Читать книгу Rake's Wager - Miranda Jarrett - Страница 8

Four months later

London

R ichard Blackley leaned closer to the painting, inspecting the surface for cracks to better judge its age. He didn’t give a fig whether the painting was two hundred years old, or two weeks, nor would he recognize the difference, except for how high the auctioneer might try to run the bidding. He glanced back at the listing in the exhibition catalog: The Fortune Teller, Italian, Sixteenth Century.

That made him smile. The smirking old woman was a bawd if ever he’d seen one, taking the last coin that poor sot in the foreground had in his pocket, while he was busy gaping at the strumpet in the scarlet turban at the window. It was the strumpet he liked best, with her sloe-eyed, sleepy glance and creamy bare breasts. He knew just the place for her, in his dressing room at Greenwood, where she’d amuse him while he was shaved.

He drew a small star before the picture’s number in the catalog. Generally he didn’t care one way or the other about pictures, but this was one he didn’t want to let slip away. What was the use of being a rich man if he couldn’t buy himself a painting that made him smile?

“Excuse me, sir.” A young woman had eased her way through the crowd of other viewers here for the exhibition before the auction, and she now stood squeezed between Richard and the painting—his painting. “I didn’t mean to bump you.”

“Forgiven,” he said, lifting his hat to her as he smiled. It was easy to smile at her: she was a pretty little creature, with bright blue eyes and golden-red hair that her plain dark mourning bonnet seemed to highlight rather than mask. Whom did she grieve for, he wondered idly: a husband, parent, sibling? “Though to be honest, I hadn’t noticed that you’d bumped me at all.”

“Well, sir, I did,” she said, “so of course I had to apologize, to make things right. It would be rude of me not to.”

She stated it as simple fact, a fact that he wasn’t sure how to answer, but because she was such a pretty little creature, he wanted to. She wasn’t being forward, the way a demirep might be to attract his notice; in fact, if Richard was honest, she didn’t really seem interested in him at all. Instead her whole attention seemed focused on the painting before him, and to his dismay she was marking a circle around the same number in her catalog as he had in his.

“You are bidding on this picture, miss?” he asked. “You like it that much?”

“That is the reason one usually comes here to Christie’s Auction Rooms, isn’t it? To bid on the pictures one likes?” She darkened the circle around the listing for emphasis. “Last week I sold three dreary paintings of peasants with cows, and now I plan to reward myself by buying this one.”

“For yourself?” he asked, surprised. It didn’t seem like the kind of painting a young lady—she couldn’t be more than twenty—would choose for herself.

“It’s my choice, yes, though I’m sure my sisters will find it amusing as well.” She leaned closer, studying the surface just as Richard himself had done. “I don’t believe it’s as old as they’re claiming—it’s likely a copy, and not even an Italian one—but the fortune teller in particular is very nicely done, I think.”

“They got that wrong in the catalog, too,” he said. “If that old crone’s a fortune teller, why, then I’ll—then I’ll—”

His words trailed off as he realized his mistake, the kind of mistake that true English gentlemen weren’t supposed to make when addressing English ladies.

“Then what else could she be?” The young woman’s eyes were as blue as the Caribbean itself, and just as ready to swallow him up. “The smiling soldier had just given her his payment, and now she’s holding his hand as she reads his palm, while the other woman watches. His future must be improving, for him to look so jolly. Good fortune overcoming bad. That, sir, is why I wish to buy this particular picture.”

She turned away from him and toward the next picture, and he joined her, unwilling to lose her yet.

“You speak as if from experience,” he said, happy to let her think what she wished about the old procuress in the painting. “About good luck and bad, that is.”

“There’s not a person on earth that’s not had experience with luck of both kinds.” She glanced at him sideways, up through her lashes, and without turning her head. “Unless, sir, you are among those who don’t believe in it?”

“If you mean sitting idle beside a stream and waiting for my luck to change, then, no, I do not,” he said. “But I do believe in seizing the opportunities that fate offers, and making them my own.”

She raised one arched brow, and laughed, a merry, bubbling sound that he instantly wished to hear again.

“That’s bold talk, sir,” she said, “quite worthy of Bonaparte himself.”

“It’s not empty talk,” he insisted, “nor was it meant to show sympathy to the French. It’s how I live my life.”

“I didn’t say your words were empty. I said they were bold, which is a very different thing altogether.” She moved to stand before the next painting, and Richard followed. Clever women like this one hadn’t existed on Barbados, or at least none in the society that had allowed him, too. “You must enjoy gambling.”

He frowned a little, not following her logic.

“I’ve become good at spotting gentleman gamesters, you see,” she explained with an inexplicable triumph in her voice, as if spotting gamesters were a required skill for young ladies, like singing and fine needlework. “If you’re as bold as you say, then you must be the sort of sporting gentleman who enjoys his games of chance.”

He shook his head, sorry to see her face fall. “Not dice, not pasteboard cards, and I’ve no wish to empty my pockets on account of some overrated nag, either.”

“Truly?” she said, disappointed. “You are not pretending otherwise?”

“I did when I was younger,” he said, to make her feel better, “but not for years. Now I’d rather find pleasure in playing for higher stakes than a handful of coins.”

“Indeed, sir.” Her voice turned frosty, her cheeks flushing. “How fine for you.”

He barely bit back an oath, realizing too late that she’d misunderstood him again. He’d meant the dangerous investments and other merchant ventures with high-risk profits that had become his specialty, while she’d thought the stakes were her and her charming little person—her virtue, as ladies liked to call it.

“Oh, blast, I didn’t intend it that way,” he said, taking her by the arm so she’d have to look at him, so she’d understand he meant her no harm “Here now, miss, listen to me. I’ve never had to rely on a wager for a woman’s company, and I’m not about to begin now.”

“No,” she said curtly, staring down at his fingers around her upper arm as if his touch had scalded her. “But then I don’t imagine any woman willingly shares your company, not for the sake of love or money.”

He sighed with impatience, wondering why in blazes she’d suddenly turned so priggish and prim. “Now that’s not what I—”

“Isn’t it, sir?” she said, the curving brim of her bonnet quivering with indignation. “I may be from the country, but I am not completely ignorant of the wickedness to be found in this city!”

Other people around them were beginning to turn with curiosity, and Richard lowered his voice to give them less to hear. “Listen to me, sweetheart, and stop speaking of things you know nothing of. You wouldn’t recognize wickedness if it tripped you in the street.”

“I am not your sweetheart, and I will thank you not to fancy I am.” She jerked her arm free of his hand. “Now leave me, sir, before I demonstrate exactly how much I know of your wickedness, and summon one of Mr. Christie’s guards to have you removed. Good day, sir.”

She gave an angry final twitch of her black skirts as she cut her way through the crowd, as fast and as far from him as she could get herself.

And that was fine with Richard. If ever he’d needed another reminder that London ladies would be difficult, then this red-haired chit had given it to him. He’d thought at first she’d be different, and speak plain, but without warning she’d become just as self-righteous and sharp-tongued as all the rest in this city. Finding one who wasn’t would be his greatest challenge so far.

But he was willing to take his time. He’d decided that, even before his ship had rounded Needham Point and left the last of Barbados behind him. He had made his fortune, and he had bought his fine bespoke clothes and his carriage and horses and an ancient, grand country house awaited him. Now all he needed was a high-bred lady-bride to complete the transformation, and make the world see that Dick Blackley, collier’s boy, had become Richard Blackley, gentleman.

He glanced one last time toward where the young woman in mourning had disappeared. He was sorry she hadn’t turned out to be his match; he’d liked her looks and her spirit, before she’d gone and turned so sour over nothing.

And he’d be damned before he’d let her steal his painting away from him.

The auctioneer had made his way to the podium and stood testing his gavel against the palm of his hand, while his assistant was ringing the bell to signal the beginning of the auction. Most people hurried to find seats on the long benches, while a few others lingered for a final glimpse of the paintings hung and stacked along the walls. A footman carried the first painting, a murky landscape, to the front of the room, taking care to balance the ornate gold frame on the tall easel for all to see.

Richard didn’t sit, choosing instead to stand along the wall where he could keep one eye on his old bawd. He crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his hat over one eye, leaning against the wall as he prepared for a long wait before his painting would be called. He glanced across the benches, but saw no sign of the red-haired woman in mourning. Perhaps he’d chased her off; perhaps she’d never had a real interest in the painting.

Slowly the sun slid across the skylights overhead as the auctioneer droned on, cracking his gavel to seal each transaction as the footman switched paintings. At last the footman lifted The Fortune Teller onto the easel, and Richard stood away from the wall and straightened his hat.

“Next is an Italian painting in oils from the sixteenth century entitled The Fortune Teller,” the auctioneer announced. “Opening with a reserve of five pounds for this very fine work by an old master whose name is lost to time, but not the product of his genius. Five pounds to start, then, who’ll give five pounds?”

Richard raised his hand just enough for the auctioneer to notice. He could see it hung in his dressing room at Greenwood already.

“Five pounds to the tall gentleman at the wall, a pittance for a work of this quality, of this sensibility, of this—”

“Seven pounds!”

“Seven pounds to the lady in mourning!” the auctioneer called. “The lady knows her art, gentlemen, benefit from her knowledge and—”

“Nine pounds.” Richard had spotted her now, sitting on the far end of one of the benches, with all but the brim of her black bonnet hidden by a fat man in a gray coat.

“Nine to the tall gentleman at the wall, will anyone give me—”

“Fifteen!” The young woman hopped to her feet, her program rolled into a tight scroll in her black-gloved hands.

Excitement rippled through the crowd; no one had expected any serious bidding for this particular lot of paintings, especially not between a gentleman and a lady.

“Fifteen to the lady with a connoisseur’s eye for an old master, fifteen to—”

“Twenty.”

The woman turned and glared at Richard. When he nodded and smiled, she twitched her head back toward the front, refusing to acknowledge him.

“Twenty-five,” she said, her voice ringing clear and loud in the auction room. She wasn’t afraid to make a spectacle of herself, and Richard liked that. What a pity she’d learn soon enough that his pockets were deeper than she’d ever dreamed.

“Twenty-five to the lady!” the auctioneer crowed with near delirious fervor. “Twenty-five for—”

“Fifty,” Richard said, and the audience gasped.

“Fifty-five!” the woman cried, tossing her head for good measure.

Richard smiled. She did have spirit, he’d grant her that.

“Fifty-five to the lady!” His round face flushed with excitement, the auctioneer peered expectantly at Richard over his spectacles. The room was nearly silent, the audience holding its breath together. “Fifty-five for this most excellent work, fifty-five for—”

“One hundred,” Richard said. “Even.”

The crowd exploded, whistling, swearing, applauding, cheering. The auctioneer turned back to the girl.

“One hundred for The Fortune Teller,” he thundered, his voice fair glowing with the importance of such a bid. “One hundred from the tall, dark gentleman for this magnificent work. Do I hear one hundred five? One hundred five?”

But the young woman only shook her head and sank back down onto the bench, behind the fat man.

Obviously disappointed, the auctioneer continued. “Once at one hundred, twice at one hundred.” His gavel cracked down on his desk. “Sold to the tall gentleman for one hundred pounds.”

Another spattering of applause came from the audience, but the contest was done and their interest with it. Few even bothered to turn as Richard made his way to the front to pay for the painting and make arrangements for its delivery to Greenwood. With the picture now leaning against the back wall, the old fortune teller seemed to be laughing at his expense now, too—as well she should, considering how much more than her worth she’d finally cost him.

“So this is how you seize opportunities to make your own luck, sir?” The redhead was standing beside him, her cheek flushed and her eyes flashing with anger. “I told you I wanted that painting, sir, and you stole it away from me from sheer spite. You swoop down and plunder like a—like a pirate, sir!”

“I didn’t plunder anything,” he protested. “I bid for the painting honestly, and now I must pay through the nose for the privilege, too. Show me a pirate who’ll do that.”

Her eyes narrowed, shaking the scrolled program in her hand as if it were a dagger. “You are no better than a pirate, sir. A thieving, incorrigible, rascally pirate, with no sense of propriety or decency!”

“And if you had outbid me, would that have made you the pirate?” he asked. “I come from a place where piracy’s taken seriously. Would the painting have become your righteous plunder instead of mine, hung alongside your skull and crossbones?”

She gasped, sputtering so incoherently as she struggled for words that he almost—almost—laughed. Instead, against his better judgment, he took pity on her.

“If you promise to surrender your sword, lass,” he said, “then I’m willing to make peace over a dish of tea or chocolate.”

“Go with you, sir?” Tiny wisps of red-gold hair had come free from her bonnet and now quivered around her face, echoing her outrage. “Sit with you, drink tea with you? After what you have done to me?”

“That was my intention, yes,” he said, his patience shredding fast, “though you are making it damned difficult to be agreeable.”

“That is because I do not intend to be agreeable to you, sir.” She took one last look at the painting. “Drink tea with you, hah. Even if you were to suddenly play the gallant and give the picture to me, I would not accept it.”

“But I’m not some blasted foppish gallant any more than you’re agreeable,” he said irritably. “The painting’s mine, fair and square, and it’s going to stay that way.”

“I didn’t need a fortune teller to know you’d say that.” She retied the bonnet’s ribbons beneath her chin with short, quick jerks, the black silk cutting against her white throat. “You can try to bend your luck all you want, but someday, Captain Pirate, you’ll find that luck will bend you back.”

He frowned as she turned away toward the door. “Is that meant to be a curse,” he called after her, “or are you telling my fortune?”

She paused just long enough to look back over her shoulder, her blue-eyed gaze so startlingly intense that he almost recoiled. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself, won’t you?”

She disappeared through the door, and slowly Richard turned back to the painting. Likely he’d never see the redhead again, not in a city this large. But he’d been in London less than a week, and already it had come to this.

A fortune, or a curse.

“Good afternoon, Pratt.” Cassia smiled at the old man as he held the door to Penny House open for her. “I hope my sisters haven’t been making your life too miserable today?”

“Like hell itself it’s been, Miss Cassia,” he grumbled, looking down sorrowfully at his leather apron, covered with silver polish, sawdust and general household grime. “Fussing about like an Irish parlor maid, ordered up an’ down those infernal stairs like it was nothing—that’s not why I agreed to stay on, Miss Cassia, not at all.”

“I know, Pratt, I know,” she said, “but after tonight everything will be ready, and we’ll be busy running Penny House instead of just cleaning it.”

She smiled and patted his sleeve. They needed Pratt to be happy. Pratt was the club’s manager, one of the few members of the staff they’d kept on from Whitaker’s. Once valet to the Duke of Conover, his limitless knowledge of who was who in the aristocracy had already proved invaluable to the sisters. He had suggested which noblemen they should invite to form their new membership committee and who should receive their engraved invitations to join, and he’d even known that twenty guineas should be the precise—if shocking—entrance fee to keep the club exclusive.

“I trust you’re right, Miss Cassia.” His sigh was more of a groan as he dabbed his forehead at the edge of his wig with a linen handkerchief. “Your sister may have been born a preacher’s daughter, but she gives orders like she’s lived all her life in a palace.”

“Pratt, there you are!” called Amariah from the staircase, and he groaned again. “You’re needed in the pantry to help move a table, and— Ah, Cassia, at last you’re home!”

“Good day, Amariah,” she said, wishing she could be heading off with Pratt. “You make it sound as if I’ve been away to China and back.”

“Well, you have been gone for hours and hours, and so much has happened since you’ve been gone.” She leaned over the railing, searching the entryway. “Where is the painting you went to fetch? Is it coming later in a cart?”

“It’s not coming at all.” Cassia untied her bonnet as she glanced into the refurbished dining room. “I didn’t buy it. I see the painters have finally taken down their scaffolding, so I suppose the ceilings are done at last.”

“But you told us the fortune telling painting was perfect!” Amariah hurried down the steps to join her, her white linen apron billowing around her. “You left the space on the wall bare specifically for it—a great, gaping, empty hole, with our first night all but upon us!”

“Then I’ll find something else to put in its place.” Cassia pushed open the tall double doors, eager to avoid answering any more of Amariah’s questions about the auction. This was her own fault, really, for gushing on so much about the painting after she’d seen it in the preview, about how cheaply it would be had. It would have been, too, if not for that dreadful man stealing it away from her. “And I know we open tonight. However could I forget?”

“If you decided against that painting, then you should have been here, working with us.” Amariah followed her through the doors. “How things look at Penny House, Cassia—that’s your responsibility, just as Bethany’s is in the kitchen and mine is—”

“To greet our guests, to oversee the gaming staff and to keep the books.” Cassia sighed, exhausted. All three of them were, from working so hard and with so little sleep to be ready for the first night. That was probably the reason that man had irritated her so over the auction; if she hadn’t been so tired, she wouldn’t have paid him any heed at all. “I’m sorry I took so long, Amariah, but it couldn’t be— Oh, don’t the chairs look fine!”

With the protective cloths finally removed and the painters gone, she wandered through the room, running her hands lightly over the tops of the tables and chairs. The old tables had been sturdy enough to keep, but the few original chairs that remained from Whitaker’s had been so rickety they’d needed replacing before some corpulent gentleman plunged through to the carpet.

Cassia herself had scoured secondhand stores along the river to find the replacements, then scrubbed and polished away the old grime from the chairs in the yard out back. None of the chairs matched, but Cassia’s eye for proportion had made her choices cousins, if not brothers, and the overall effect was lighthearted and imaginative and inviting.

But that was how she’d decorated all of Penny House, from the private card rooms to the bedchambers the sisters kept for themselves on the top floor. Everything was a curious jumble, from the fresh, bright paint and well-used furniture, to the latest political cartoons pinned beside an ancient carving from the East Indies. Yet somehow Cassia had put it all together to make the rooms seem more exotic and fashionable than what the most expensive London architects were creating for their wealthiest clients.

The Fortune Teller was going to have been one of her few indulgences, a costly painting for her and one to be given a special place of honor. Cassia glanced up to the empty spot over the fireplace where the picture would have gone, and muttered furiously to herself.

“So why didn’t you buy the painting, Cassia, if you wanted it so badly?” Amariah was watching her, arms folded over the front of her apron. “You had money from the old paintings you’d sold last week, and this morning you seemed to feel sure it could be had cheaply.”

Cassia gave a dismissive sweep of her hand. “It should have come cheaply, yes. But there was a dreadful, selfish, rude man at Christie’s who stole it away from me, as boldly as any thieving pirate might!”

Amariah listened, her expression not changing. “You mean he was willing to bid higher than you?”

“I mean he drove the bidding so high that I could not compete with him.” Cassia stalked back and forth before the fireplace, unable to keep still. “Before the auction, he saw that I wanted the picture, and then from purest spite he let me bid as if I had a chance.”

She held her hand up, palm open, over the mantelpiece. “He let me bid, Amariah, let me bid in my innocence before he finally squelched me flat as a gnat!”

She smacked her palm down on painted wood for emphasis, showing exactly what the man had done to her hopes.

But Amariah didn’t blink. “How high did he run the bidding?”

Cassia let her hand slip from the mantel, not wanting her sister to realize how her fingers stung after that thoughtless, emphatic little gesture. “The reserve was five pounds, which was fair. His final bid was one hundred, which was not.”

“So evidently he was either a very rich pirate, or a very indulgent one,” Amariah said. “I trust you offered him an invitation to our opening?”

Cassia gasped. “I most certainly did not!”

“Why?” Amariah pulled out one of the chairs and sat. “He is gentleman enough to be at Christie’s bidding on paintings, he is rich and he is impulsive. He sounds ideal for Penny House.”

“But I thought we were only inviting gentlemen recommended by the membership committee!” Cassia protested. “True gentlemen, with breeding and manners, and not boorish and ill-tempered and—”

“Was he handsome, too?”

“Handsome?” Cassia paused, surprised that Amariah would ask such a question. The man was handsome; she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t noticed as soon as she’d bumped into him. His features were sharp and regular, his pale eyes intelligent, and he was so tall she’d had to look up to his face. His dark hair had seemed too thick and heavy to stay in place, and as they’d spoken, he’d had to toss it back impatiently from his forehead. His skin was browned by the sun, as if he were a sailor or farmer, and his hands and the breadth of his shoulders seemed to belong more to a man who worked for his living rather than a gentleman. He’d certainly stood out among the crowd at Christie’s.

Not, of course, that any of that would matter to Cassia now.

“He was handsome enough, in his way,” she admitted with a dismissive little shrug. “In a common way.”

“Indeed.” Amariah sat back in her chair, watching Cassia closely. “Was he young, too?”

“Older than we are,” Cassia said. “Thirty?”

“Young for a gentleman.” Amariah sighed, smoothing her apron over her knee. “Thus the man was young and handsome and rich and impulsive. For all we know, he may already have one of our invitations. Yet because you imagined he’d slighted you somehow, you were every bit as ill-mannered as he was to you.”

“I did not say that!”

“You didn’t have to, Cassia.” Amariah pressed her palm to her forehead and sighed. “You’re saying it now, as clear as day. It’s how you’ve always been with gentlemen.”

“Only when they behave ill toward me first!” Cassia cried. “Don’t you recall how Father said we were to stand up for ourselves with gentlemen, and never let them take advantage?”

“There is a world of difference between taking advantage and behaving like a spoiled, petulant child,” Amariah said. “London isn’t the Havertown Assembly, and you can’t treat the gentlemen here the way you did with the ones at home. There will always be another lady who is prettier or more amusing, and London gentlemen won’t be nearly as indulgent with you if you lose your temper.”

“I wasn’t trying to be amusing,” Cassia protested. That wasn’t what had happened with the gentleman at Christie’s, and it didn’t deserve this kind of talk from her sister. “I was trying to buy a painting.”

“Yet I can imagine all too well what that gentleman must have thought.” Amariah reached out and took Cassia’s hand. “I know you are still our baby, Cassia, and that you’ve worked as hard as Bethany and I these last months—maybe even harder. And I know how set you can be on having your own way.”

Cassia shook her head, even as she thought again about the dark-haired gentleman. If she hadn’t turned so—so tart with him, then maybe they’d be in this room hanging The Fortune Teller now instead of staring at that empty space. “But I didn’t—”

“Hush, and listen to me,” Amariah said with a gentle shush. “We’ve come to London to honor Father’s memory by making Penny House a success, and his charities with it. That must always come first. Neither imagined slights, nor gentlemen who haven’t paid us as much attention as we’d wish. If you let your temper run away tonight, why, then the talk will begin about those disagreeable women at Penny House, and everything will be lost.”

“Not the women. Me.” Cassia sighed, her agitation slipping away. “You should have been with me at Christie’s today, Amariah. It’s simple for you. You are always so calm.”

“I hide the rest, that is all.” Her sister smiled, gently squeezing Cassia’s fingers. “You’ll have a fresh start this evening. Before you act or speak, think, then think again, and you’ll do fine.”

“I’ll try, Amariah,” she said, and she meant it. “For all our sakes, and for Father’s, too, I’ll try.”

A fresh start, thought Cassia. That was what they’d all needed, and why they’d come to London in the first place. Likely she would never see the dark gentleman—the thieving pirate—ever again, anyway. Likely all he’d ever be to her would be a warning, a reminder of how she must not behave.

And she swore to push aside forever that guilty twinge of surpreme satisfaction for having gotten the last word.