“No. Hurting and using children is madness. The practices that somehow allow it are madness. The laws are inadequate and never enforced, and not a single bloody politician seems able to change this. I’m nobody, really, but if I can help, if only one child at a time . . . and there are so many, Jonathan. So many. Tell me—” She lowered her voice to a fierce hush, and jerked her chin. “—Would you hit her?”
Sally was standing in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. She’d slept through everything, and this was a blessing.
“Mr. Friend!”
She was wholly delighted to see someone she’d met only once before in her life.
Jonathan stared at her. She was so . . . small. So willing to trust. To believe the best of people, despite what she’d experienced. To find delight in something simple.
A cold fist clenched his heart. Hitting her for any reason was inconceivable. The notion of it was grotesque. Not only was she a child, but a servant. Someone who would never be able to defend herself.
“Good morning, Sally,” he said politely. Somewhat abstractedly.
She smiled shyly at him. “Do you have any scars?” she asked.
He blinked. “Do I . . . ?”
“Will you show me?”
She had anarchic glossy black ringlets and enormous brown eyes. How in God’s name did anyone say “no” to those eyes? They were horribly unfair.
And now Tommy was biting back a smile.
“Go on, Mr. Friend. I told her all the most dashing people have scars. She will have a particularly fine one on her forehead.”
“Oh, I’ve scars. It’s just that there are so many to choose from,” Jonathan hedged.
“The bravest one,” Sally requested.
“The bravest one . . .” He inhaled. “Very well.” He shook off his coat, unfastened his cufflinks, rolled up his sleeve, and knelt down near her.
There, on his forearm, was that raw red slash. From the last time he’d intervened to save someone.
“It’s not yet officially a scar, Sally. But it will be, and a grand one, too. A gentleman was accosted by a group of ruffians outside an” —he substituted the word “establishment” for “gaming hell”—“and I intervened to help him. I was slashed a wee bit by a knife but all the good people got away unscathed.”
Implying that the “bad people” had been scathed indeed. From the floor, the deeply sleeping Rutherford gave a snort and turned.
“He’s just sleeping,” Jonathan said smoothly, and Sally accepted this with apparent equanimity.
“Ooooohhhh.” She peered at his scar admiringly, not at all upset by the violent story. “Does it hurt?”
“Not so much, anymore. This bruise, you see, went along with it, and it’s going away, too.” He pointed to the fading spot below his eye. The one that had seemed to brand him as a ruffian in the eyes of the Duke of Greyfolk.
Tommy was watching the two of them, and when he glanced up he found a look of studied innocence on her face, a certain triumph underlying it. “So you intervened, did you, Mr. Redmond, when you saw a wrong being committed?”
“How could I not?”
“Do you make a habit of intervening? Didn’t you rather intervene in my circumstance today?”
“It’s not so much a habit as . . .” He trailed off.
He thought about Klaus Liebman. And the costermonger, and the child thief, and how Tommy had given him her sorry handkerchief. And the mysterious gentleman outside the gaming hell, whom Jonathan had rescued from knife-wielding ruffians, and who had staggered, dazed and frightened, away into the night, bleeding on Jonathan’s handkerchief, muttering thanks.
And then, of course, today, when he’d been quite prepared to do murder for the woman standing in front of him.
“Not everyone intervenes, Mr. Redmond. You simply have no choice. It’s your nature.”
“I haven’t a choice,” he repeated faintly. With grim resignation.
She’d made her point, then.
It wasn’t quite the same thing, but he wasn’t about to argue it now. And she’d also neatly taken advantage of this quality in him by enlisting his assistance, which, in a perverse way he admired, and he almost smiled ruefully. The woman was deucedly shrewd.
He sighed. Christ. What she did was untenable and mad, and it unnerved him greatly. The lawlessness and peril of it. The grandeur and heroism of it.
It terrified him to his marrow.
And frankly, it thrilled him.
God save him from complicated women.
She quite simply couldn’t go on doing it. She would be caught. It really was only a matter of time.
Every muscle in his body contracted in protest. No. No. He didn’t want to be Tommy de Ballesteros’s savior. He quite seriously doubted Lady Grace Worthington, for instance, would ever need to be saved from a mad doctor. He indulged in a moment of imagining her serene, predictable, exquisitely-bred blond beauty.
Well, he’d demanded details from Tommy. He supposed he only had himself to blame.
He sighed. “Have you any tea?”
Very few circumstances weren’t improved by the addition of a little tea.
“It isn’t very good tea,” she warned.
“When your investment pays off, your tea will be excellent.”
Her face brightened instantly. “Oh, so is your plan underway?”
“I sold the pearls at Exley & Morrow, I came from Klaus’s a few minutes ago, and then paid a visit to Mr. Wyndham, who will prepare the images for the plates. We should have the plates made and the decks printed inside a month. I predict you’ll have your investment returned, and then some, quite soon.”
She beamed and gave the slightest little gleeful hop, and this pleased him absurdly, and not only because she seemed to share his joy in the making of money. Her face was luminous when she smiled genuinely. She had the sort of smile one felt smack in one’s solar plexus.
“Tea it is!” she said, and swiveled toward where cups were stacked on shelves and stretched up for one. And for a moment he lost himself in the quiet pleasure of watching her slim back, the quick deft movements of her white hands selecting saucers. Her grace was innate and subtle, as though she moved to silent music. By contrast, the colors of her—the rich hair, the exotic eyes, the black brows—were as vivid and surprising as her personality. And for a moment he indulged in simply baldly admiring her as if she were a woman he’d never before seen. He understood how she could have captivated the imaginations of so many men.
And yet none of them truly knew her.
He glanced at the snoring Rutherford on the floor, and considered wryly whether he envied all those young men their ignorance of the real Tommy de Ballesteros.
The one who had a bullet scar on one slim pale arm.
He felt every muscle in his body tense again, as if he was springing to defend her from something that had already happened. As if he could take the shot for her.
“Tell me, Tommy . . .” he said slowly. “Who gave you the pearls?”
He hadn’t realized he was going to ask the question.
She froze. And pivoted reluctantly. Her green eyes studied him, gauging whether the well of his patience had begun to refill.
“A gentleman. And that’s all I’ll tell you.”
Apparently she’d concluded it was safe to be circumspect again.
After a brief staring contest, he acquiesced with a shrug and a quirk of the corner of his mouth. He supposed, in the end, it didn’t matter; he told himself he didn’t care. It wasn’t as though he had a claim on her, or remotely wished to join the ranks of besotted sheep who wagered absurd things about her in White’s Betting Books. And yet, if they were to be friends, he supposed it would be useful to anticipate from which direction trouble would next come. Because with Tommy, trouble was inevitable.
Besides, he had every confidence in the world that if he truly wanted to know, he’d eventually have the information out of her.
“Very well.” His chin pointed to Sally. �
�What are you going to do with her?” he asked sotto voce. “It’s hardly safe for her here, is it? For her or for you.”
Something flashed in her eyes then; a shadow darted across her face. A wounded defensiveness about the rooms she could afford, about her ability, perhaps, to keep Sally safe.
She composed herself swiftly.
“I haven’t a place for her yet. And usually I have a place . . . it’s just the timing of it was unfortunate . . .”
“Usually you have a place?”
How many of these rescues had taken place? And then he recalled the little thumping sounds he’d heard above his head the night she’d shown him the pearls.
“Was there a child upstairs with Rutherford the first night I was here?”
Again, a stubborn silence.
In other words, yes, there was.
In other words, she made a habit of this sort of thing.
She read his expression, and again her voice was a fierce, persuasive, unapologetic hush. “Nobody cares about these children! When they disappear, it doesn’t cause an uproar or histrionic articles in the broadsheets. They haven’t families. They’re property. When you use up kindling, why, don’t you simply go and get more? That’s how they’re used by the workhouses and by wealthy men like Feckwith.”
Her words were appalling. And true. He just hadn’t thought about it in this light.
He glanced at Sally, who looked up and beamed at him. She’d lost interest in their incomprehensible adult conversation, and was paging slowly through what appeared to be a little picture book. She had a dimple, he saw, on the right, and what appeared to be a crumb on the left. Reflexively, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the crumb.
“Thank you, Mr. Friend.” She beamed. And returned to the picture book.
Well. He was charmed motionless for an instant, despite himself. Polite child, for all that.
He looked back at Tommy and found her as frozen as a pointing retriever, an aura of amazement on her face.
He frowned faintly at her. “And the reason you need money more quickly . . . is to fund this enterprise?”
There ensued more stubborn hesitation, which he knew heralded more circumspection.
“Why does anyone need money? Perhaps I want more than this.” She gestured to her rooms.
“So you do live here.”
Her silence, followed after a moment by a noncommittal one-shouldered shrug, rather confirmed it.
“Ah, Miss de Ballesteros. But I thought you were going to marry money.”
“Oh, of course,” she said smoothly. “Just like you.”
He couldn’t help it. He grinned at that.
She smiled back at him.
He shook his head and turned away from her and sighed at length.
Damn the woman. There was still no question that he liked her. He just wasn’t certain his world needed to be as . . . interesting . . . as it had become since she’d entered it. Then again, Argosy was also his friend, and Argosy could, on occasion, be a trial, too.
As Tommy pulled down cups and saucers with homey little clinking sounds, he turned his attention to Sally again, who was still absorbed in the book, her legs swinging gaily.
He wondered if she could read, or if she was just looking at the pictures.
And from that thought . . . an idea dawned.
He was going to regret saying it. He would only embed himself deeper into Tommy’s quixotic madness.
But in truth, there was no way he couldn’t say it.
“Tommy . . . about Sally . . . I’ve an idea . . .”
Chapter 13
ARGOSY ENTERED WHITE’S WEARING a smug secret smile, and wove through the club purposefully, greeting his friends abstractedly, which of course captivated all of them.
His destination was clearly the Betting Books; such was the languid Argosy’s charged purpose, all heads turned to follow his progress.
He scribbled something in it, then wiped his hands with satisfaction, and turned.
To find that five young men had leaped from their chairs and clustered around him to read it.
I wager Jonathan Redmond one hundred pounds that he will marry the Queen of Spades by the end of the year.
They all reared back at once.
“What the devil does that mean, Argosy?” It was Harry Linley, whose sister Marianne yearned after Jonathan.
“Well . . .” He made a great show of reluctance. “Very well. I’ll tell you. Do you know how Redmond excels at Five-Card Loo?”
“Took me for seventeen pounds last month,” one of them said sullenly.
Argosy nodded. “He’s going to let the cards choose a bride for him.”
A silence.
“He’s going to do what?” This was a general exclamation as the word “bride” and “cards” seldom occupied the same sentence, or even their minds, simultaneously.
“Do you mean he intends to win a bride in a card game? I’m going to the wrong gaming hells, if brides are on offer.”
“Is that an option?” one of them muttered. “I’d like to trade in the one I’ve got.”
Argosy held up a hand for silence. “Very well. I’ll tell you, but you mustn’t tell a soul.” This admonition was critical to ensure that the gossip would be spread immediately. “Klaus Liebman & Co. on Bond Street is having a special deck printed. In color, mind you. A magnificent new process of printing. And the suits—all of them—will be represented pictorially by the most beautiful women in town. Only Diamonds of the First Water, the most beautiful women of the finest pedigree, you see, will be allowed into the deck.”
This prompted much discussion among the little crowd.
“Imagine, a card deck immortalizing this season’s most beautiful women. Who wouldn’t want that?”
“Who wouldn’t want to lay Lady Grace Worthington down on a card table?”
This resulted in unworthy-of-them chortling.
“I’ll raise you Lady Margaret Cuthbert.”
“She raised me just the other day while we were waltzing.”
Appalled and delighted hooting ensued.
“These are ladies, gentleman, so if you’ll refrain from this sort of talk . . . until we’re a bit drunker.”
“Or Olivia Eversea.”
A hush greeted this. There was no question that Olivia Eversea was beautiful by anyone’s definition. It was just that it was difficult for anyone to imagine winning her, let alone playing her.
“Redmond told me he thought it would be brilliant to let the turn of a card determine his choice of bride. I think he’ll draw the Queen of Spades. Whoever she may turn out to be. You’re all welcome to wager otherwise. But please be discreet.”
They all absorbed this in delighted shock.
“Redmond is actually planning to get leg-shackled?” Linley asked.
“He always did have a diabolical panache,” one of them said enviously.
“Where will the girls be posing?” someone else wanted to know.
“An artist will sketch them on the premises of Klaus Liebman Printing on Bond Street. Remember, he has the finest, most modern of chromolithography printing. Liebman himself will have the final say over who is featured in the deck.”
“But . . . how will he get the girls to go to him?”
Argosy made a show of looking at his watch. “From what I understand, a young woman need only provide evidence of an Almack’s voucher if she’d like a chance to be featured. For we all know that is a sign of true pedigree. I believe he may have personally invited only one.”
“Who?” they chorused. For surely she was the standard against whom all others were measured.
Argosy shrugged.
“Where can I get a deck?” Linley wanted to know. “Maybe I want to choose a bride from it, too.”
“You can place your orders with Liebman himself now, from what I understand. And your bets. The decks should be completed and available from all the best merchants in a month. But demand ought to be fierce,
so I would place my order now, if you wish to be among the first to see the results.”
He stepped aside and gestured at the book.
And as the idea was irresistible, they queued to lay wagers.
Having more than adequately fulfilled his assignment, Argosy strolled out of White’s whistling.
“THIS SORT OF thing,” the formidable Miss Marietta Endicott said after a long silence, “one might expect of the Everseas, if you’ll take my meaning, and also forgive me, Mr. Redmond.”
“She’s not my by-blow, Miss Endicott. I swear it.”
Never in his life did he dream he’d have to say those words to Miss Marietta Endicott
The Redmond family name—and Miss Endicott’s admiration for Jonathan’s skill at darts, which she witnessed whenever she took a pint at the Pig & Thistle—were what got him an immediate audience with her in the middle of the school day. He’d watched the heads of young girls crane as he walked through the long hallway to Miss Endicott’s office. Giggles and whispers and reprimands followed in his wake.
Tommy remained with Sally and the Redmond’s driver across the bridge on the opposite side of the river, lest anyone notice and wonder why a carriage bearing the Redmond crest was there. Certainly no one in his family had any immediate business with the school.
Miss Endicott still looked unflatteringly dubious. “Do you know anything about this girl’s family, her true age, her temperament, Mr. Redmond? Can she read and write?”
He reflected upon the carriage ride there, during which he’d learned that six year olds never stop moving. As if they’ve just discovered all of their limbs, and fingers and toes and tongue, and need to break them in, like a new pair of shoes. The conversation had gone something like this:
Don’t kick, Sally.”
She stopped kicking, and beamed at him, as if she’d been kicking specifically to get him to say things to her.
And then she inserted her finger in her nose.
“Don’t put your finger in your nose,” he ordered.
She pulled it out of her nose and wiped it on her dress.
Julie Anne Long - [Pennyroyal Green 08] Page 11
