his pretty friend, Roxanne Cobb. But then he checked, frowned, and, remembering, patted his waistcoat pocket absently and turned round to step quickly to the anteroom where the reception desk was and where the clerk had signed him into his room so many hours before.
That room was deserted now. There were no new guests expected at one hour into the new morning, and as there was also no gaming to be had there, the chairs and couches and tables were abandoned, all save one. As Arden entered the room, that one was suddenly left too, as the slender, nervous young gentleman leapt to his feet. He wore a look of plaintive desperation, and his thin-cheeked face with its finger-fretted pompadour all in disarray about his high forehead gave him the look of an inspired poet or a madman.
“Mr. Lyons,” he said at once, all astammer, with a look of hope and despair all intermixed in his worried eyes, “dare I…dare I hope?”
“Don’t bother,” Arden Lyons said coolly, but before the young man could let the tears which came so easily to those large liquid eyes fall, the larger man hastily pulled the folded sheet of vellum from his pocket and thrust it at him.
“Here it is,” he said. “You’ve not lost a tile from your home’s roof, nor a holland cover from the drawing room while it’s been out of your hands. But for God’s sake, Waite, see it don’t leave your hands again, will you? This time, the chap who won it from you was an honest man, within reasonable perimeters, of course,” he added with a genuine smile, “but he’s by no means typical of the breed.”
“Oh, never again, never, I vow it, never shall I let it leave my keeping again. I don’t know what came over me, it was like a fever, I could think of nothing but the cards, all else became less real to me…” the young man babbled, holding the deed to his ancestral home tightly in his trembling fingers.
“Fine, fine,” Arden said brusquely. “Now, go home, my lord, and leave this sort of play to those who can afford it, or who’ve nothing left to lose, in property or honor. Home to England, if you can. But I forgot,” he muttered in annoyance, as if to himself, “if you’d the money, you wouldn’t have bet the farm, would you have done? Here, then,” he said brusquely, and withdrawing his wallet, he counted out a sum and handed it to the young gentleman.
“Oh, take it, take it,” he said impatiently as the young man hung back. “We all of us are entitled to be fools in our youth—that’s the whole point of being young, I think. You can repay me someday when you’ve passed those treacherous shoals. Here, it’s no king’s ransom, but enough for the boat and a coach to Lancaster again after, and a few meals to keep you together till then.”
“How can I thank you?” the young gentleman cried as he clutched the bills and the deed to his thin chest. “How can I ever repay you? To think…to wager and lose my home, and where would my young sister be then? And what of my name, and reputation? Mr. Lyons, how can I thank you?”
“By going home,” his benefactor said abruptly. “Good night, my lord, and good-bye.”
But the young man had transferred the deed and the money to his own pocket and now took his savior’s hand in his own two and wrung it there and shook it repeatedly as he kept vowing his thanks and his future virtue.
Arden snapped, “Good night, my lord, and good luck to you,” and then quite literally tore himself from that damp clasp. And in a far worse temper than he’d been when he’d stepped into the room, he stormed out of it.
He took a handkerchief to his hands after he left, but that didn’t help; he felt as though he’d been dipped in a vat of some sort of sticky stuff after his encounter with the young man. And for all he’d done a good deed, there was something about the young fellow’s abject attitude, though understandable and certainly laudable, that was also disturbing. So he was in a vile temper and stamping toward the main part of the hotel when he abruptly stopped to collect himself before going to find his friends.
They were alone in the salon now, since most of the other gamesters there had already gone to their beds. Arden found himself as grateful for the relative quiet as he was for the genuine smile of greeting he received from his friend Julian and his new acquaintances, who were still chatting with him.
“I only just ran into your daughter, my lord,” he mentioned to the Baron Wyndham as he settled himself in a small chair, folding himself up neatly, automatically tucking his hands and feet close, as he’d had to learn to do. “Or rather, she ran into me,” he mused, “but she was looking for you. I told her we’d already secured your company, and she decided to retire, so I imagine it was nothing urgent, but I’d look for her early in the morning, were I you. And, considering her loveliness, even if I weren’t,” he added with a grin.
“Lovely, ah, yes,” the baron sighed, “but much good it will do her, with neither a decent father nor a dowry to advance her.”
“Her late husband made no provision for her?” Arden asked curiously.
“Ah…no,” the baron replied hesitantly, looking so self-conscious that his new friends realized at once it must have been an ill-advised love match or some other sort of ramshackle elopement that the daughter, likely as impetuous as her gamester father, had plunged into.
“Ah, but…in truth, he may have done—for he was a good sort of lad, and a conscientious one,” he went on to assure them after noting their reaction. For Arden Lyons seemed pensive and somewhat saddened, and the viscount frowned, looking so troubled that Roxanne Cobb had to bite her lip to remember that she ought not to give in to temptation and put a hand out to smooth that furrowed brow as she wished to do.
“It was very unlike him to leave her penniless,” the baron confided hastily, as though making up his mind to be entirely candid with them, “very unlike. So much so that I’ve a man-at-law looking into it, never doubt it. His family…has not been too forth
coming, not that I wish to say anything…but there are several younger portionless brothers, you see. Still, she’s young yet,” he said at once, noting the silence that had fallen over the others, “and she’ll come round all right, for she’s got a good head and a loving heart and a great deal of sense as well as education. But pray don’t put that last bit about, gentlemen—it would be ruinous to her reputation, you know.”
They all laughed with him, before Arden asked lazily, so carelessly that his friend looked up at him curiously, “Surely not that young, if she’s a companion to that charming ingenue? Not that I wish to be indiscreet, and a lady’s age, we all know, is as secret as the amount of time she must spend in front of her glass each morning before she emerges from her room so that we can recognize her from the night before, but still, consider—we can’t have one ewe-lamb leading another—just think of the danger of wolves!”
For once, the baron looked flustered, and Roxanne Cobb’s trill of laughter was a key too high, before the old gentleman recovered and said with a wink, “Ah, but you’ve caught me out. But don’t forget: a young daughter makes a gent younger too, sir, the ladies aren’t the only ones to have looking glasses in their rooms, even if some of us only dare to look into them at night, and without a light.”
