Gambled Away: A Historical Romance Anthology

by Rose Lerner

“That can be arranged. I want her out from underfoot, too.”

  * * *

  Hawker sat on the patterned carpet, tailor fashion, showing long practice in holding down this exact spot beside the fire. He frowned up at the ceiling.

  “Leave it be,” Lazarus said.

  “I heard something. Thumps. Fighting. Aimée’s up there.”

  “Aimée can take care of herself. Sit down.”

  Hawker subsided, looking angry. “What is this supposed to prove?”

  “We’ll discover if Gideon Gage can hurt her when he has an excuse to do so.” Lazarus folded his hands. “More important, Aimée discovers that. Take that tea tray away before somebody breaks the cups trying to kill me. While you’re at it, remove that coat of his from the floor and get rid of it.”

  Hawker considered the ragged coat folded on the floor beside the chair. “You plan to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Why would I do that?” The scuffle and thump from above had stopped. “Tomorrow, take a purse of ten pounds to the blind man Trendell in Covent Garden. Be discreet.”

  “I am discreet as the new moon.” Hawker sat, thinking. “If that’s payment for services rendered, Trendell gave the directions to find you. I like knowing that. Means I don’t have to worry about who’s been talkative.”

  “Gage was asking questions about me. It seemed polite to provide answers. Besides, I wanted to meet him face to face and see for myself.”

  “See what?”

  Lazarus ignored that. He flexed his left hand, not moving any muscles in his chest. “Get me another brandy, Hawk. I have hours to get through yet. Being stabbed hurts like Hell.”

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  Aimée picked away at the lock. The corridor was silent around the two of them, enclosed and dusty. The racket of London’s thieves on the floor below was like the distant grumble of a large animal.

  “People don’t break in here, normally,” she said. “It’s a good way to get shot.”

  Nobody in his right mind invaded Lazarus’s bedroom. Yet here she was, invading. She was already rehearsing excuses to give Lazarus when she next saw him. It would be a long explanation.

  She used Gideon’s lockpicks, not wanting to run downstairs and borrow a set. She’d been unsurprised when he pulled them out. He struck her as a man who prepared for all eventualities.

  Gideon nudged the mat rolled up against the wall. “What’s this?”

  “Hawker sleeps there, across the door, so he gets killed first if anyone comes after Lazarus. Hawker says it’s like being a good dog.”

  “Loyal?”

  “Expendable.”

  They spoke in whispers. Nobody would hear them.

  The lamp that burned at the end of the hall gave enough light to see the outline of the door frame, the doorknob, and the dark keyhole. She couldn’t make out Gideon’s expression, though. She’d have liked to see what he was thinking, if it had showed on his face and if she’d been able to figure it out.

  She felt an itch on her shoulder blade where Gideon was almost touching her. She said, “Would you move? You’re in my light.” There wasn’t enough light to matter, but he was too close.

  He didn’t back away. “Is there anybody in this house who can’t pick locks?”

  “I don’t do it often.”

  “How often?”

  “Counting tonight? Once.” The pick scraped and slithered, not catching. “But then, I’m not the one walking around with burglar tools.” The lock wasn’t clever, but it was old and stiff. It represented the triumph of stubbornness.

  She hadn’t let Gideon perform the lockpicking, though he’d be faster at it most likely. It seemed less of a betrayal to do it herself. Her loyalty to Lazarus was tentative and conflicted. Apparently it allowed her to sneak into his private rooms and release his prisoners. An odd loyalty.

  Gideon said, “He keeps Daphne here? In his bedroom?”

  “Where nobody can get to her.”

  “Except Lazarus.” That was grimly said.

  She’d give him his Daffy. She’d get them both out of the house. Then Gideon would not tromp down the stairs to hold a stormy confrontation with Lazarus and make it clear to all and sundry that King Thief was injured and couldn’t defend himself.

  She would do this and everybody would survive till dawn. Sometimes one’s goals are quite uncomplicated.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Gideon said softly.

  There was no limit to the stupidity of men. She put her forehead to rest on the cool, solid, entirely straightforward simplicity of the door and sighed. If she had a week and nothing else to do, she might possibly explain Lazarus and his games. “Do you want to get your sister out of here or do you want revenge?”

  “Both.”

  “Then you’re a fool. If I get you through the halls and out of this house undamaged we’ll use up all the luck we’re entitled to this year.” A statement filled with wisdom, which he would doubtless ignore. “You saw her. She’s wretched and scared, but she hasn’t been hurt. That’s against his rules. He doesn’t break his own rules.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about these rules.” Gideon leaned on the door frame, very close to her and very angry. She might have been intimidated if she hadn’t spent the last few years surrounded by men of hair-trigger temper.

  “It’s not about the ransom.” She wasn’t the only one who’d figured this out. It was common talk among the Brotherhood. “He gets bored. When things are too easy, he starts playing complicated games and everybody stays out of his way. This is one of them. He tracks down rich women who’ve done something unforgivable and got away with it because they’re rich. Usually they’ve done murder.”

  “Daphne didn’t kill anyone.”

  But Lazarus didn’t make mistakes like that. Harmless, gentle Daffy had done something terrible. Gideon would find out what it was, eventually.

  She said, “The last one he kidnapped was a sweet-faced young lady, very genteel, very smug, who’d poisoned her grandmother for the inheritance. Put nightshade in her soup. When she made her confession to the Brotherhood, everybody clapped. They like it when the rich turn out to be even more depraved than they are.”

  “He rapes those women.” Gideon set his words down like a line of broken glass.

  “Yes.” She wanted to run away from this whole discussion. “Not with force. But yes.” There was no other word for it.

  Lazarus was smarter than the vain, greedy women he kidnapped. He flattered them and offered a featherbed and chocolates instead of a blanket on the floor and rough food. Offered pleasure, apparently, because once they started coming to his bed they didn't stop.

  He made it look like their choice, but it never was.

  She said, “He’s an evil bastard.”

  She’d seen every sort of barbarity since she came to live with the Brotherhood. Lazarus’s subtle, deliberate exposure of the weakness of these women might be the worst.

  She challenged him on it, sometimes, rarely, when she thought she could get away with it. He’d say, “You go stroll around the padding ken and count the women who were raped and turned whore by the gentry. I’m just returning the favor.” Or he’d say, “A poor woman hangs for murdering her husband. A rich one orders a new carriage.” Or he’d quote Robespierre and Rousseau.

  Then he’d send her off to scrub out chamber pots for a few days to discourage discussion on the subject.

  Gideon didn't need to hear what kept her awake at night. He just wanted his sister. She said, “He’s been treating Daffy better than the others. I don’t know why. He puts her close to the fire and he doesn’t make her eat workhouse food. That’s a lie. He looks the other way when Hawker sneaks in jellied eels and fish cakes.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Gideon didn’t finish up with, while I cut his throat, but he was certainly thinking along those lines.

  The lock clicked. Clicked again. The tumblers ground and turned. Done. She would finally help one of these wom
en escape. She’d probably pay for it, some way or another.

  She grabbed a minute to say one last thing. “Gideon, when you get her home you have to be gentle with her. I don’t know what Daffy did, but she regrets it. She’s not like the others. It’s tearing her apart inside.”

  Gideon said quietly, “I will make Lazarus regret he was ever born.”

  “That’s fine, threatening talk, but let’s concentrate on getting her out of here. If you can keep her from shrieking like a banshee when she sees you, we have a better chance.”

  She turned the doorknob. With that, she was committed. There was no retracing her steps.

  Gideon pushed past her into the room, searching the dimness for Lord knew what, hand inside his coat. On a knife handle, most likely. She followed him in and closed the door softly behind her.

  The bedroom was empty of recent events. No sign of dragging Lazarus up the back stairs and getting him in here. Of stopping the bleeding and sewing him up. The bloody cloths from last night had been cleared away. She’d put new sheets on the bed and spread newspapers across the covers as if Lazarus had been reading them. The remains of a breakfast, eaten with good appetite, filled a tray.

  Daffy was curled up, sleeping, rolled in her blanket on the rug by the fire, a fold of the wool pulled over her head. She didn’t wake till Gideon knelt and put his hand on her shoulder. Then she jerked upright and he gathered her in and held her, a big brother taking care of his sister. He said, “Hush. Hush. I’m here.”

  Daffy gasped and gulped out words that were muffled into his chest.

  He whispered, “It’s over. I’ve come for you. We’re leaving.”

  Not quite over. There was a long, uncertain trip through the corridors of this house to be managed.

  Daffy slept barefoot, of course. “Where are her shoes? She needs shoes.” A hat and cloak would be good, but the shoes were necessary. They’d been put out of the way somewhere and there wasn’t enough light to find them.

  “Please. Please. Please,” Daffy kept repeating. When Gideon tried to lift her she pulled back and crouched on the floor, whimpering.

  The shoes were under a chair. “You have to keep her quiet,” Aimée said.

  Gideon said, “Stand up, honey. We have to leave.”

  “Let me get these shoes on her. Wrap her in that blanket. It’ll look like a cloak when you get out on the street.”

  “We have to go. Have to go now.” Gideon spoke to Daffy as he’d speak to a child. Gently. Coaxing.

  Then, faint but coming closer, footsteps. She grabbed Gideon’s arm. “Somebody’s coming up the stairs.”

  “Damn,” he said.

  Daffy huddled in upon herself. Her breath dragged in and out, but she was silent.

  The footsteps mounted to the top of the stairs. Now, they were on the floorboards of the hall. Now, coming this way.

  Gideon straightened and fixed his eyes on the door, his whole body stiff and ready. He had become wholly a soldier, prepared to meet guns, knives, and fists with resolution and poised skill. He would be a powerful defender.

  Almost, she let herself wish she were leaving this house with him tonight. A world with Gideon Gage in it would be a less frightening place.

  They waited, motionless. Footsteps passed this bedroom door and went onward. A doorknob rattled in the middle distance. That was the room they’d put Gideon in. She’d pulled it closed and locked it when she left. That bit of habitual caution turned out to be a lucky choice.

  In the hall Bent Thomas called, “Aimée.” Then, more loudly, “Aimée!” He knocked.

  She said, “That’s Bent Thomas.”

  Gideon’s whisper barely moved the air. “A friend of yours?”

  “An enemy.” He’s come to find me alone.

  “Does he hurt you?” Calmly said. Dispassionately said.

  “Not yet.” There was more truth in that than she wanted to face. She licked her lips. “We can’t be caught here. When he leaves we run for it.”

  Bent Thomas pounded on the door. “Open up, Aimee.” He waited. Then boots stomped back down the hall.

  “He’ll come back with a key,” she said. “And his friends. There’s no more time. We have to go this minute.”

  “No.” Daphne stayed on the floor, a limp weight leaning against her brother. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  She threw the blanket around Daffy’s shoulders. “Get these shoes on her.” They were in so much danger. Every instant made it worse.

  But Daffy, shaking, obstinate, and desperate, said, “Go. Get out of here while you can. I’m staying.”

  Gideon seemed to hear her for the first time. “For God’s sake, why?”

  Daffy said, “Lazarus has something of mine. I won’t leave without it.”

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  Gideon fingered his way around the window. It was a grilled square, small, but wide enough for him to get through. He could hold onto that line of bricks across the top and swing himself out. It wasn’t a long drop.

  The screws that held the grille in place had been removed. It would lift out easily when the time came.

  In the darkness outside, two men made a methodical search of the kitchen yard, looking over, under, around, and behind everything sizeable. Their lanterns were globes of light in a landscape of dark outlines that ran across upright barrels and a straight-sided shed to the brick wall on the far side of the yard.

  “That’s Thimble and Pratchett.” Aimée stood beside him, looking out the window. “Reliable but not too bright.”

  The buzz of the rain would eat up the sound of voices long before it got to the guards, but they both spoke in whispers.

  “You don’t want somebody clever on sentry duty,” Gideon said. “He gets bored and then he gets slipshod.” He watched the pair go over every spot large enough to hold a man and some that weren’t.

  “Men who do guard duty for Lazarus don’t get slipshod.” She added, a certain matter-of-fact bleakness in her voice, “Once, I saw him punish a guard who fell asleep on duty. I’ll just mention that those two are armed. Good shots, too.”

  “I will avoid them.”

  “They’ll move on in a few minutes,” she said. “Then it’ll be safe to cross the yard.”

  He’d come so close to getting Daphne away. He could have had her out this window, into the yard, over that last wall, and across the road in three minutes. A few streets away they’d climb into the coach with Selim.

  Tomorrow it would be more complicated getting in to talk to Lazarus. Daphne might be worse off because he’d come.

  He’d endangered another woman too. This woman at his side, staring out into the dark, calculating the safe moment for him to leave. Aimée.

  He said, “I don’t know your whole name.”

  “Beauclerc. Aimée Beauclerc.” He couldn’t see her expression but he sensed the smile in her voice. “No one uses my last name. We are informal as rabbits here.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mademoiselle Beauclerc.”

  She stepped away from the scatter of rain that was coming in the window grille and swiped her sleeve across her face. “I cannot return that compliment. You are a great complication.”

  They were in a storage room at the back of the house, one packed high with discarded furniture, cluttered and dusty. She’d locked the door behind her and led him unerringly between old broken sofas, rickety tables, and slanting bedframes, in the absolute dark, holding his hand in a warm dry grip. “They put every unwanted stick and stitch in here,” she’d said. “Everything they wouldn’t throw away and had no use for. We’re burning our way through the chairs now. The tables come next.”

  The grilled window was hidden at the back behind a huge cupboard. He recognized an escape route when he saw one. Probably she had a couple. She was a woman who expected to crawl out a window every once in a while, running for her life. A woman of bravery and ironic wit. A woman a man like Lazarus trusted. She impressed him again and again.

&nbs
p; It was chilly in here. She hunched herself against the cold and said, “Do you know what Daffy’s treasure is? The one Lazarus won’t give back?”

  “I have no idea.” What could Daphne want that would be worth spending an extra hour in this place?

  “A ruby necklace? Bonnie Prince Charlie’s handkerchief? A first edition of Shakespeare? The Emerald Eye of the Idol of Alioth, stolen from the East? What does she value?”

  “I don’t know. I was gone from England for a decade. When I came back I was too busy to spend time with her. I put it off and put it off.” He hadn’t protected Daphne. It twisted his gut, knowing that. “She’s my sister and I don’t know anything about her.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if she killed somebody then.”

  “She lives with her aunt in Harrogate. People don’t murder each other in Harrogate.”

  “Lucky Harrogate.” She rubbed her arms, up and down. “Among my friends, the betting’s two to one it was poison. Twenty to one she used a knife. Fifty to one she didn’t kill anyone at all.”

  “You could take that last bet,” he said. “And you are shivering till your teeth rattle. There’s no glass in this window.”

  “I took it out so I wouldn’t get cut if I had to make a hasty retreat this way. I broke some other windows at the same time so it wouldn’t be noticeable.”

  “You’re thorough. But it’s chilly in here. You’re shivering.” Even an indomitable spirit could be cold. “I can’t give you my coat. It’s clanking with weapons.”

  “I noticed. I’ve been hoping you wouldn’t stab any of my friends with those. So far, so good.”

  His coat and jacket hung open, the better to get to his knives. Now he undid the five quick buttons of his waistcoat.

  “We’ll share.” He turned her toward him and wrapped her in with him, under his coat, against his shirt.

  She tensed when he put hands on her, a surprised affront that stiffened the length of her body. It was as if he gathered in a bundle of sticks that jutted at awkward angles.