A Gentleman Undone
Page 13
They wouldn’t, though. He had reasons against it. So he’d said.
She picked up a scent bottle and turned it, the facets catching candlelight one after the next. A lady didn’t have to puzzle long to deduce what his reasons would be. He was promised elsewhere, or at least paying attentions, and he would not dishonor that connection by indulging whatever appetite he’d worked up for her.
That was to his credit. A man who could master his impulses would be likely to keep his head in a gaming hell. That was the important part of all this. The rest was mere distraction.
She set the bottle down firmly. They had a bargain. She would teach him to play with a reckoning, and he would scout the hells for her and find her a man of business when the time came. That was all. “I think I must consider the difference in odds for a deck whose composition is known as opposed to a deck of unknown proportions,” she said, and watched Jane’s face settle into lines of patient resignation.
SUNDAY MORNING. He ought to have stayed in bed.
Bells rang out from the dark brick tower of the Church of St. James as Will walked past. People in their sober Sunday best were streaming the opposite way and he must fight the current, threading a path through like one of those fish who braved rapids and waterfalls to find its way home.
He hadn’t yet been inside that church since coming back to England. Nor had he darkened the doorstep of St. George’s in Hanover Square, though Andrew or one of his sisters must always be extending the invitation. Difficult to be sure of the proper protocol, when one had cast away one’s immortal soul.
He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and pulled his greatcoat closer against the chill wind. Not for him to judge, of course. Soldiers of the world would be in a sad way if taking a life meant absolute condemnation. Indeed, enough of them filled the churches on Sunday to suggest a general hopefulness of outlook on that point. His case was just different enough to prevent him joining them.
A stray end of his muffler flapped; he caught it and tucked it into his coat. Eternal damnation. Jolly subject for a long morning walk. Still, it kept him from dwelling on what he’d said to Miss Slaughter. To Lydia. He shook his head as though he might scatter the memory. What on earth had possessed him to speak so?
Yet he must have said something of the kind, sooner or later. She would surely have guessed before very much longer. He hid his sentiments poorly. This way, at least, the cards were laid out on the table between them. But he wouldn’t dwell. He’d said what he’d said, and he could not take it back now.
South and east he walked, through the Sunday-quiet streets of the City until he reached the London Bridge with its view of the Upper Pool. More than once, lately, he’d come down here to watch the boat traffic and test his recollection of what he’d learned from Fuller or read on his own. This nearest vessel at anchor was a two-masted brig, not large enough for an open-sea voyage so probably engaged in some coastal trade. Coal, perhaps, or wool. Something produced in the hinterlands of the north and brought down to supply the needs of London. Rather miraculous how it all worked, when one paused to consider.
He folded his arms atop the stone railing and leaned into a breeze that stirred the surface of the river and tasted faintly of salt. To be part of this might be a fine thing. Of course the urgent matter was to secure a profit that would make Mrs. Talbot’s independence possible. To deliver her from such unfriendly confines, and to make his word worth something again.
Beyond that, though, and beyond assuring himself of an income sufficient for his own expenses, he would gain a certain satisfaction from knowing he had some small hand in all this industry. This honest commerce. People might one day live in houses built from timber his own ship had hauled across the sea.
Not the life he’d been brought up to, of course, and Andrew would probably blanch when he heard of a Blackshear brother having even so glancing a connection with trade. But an eldest son must always have more use for the gradations of rank than a youngest, to say nothing of a youngest who’d stood shoulder to shoulder with butchers’ sons in square combat formation on the battlefield.
He turned to lean his back against the railing and look to his right, where the buildings of London rose. The City. St. James’s. Clarendon Square, somewhere beyond what he could see. What hopes he held for the future were coming to depend in large part on his association with Miss Slaughter. He must be mindful, henceforward, of all he stood to lose by being careless with her. More than ever, he would practice circumspection. Now he’d confessed his attraction, they could surely set that matter aside and devote all their energy to the intricacies of vingt-et-un.
Chapter Ten
BUT THERE was more than one way to scuttle their bargain, and two nights later she had him on the brink of doing just that.
“How do you not see that three-eighths is greater than five-fourteenths? How do you not see?” She stood dumbfounded, hands on her hips, her vexed pacing of the past five minutes temporarily arrested that she might aim her wrath at him with optimum accuracy.
“For God’s sake, Lydia, my brain doesn’t work that way. Most people’s don’t.” He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands at his temples, his weary fingers pushed through his hair.
She walked three steps away and came back. “Surely if you make a picture—”
“I can’t make a picture.”
“A simple one, I mean. Two rectangles, side by side, equal in height. Divide one with seven horizontal lines and the other with thirteen. Then surely you can see—”
He had to laugh. He could not forbear. “Good Lord. It really is that simple for you, isn’t it? And you really have no idea of its not being like that for the rest of us.”
She took one step closer, arms dropping straight at her sides and hands curling into fists. “This isn’t a jest, you know. This isn’t meant to amuse you.” Everything in her demeanor suggested a young girl furious at some elder who would not take her seriously. Did she have elder siblings? Any siblings at all? That wasn’t where his thoughts ought to be. “I have spent hours and hours, and used up a whole pencil and countless sheets of paper, attempting to devise a system by which you can consult the degree of your advantage in order to determine the proper amount to wager. I can only think my time and effort will have been wasted if you haven’t the necessary understanding to even keep track of your advantage.”
“Perhaps your time and effort were wasted indeed.” He let one hand fall to the table where his fingers drummed lightly, to let out by increments the irritation that simmered in him. “Let me posit, though, that the fault may not be with my common understanding, but rather with the decision to concoct a wagering system that depends upon a common brain’s recognizing that three-eighths is greater than five-fourteenths.”
She stared at him, baleful as a hawk come face-to-face with a rival in her hunting grounds. Her eyes skipped back and forth, considering him. “You shall have to learn everything in hundredths,” she said with new and sudden resolution. “Three-eighths is thirty-eight hundredths and five-fourteenths is thirty-six hundredths.”
Oh, good God. He seized the edge of the table and levered himself up. “Lydia, I cannot do that.”
“You can with practice.” The suggestion of violence in his movement seemed only to spur her on. Briskly she came back to her place opposite, pulling out her chair. “Surely you learned division in school. Just round everything to two places beyond the period.” She sat. “Likely you’ll need to practice with a pencil and paper, to begin, but if you spend a little time on it each day then I should think—”
“No.” He put everything he knew of calm and reason into the one syllable. “I’m sorry, but I should consider that a waste of my time.” More calm and more reason, to smooth away the piqued creases in her forehead, to soften the tight line of her mouth. “The chances of my ever attaining such proficiency as would allow me to execute those calculations while keeping up with a game of vingt-et-un are simply too slight to justify the investment of ho
urs.” He released his hold on the table and straightened. He’d been sitting for some while and his legs were in no hurry to take the chair again.
She swiveled her chin to the left, as though she believed the candles more worthy of her wisdom than he. “I see.” One flame swayed and buckled before her breath. “You are unwilling even to try. That, in case you wondered, reduces your chance of success from slight to nonexistent.”
Three backward steps brought him to the wall, where he leaned, arms folded across his chest. He sifted words, though really, why should he take any care at all in answering her petulance? “I am trying very hard to remain civil, Miss Slaughter, and to make allowance for what must be your feelings, on hearing one of your favorite pursuits dismissed as a waste of somebody’s time.”
“I do not want you to make allowance for my feelings.” Impulse and luck had nothing on feelings when it came to arousing her distaste. “I’ve never asked you to give the least consideration to my feelings.” He could picture her holding the word with fingertips at arm’s length, like a scullery maid disposing of a dead rat she’d found in the larder. “All I’ve asked of you is that you take this game seriously, and apply some small fraction of the effort I myself have applied toward giving you every possible advantage when the time comes to wager. I’m very sorry you find yourself unable to do so.” Everything in her aspect—the rigid posture, the averted face, the arms converging to suggest hands tightly clasped beneath the table’s edge—made a silent rebuff to any sympathy or cordiality he might dare attempt.
He expelled a slow, weary breath, tilting his own eyes to the ceiling. No one to blame but himself. He had an excellent idea of how to account for her irritability.
He pushed off the wall and came round to the candle side of the table, where he crouched until his eyes were level with hers.
She peered at him through the flames. Her lips thinned, warily, but she didn’t turn away.
“Tell me the truth.” At this distance—two feet at most—he didn’t need to weight the words with any particular inflection. Their meaning alone would be sufficient. “Are you angry at me because of what I said to you the last time we were in this room?”
“You would think so.” Her gaze shifted: though she still faced him, she’d gone back to addressing the candles. “You can’t believe the cause of my frustration could truly be what I’ve stated. No, because I’m a woman, it must be some slight to my feelings that’s put me out of countenance.” Again, the scullery maid and the dead rat, though this time she seemed set to swing it by the tail and pitch it over a far hedge. “Or some injury I’m nursing in response to some one of the many things you said here, three nights since.”
“Lydia.” He set his hand on the table’s edge, four fingers atop and thumb underneath. “I know you’re not naïve. I know you recall the exact thing to which I refer.” He let those words stand, and waited.
She glared into the candles until he could see her eyes watering. No trembling about the lips—she wasn’t weeping—rather it was as though she were punishing herself, deliberately, for some obscure failing. She blinked hard, one, two, three times. Water welled over and made its haphazard way down both cheeks. It glittered against her skin in the candlelight, stark as an accusation, and she made no move to wipe it away.
She looked past the candles to him. “I’m not angry at you for that. I should be a comical character indeed if I took offense at a man saying such things.”
He watched his fingers curl and straighten on the table’s edge, flesh against faded oak. That wasn’t the answer he wanted. He had rather she be angry at him, Will Blackshear, for the particular words he’d said to her than that she should absolve him with the same sardonic policy that could exculpate every man in the world. He slanted his head a degree to the right and spoke, carefully. “It’s not untrue, what I said that night. But with all my soul I will wish it untrue if it means the loss of what cordiality we’d attained. I spoke impulsively, without giving sufficient thought to how those words must be received by a lady who has your experience of men. I don’t want you to see me as just another lout looking to make use of you.”
“Why should you care at all what I think of you?” She all but squirmed in her skin at the notion, and one more fact about her came clear: I want you didn’t discompose her nearly so much as I like you and I want you to think well of me.
And it was an excellent question she’d asked. Why indeed did he care so much for her good opinion? He tightened his grip on the table. “There’s the bargain, of course. I need to learn what you can teach me and I cannot afford to jeopardize that with ill-timed candor.” He would give her a bit more. She’d told him about the loss of her parents, after all; this would bring him even with her. “Also, this is the first truly new acquaintance I’ve formed since returning from the Continent. You’re the first person to build her opinion based solely on the man I am now.” His stomach was threatening to turn somersaults but he would forge on, even if he must fix his gaze on the unlit candle at the end of the branch. “I have more doubt than I once did about meriting a lady’s good opinion.”
The room was so quiet he could hear her breathe. Lord only knew what she was thinking. She cleared her throat. “Because you were changed by war, do you mean?” A quick glance found her busying herself with one of her gloves, a finger tracing along its seam.
“It’s difficult to explain to a woman—that is, to anyone who’s never served.” Again he looked to the end of the candle-branch. “But I suspect few men come home unaltered.”
“I can see how that might be.” The satin of her glove whispered as she rubbed it between finger and thumb. “My brother was a soldier. Though he didn’t come home, altered or otherwise.”
“I’m sorry.” He plucked the cold candle out of the branch. “Was he your only sibling?” Perhaps he would have given her a home, and spared her the descent into her present station.
She nodded. “Henry was his name.” In the pause, he could almost hear her deciding whether to tell him more. “Do you remember the Walcheren expedition, seven years since?” Her fingers stilled on the glove and she angled her head to face him.
“Of course.” A sorry mess that had been, troops stationed in swampy ground, more men dying of sickness than by bullet or cannon. He touched the candle’s wick to a flame. “Is that where you lost him?”
“To the ague.” Her eyes glittered like ice before the sudden flare of the candle. “He hadn’t even the honor of dying in battle.”
“There’s very little honor involved. You may trust my word on that.” He put the candle back, finding the place by feel so he need not take his gaze from her. “Was he clever with numbers too?”
Surprise flashed over her face—she hadn’t expected this question—before giving way to a very sunrise of a smile that seemed to warm and loosen every knotted-up thing inside him. “Clever doesn’t begin to tell it, Will. Where I have a sort of dumb genius for calculation, he had depth of understanding, and an interest in abstract concepts that I don’t share. By his side I always felt a bit like one of those trick horses at the fair, pounding out answers with one hoof.”
“He must have been proud to have such a sister, I imagine.” Seven or eight thoughts and feelings were running riot all through him. Chief among them: this is what she looks like, sounds like, when she loves someone.
“I suppose he was.” Her smile subsided. He’d said something wrong, or perhaps she’d simply moved from remembering her brother to remembering his loss.
The compulsion to cheer her was primal, of a sudden, the same sort of drive that could keep a man staggering through a desert for days toward a rumor of water. Numbers. Cards. That was the way. “I wish I could claim either a depth of understanding or a dumb genius, but I think we must face the fact that I’ll never be as proficient as you’d like at keeping the tally.” He let go the table and came upright again. “Might there be some way you can keep that reckoning, and pass the information secretly to me?”
“Yes.” She’d completely forgot about war and ague and trick horses at the fair. “Yes, that’s exactly what we’ll do. I’ll manage everything. I’ll tell you how much to wager, and whether to buy or stick. We’ll devise a system of codes.” Her brow furrowed fiercely as she sent her gaze to the table. Four seconds later she looked up. “Mr. Blackshear, do you know French?”
LYDIA LEFT first this time, pulling the door shut behind her with a clean, immensely satisfying click of hardware. The prospects that had looked so grim but an hour before were looking crystal-chandelier-brilliant now, and if Mr. Blackshear truly cared to earn a lady’s good opinion he need only keep coming up with ideas like the one he’d voiced tonight.
For Heaven’s sake, why hadn’t she thought of it herself? She would manage the reckoning, and he would supply the larger stake that could weather the inevitable fluctuations in outcome. He would have to trust her, of course, and she would have to prove herself worthy of his trust. But with their interests lying on a common path, that part should see to itself.
Down the staircase she went, light on her toes and in charity with all the world, until she turned at the landing to find Maria waiting at the foot of the steps, arms folded, posture rigid with disapproval, eyes fixed on the flight that led down to the next floor.
Apprehension seized at her with cold fingers. She caught up her skirts and hurried down the remaining stairs. “What is it?” Don’t act guilty. You’ve done nothing wrong.
“Mr. Roanoke came to the retiring room some half hour since, looking for you.” Maria kept her gaze averted. “Eliza talked him into dancing a set with her in the ballroom. They must be on their second set now, and if he hasn’t grown suspicious you’re greatly in her debt.”