Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  “A little over one pound,” the man said. “There was a withdrawal a few days ago. Would you like to see the entry?”

  Jenny’s mind filled with white-hot brilliant light. It washed out all thought, all emotion. She heard the sound of rushing water, as if she were the center of a deluge. She swayed dizzily and grabbed the counter in front of her to keep her balance. Her mind was empty. Completely empty.

  Not so coincidentally, so was her bank account.

  She’d been staving off panic by telling herself that her money was inaccessible. Unavailable, but there. An ineradicable bulwark against starvation. Twelve years of savings, insulating her from the depredation of time. She’d felt so brave sloughing off the trappings of Madame Esmerelda without the prospect of future income. She’d forgotten the panic penury could induce.

  “There is something rather strange about this final entry,” the cashier was saying.

  One possible oddity: All her money was missing.

  “Usually, the person that records the totals breaks the numbers down by coins. You know—£1-3-4 in pounds, shillings, pence. But whoever made this last entry recorded it as thirty shillings straight. I wonder why.”

  That Judas. Mr. Sevin had emptied her account and left her a message in the total. Less than subtle—but then, he didn’t need to be particularly sophisticated about his communication when he was stealing four hundred pounds. Although who Mr. Sevin believed to be the betrayed and who the betrayer, Jenny couldn’t say.

  The bank clerk eyed her with a quizzical expression.

  “Would it be easier,” Jenny said, “if I just closed the account now?”

  He nodded and began counting coins. Jenny shut her eyes and did the same. Her total funds available hadn’t increased much. She now had three pounds and change. Not enough to pay her quarterly rent. Not nearly enough to do something about this robbery. If she had more, she could raise a protest. Maybe bring the matter before a magistrate. But she’d be on the defensive if she did so. Her story would convince no rational man to award her the money. After all, the only proof she had of his perfidy was in the account sheets in front of her—made out to Madame Esmerelda, with the fraud signed in Jenny’s own hand.

  There was no need to panic. She had possessions she could sell. She’d have enough for months. And after that—well, surely she’d think of something. She always did. Her future was not imperiled. It was just…restricted.

  “Sign here,” the cashier said, pushing over a sheet of paper. Jenny signed in a daze.

  The coins he handed her weighed nothing in her hand. They were no shield against the future, which had just become significantly more frightening.

  SOMEHOW, NED HAD MANAGED not to slump as his servants washed and dressed him. He’d sat still as his valet applied soapy suds to his face and neck. And he’d looked straight ahead as the man plied the straight razor, shearing Ned of stubble, and rendering him fit company for a duke and his daughter.

  It should have been a simple matter to wait in the parlor with his mother and all the stone statues. Her advice had as much effect on him as coins bouncing off a wall. She had talked to him in heartfelt terms about his duty, his future. He wanted to listen to her; she meant well. But none of her words made the least impression on the impenetrable numbness of his mind.

  All Ned had to do was sit and wait, and Blakely would arrive and escort him to the imposing stone edifice where Ware lived. Blakely would arrange everything. Ned’s life. If Ware pleased, Ned’s death.

  And yet Ned had not waited. Instead, he’d stood up, interrupting his mother midstream. She’d reached for him, but he’d walked right out the front door and down the steps, before she’d had time to understand what was happening. He’d not been able to bear the weight of her careful solicitousness.

  He’d crossed the street in one straight line, not bothering to step out of the way of the pungent horse dung in the gutters. That smell—redolent of hay and stables—clung to him now.

  It was seven o’clock, and he hadn’t told anyone where he was going. Not Blakely, who would be apologizing to Lady Kathleen at this moment. Not the butler, who had opened the door for Ned in silence. Not even his mother, who had stared after him in pained confusion as he’d taken his leave.

  The only person who knew where Ned was at this moment was Ned, and even he didn’t know why he’d returned to this particular street corner after all these years.

  From the outside, the dim lights of the gaming hell did not distinguish it from its neighbors. Both the brothel to its right and the opium den on the corner were composed of the same coal-streaked stone, their windows equally dingy. It had been two years since Ned had come to this neighborhood.

  It felt like forever. That time two years ago—when he’d been in grave danger of being sent down from Cambridge, and in graver danger of failing his life altogether—seemed as misty and insubstantial as his consciousness felt now.

  A different man had slunk to this quarter those twenty-five months before. And yet what separated the Ned of today from that boisterous lad?

  Responsibility? Not a bit of it. Ned had entrusted two years of his life to a charlatan, a lying cheat of a woman his cousin had seen through in the blink of an eye. And yet what Ned had done to Lady Kathleen had exceeded even Madame Esmerelda’s flexible sense of honor.

  Experience? The experience of an idiot.

  “Carhart?”

  A hand clapped on Ned’s back and he spun around, as much from surprise as a desire to distance himself from whoever touched him so familiarly.

  The features he made out were only vaguely familiar in the gloom. Ned had to add twenty pounds to the image in his memory. The ruddy glow of ale lighting those fat cheeks, however, was nothing new.

  “Ellison,” Ned said dully.

  Ned’s erstwhile friend, already slightly bosky, grinned. The sour smell of gin rose from him. Ellison had always been a man best known for using strong spirits to subjugate his weak will.

  “It’s been years,” said the man. He landed another smack on Ned’s shoulder.

  Ned winced and twitched his shoulders out of slapping distance.

  Ellison settled for a chest jab instead. “Thought you’d turned respectable.”

  “No chance of that.” Ned’s voice sounded as sour to his ears as the smell of wine and the underlying stink of vomit in these unwashed gutters. “I spent some time pretending, but I’m not cut out for respectability.”

  Any chance he had, he’d pissed away with this latest disappearance. Ned had a sudden image of Lady Kathleen and her bald-headed father. He wondered if she would be secretly pleased when Ned failed to appear. After all, her options were ruination or marriage to the likes of him. She seemed intelligent. After what she’d learned of him, she had to be hoping for ruination.

  Ellison interrupted this grim little reverie by laughing. The sound was far louder than the occasion warranted. Ellison was the last man whose company Ned would have sought out at a time like this.

  Perhaps that’s why, when the man clouted him on the back once again, Ned forced himself to smile.

  “What say you and I go inside?” Ellison gestured at the hell. “You’re buying, eh? There’s good brandy.”

  Ned had learned long ago that brandy was no salve for this condition that overtook him. Drunkenness acted only as a magnifier, and if he started drinking while in this listless state, his ennui grew to dangerous proportions.

  But he could not bring himself to care.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT TOOK GARETH AN HOUR to postpone—not avert—the Duke of Ware’s wrath at being summarily dismissed without so much as a scrap of foolscap in explanation from Ned. He spent another hour guiltily rousting White from his family dinner, and directing a stream of minions into London’s underbelly. All told, it was eleven in the evening before Gareth received word of his cousin.

  Midnight had chimed when Gareth entered a heated room where cloying cigar smoke wafted, and the rattle of ivory markers
rose. He had hoped the message was in error, but there, in the corner, sat Ned. Drunk and gambling in this godforsaken gaming hell, when he should have been negotiating with Ware over his future.

  Gareth was too baffled to be angry.

  He walked up to the table. Gareth had never needed an excuse to feel uncomfortably stiff around others. But now he felt ramrod straight. Ned’s companions lounged, their limbs contorted at odd, unnatural angles. Cravats were, at best, untied; one dark-haired, red-faced fellow had looped his in a disreputable bow around the neck of the large-bosomed woman who sat next to him. Sticky, cracked cups were stacked along the edge of the table.

  “What’s the pool again?” The ruddy-faced fellow finished the deal, six piles of three cards each.

  Ned stared at the spray of cards dealt on the table without interest. “Damned if I know. Does it matter?”

  “Two thousand,” chimed in someone else, and Gareth winced.

  A man with a loosened black cravat peered at his cards. “I have something better.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a paper. “It’s a private menagerie. Won it last night. A few lions, apparently. And a herd of striped horses called zebras. And all the way from Africa, an elephant.”

  Gareth winced again. Loo was a nasty game, with escalating stakes that ruined many a careless gambler. The odds were even more forbidding when one party was wagering money and the other, elephants.

  “Ned,” said Gareth.

  No response. Ned’s companions lifted heads and exchanged glances.

  “Ned.” Repeated a little louder this time. Ned heard, obviously, because he laid his head to one side. But instead of responding, he reached for his cards and aligned them edge-to-edge in his hand.

  Play passed to him, and he let the two of diamonds drop from his hand.

  “Ned,” said Gareth, “you’ll have to come with me when you’ve finished the play here. There’s still some chance to patch matters up, even now.”

  Ned yawned loudly, covering his mouth with his hand. His friends giggled behind their cards, nervous that Ned defied his powerful cousin. But Ned didn’t glance up. Instead, he played the three of clubs.

  “Look here,” Gareth said wildly. “This is madness. You don’t get out of bed for two days straight. And then, on the evening when I need you to stay put, you wander off. I’m not talking to Ware for my own health, you know. The man’s talking murder. And I don’t blame him.”

  Ned played his last card. It was his highest card yet—a nine of diamonds. As spades had been trump, he lost once more.

  “Looed again, Carhart.” Red-face jabbed Ned in the shoulder.

  Ned shut his eyes and—of all strange things—he smiled. It was a strange grimace, not quite one of pain. Gareth didn’t understand. None of Ned’s behaviors made sense. He reached out one hand to touch Ned’s shoulder.

  Ned didn’t so much shrug—that would have taken real effort on the boy’s part—as slump. Gareth’s fingers slid off, and he curled his fingers in impotent agony.

  You prod and poke and pick. The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.

  He hadn’t understood what Jenny meant. He hadn’t cared. But he did now.

  It was frightening how much he cared, how the sight of this gray and listless Ned squeezed his heart into a frozen fist. She’d made Gareth feel this sympathy. But she’d given him no way to help. And Gareth had nothing to offer of his own—nothing but papers and proof.

  Ned listed away from Gareth. Then he rolled his neck until their eyes met. “Oh. You still here, then?”

  “Ned,” Gareth tried sternly, “if you don’t leave now like a rational man, I’ll—I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? I’m not afraid of you. What are you going to do? Ruin my life more than I’ve already done? Go on then. You see, if I don’t care, you can’t touch me.”

  Gareth felt as if his nerves had been disconnected—temporarily—from his spinal cord, as if his brain had been utilized in some horrendous experiment in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. His wants and desires simply ceased to exist. And for one brief second, he saw the world through the Stygian darkness of Ned’s eyes.

  At twenty-one, he too had once felt the same way. His life in ruins, or so he’d thought. Gareth had pushed off from London society altogether. He’d told himself then he didn’t care. But he’d lied.

  And now he cared for Ned. He cared so much his hands tingled and his chest constricted. He cared with a powerful, helpless fury, because there was nobody to attack, nothing to cut down. He had no words to say, no enemies to threaten. In that one second, he would have vanquished the world for his cousin.

  Gareth was still in that disconnected state, mind not quite aligned with his body, when he tripped from the room. Maybe Ned would be rational if Gareth gave him a chance to recover. Maybe a breath of cool, fresh air—away from the smoke and all that volatilized brandy—would clear the muddle that inhabited Gareth’s head.

  And maybe Gareth was just running away from a problem he could not comprehend. Because when he stumbled down the stairs into the dark night, the muddle remained. He walked, because his feet were all he could bring into some semblance of order.

  It took him some time to realize the close air inside hadn’t muddled him. Rationally, he knew precisely how to handle this situation. Wash his hands of his cousin. Look for some other way to protect his estate from its eventual devastation. No; his head was clear on the matter. It was his heart that was all confused.

  His collar was damp from rain. London—as much of it as ventured out at night—hunkered down in the determined drizzle. Had it only been weeks ago that he’d first kissed Jenny?

  If only he’d never accosted her. If only he’d let that sham relationship between Ned and Jenny continue.

  But no. He’d forced his way in, sure that he knew best. And he’d won. He’d beaten Ned and proven Madame Esmerelda a fraud.

  Damn. Jenny had been right, that day she pounced on him in the modiste. He hadn’t understood what was happening. He’d picked Ned to pieces, just as she’d said he would.

  Gareth clenched his hands in denial. No. He would make this right. He was the Marquess of Blakely. All that superiority had to be good for something.

  He thought of Jenny, then. But how could he face her and admit what he’d done? Besides, he rationalized, it was late, and she’d not want to see him. All he could hope was that her morning would prove more auspicious than his evening.

  COMING ATOP GARETH’S ABSENCE the previous night, the first encounter of Jenny’s morning was decidedly inauspicious.

  “I don’t have the money.” She squeezed her hands together in consternation as she said the dreaded words.

  Broad lines of impatient unhappiness furrowed into her landlord’s forehead. “What d’you mean, you don’t have it? You always have the rents, and right on time, too. Tomorrow, then?”

  Of course she always had the rents. She’d always been Madame Esmerelda, with attendant generous clientele and burgeoning bank balance. Madame Esmerelda had been the rock of stability upon which she’d built her world. But now Madame Esmerelda was gone, and come tomorrow, she would still just be Jenny Keeble.

  And Jenny Keeble had barely three pounds, when the quarterly rent was six. Even if she were to come up with the money to pay this man, how would she survive? A place to stay was all well and good, but she had to eat. Jenny needed to be frugal until she came up with another plan. She’d needed spacious quarters as Madame Esmerelda; a safe room, separate from her own living arrangements. Business necessity—and the lies she’d communicated to her clients with that carefully controlled atmosphere—had demanded it.

  But she didn’t need the space any longer, and she could no longer afford the price.

  If she stayed in London, she would have to move to more reasonably priced lodgings. Jenny swallowed at the thought. If she stayed in London?

  “What if I paid you for a week?” she asked, desperate to put off
the decision.

  “I don’t let by the week. There’s no profit in it—weekly renters come in and tear up my good walls, they do.”

  “I’m not a weekly renter. I’ve been here twelve years!”

  “And I’d always be coming round, too. That’s no way for a man to spend his life, hounding tenants for the money what’s owed him.”

  “I’ll pay you a pound for the week,” she said with a sigh.

  A spark of interest flared in his eyes. “Pound,” he mused. His lips moved as he calculated precisely how much she’d offered to overpay him. “And you’ll pay the full quarterly amount next week. I’ll make an exception this once, because we’ve known each other this long a time. But no more.”

  He shook her hand and took her money.

  If I stay here. Frugality demanded she find another place to live. That she find some sort of work. So why was she balking at the thought? Jenny sighed and shut the door and walked to the back room. She opened the chest of drawers there.

  That cream-and-red-striped gown Gareth had forced on her lay in place, wrapped in paper. She ran her finger down the smooth satin. It was finer than anything she’d ever owned. How much could she get for it? Ten pounds? Fifteen? She had no notion of the market for such things, having never purchased such a dress for herself.

  Fifteen pounds. She could eke out an existence on that amount for over a year, if she found a bed in a rooming-house. But aside from the fact that it wouldn’t be fun or comfortable to do so, she couldn’t let herself admit the bare truth. If she stayed in London, it was for one reason only. For Gareth.

  And there would be no Gareth if she took herself off to one of the places where she could survive on fifteen pounds a year. She might as well move to Morocco as far as he was concerned. His fastidious nature barely tolerated these rooms, clean and cozy as they were. A lodging-house, inhabited by cockroaches and lice, would have even less appeal for him than it did for her. As for finding one that allowed her gentlemen callers…Well, she could give up any hope of living at a decent address.