Once in a Blue Moon (26 page)

She pushed herself to her feet and headed for the door. "Jessalyn."

She turned, and the sconce caught the brittle shimmer of unshed tears in her eyes.

He picked the bank notes up off the desk. "You will take these with you."

Mutely she shook her head.

"Take them, Miss Letty. Or I shall have a word with my starchy, sobersides cousin. He should find it most edifying to learn that his betrothed is in such straitened circumstances that she was forced to gallop around the Vauxhall rotunda in spangled tights."

She sucked in a sharp breath. "You would not dare to stoop so low as to tell Clarence."

"When one is as sunk in the depths of depravity as I, one gets used to stooping." He gripped her wrist and pressed the stiff paper into her hand. He could feel the beat of her blood, hard and fast, beneath the softness of her skin. "Take them."

Her fingers opened, and the notes floated to the floor. "Tell Clarence the whole, then, if it pleases you to hurt me. But I will not take your money. Not even if I had chosen to become your ladybird would I have taken your money, my lord."

He let go of her wrist, but the pounding of her pulse echoed in his blood. He nodded to her, his head stiff. "Duncan will see you home in a hackney."

The manservant appeared on cue, a grim look on his handsome face. "I've got one all ready and waiting, miss. Those loungers who gave ye that wee bit of trouble earlier are still littering the street. Young coxcombs and fribblers, with nothing better to do than..." He trailed off as he caught the expression on his lordship's face. "Now, don't ye go getting all murderous on me, sir, else ye'll be winding up in gaol sooner than they can bankrupt ye there, and with a hanging charge wrapped around yer neck. I'll see the lass comes to nae harm."

McCady's hands uncurled as the desire to smash his fists into nameless faces slowly faded. Duncan would see her safe. He didn't want to let her go, but every line of Jessalyn's body shrieked that she wanted to be away from him.

He watched her follow Duncan down the stairs and out the door. Back within the apple green parlor he went to the window. The hackney driver ran up to lower the steps, and she paused. Her face, turned in profile, shone like a half moon in the fog. A tendril of hair, bright as a sunrise, slashed across her cheek.

He gripped the curtain as if he needed it to hold himself up. He wanted her so badly he could scarcely breathe from the pain of it.

The driver closed the door and climbed into his box. The hackney rolled into the street with a jingle of harness and a clatter of wheels. Yellow fog swirled and eddied, swallowing the black carriage, and she was gone.

Hands clenched, he threw back his head, the tendons of his neck standing out like ropes. "Jessalyn!" he shouted.

And slammed his fist into the window. He didn't hear the shattering tinkle of falling glass, or see his blood splashing in bright starburst patterns on the parquet floor. She was gone, and all that was left was a vast emptiness and the echo of his heart, knocking like a wheel out of gear.

He wanted her, wanted her, wanted her....

The two hundred doeskin bags made a pile the size of a hayrick in the middle of the thick Brussels carpet in Aloysius Hamilton's elegant coffee room.

"Quite a sight, ain't it?" the corn merchant said. He hefted one of the bags in his big hand, then let it fall with a satisfying jangle. "Twenty thousand pounds in gold. Don't suppose you'll be wanting to count 'em, eh?" He bellowed a laugh, which trailed off when the man beside him did not even furnish an answering smile.

"Are you certain you wouldn't prefer to take a promissory note after all?" Aloysius felt obliged to ask, though he fervently hoped not. Just the logistics of converting the twenty thousand pounds into gold sovereigns and conveying them to his Mayfair mansion had taxed even his considerable organizational skills. And he'd spent all of last night sweating like a spit goose with fear that thieves would make off with the fortune, in spite of the veritable army of Bow Street runners he'd hired as guards. He hated to think that it could now all have been for naught.

Yet the earl didn't seem either pleased or displeased with the proof of Aloysius Hamilton's efforts. He merely stared at the hill of money bags, an attitude of weary disdain on his highbred face. "Let's get on with it, shall we?" he said.

Aloysius led his guest to the end of the room, where a pair of imperial chairs addressed each other across the expanse of an elegant walnut desk. He wondered at the earl's limp, but given the man's morose mood, he thought it best to keep his wonderings to himself. They took their seats, and Aloysius positioned a document adorned with ribbons and seals before the earl.

"Just affix your name to the last page, my lord, directly after mine."

After the briefest hesitation the earl reached for the weighty papers. "If it wouldn't inconvenience you, I should like to read it over one last time."

"Eh? Oh, aye, aye. Of course. Take your time. All the time you need."

A thick silence settled over the room. Aloysius toyed with the jeweled rings and gold seals on his fob, then busied himself with twisting the tightly curled ends of his waxed mustaches. His wife kept nattering at him to shave them off, said they weren't fashionable. But he would almost rather walk into the Bank of England with a bare arse than bare his upper lip. He was never going to be one of the Bow Street set anyway. He was a nabob; whatever small social status he achieved, he had to buy.

Aloysius stole another look at the earl. A gold earring winked in the dark hair that hung ragged and long over the stiff velvet collar of his fashionable tail coat. The man looked like a damned Gypsy, yet somehow he managed to carry it off. Such a thing was bred into one's blood and bones, Aloysius supposed: how to dress, how to behave, how to think. Take this matter of honor. The man might be a scapegrace, but he possessed a strict code of honor that Aloysius, the corn merchant, only dimly understood. The twenty thousand pounds, for instance—
all
of it would go to pay off the gaming vowels of the earl's brother, who had been caught cheating at cards and so had put a pistol to his head.

Honor. Tailor and butcher bills could go unpaid for years, but gaming vowels were debts of honor and had to be settled before all others. His father could die in a drunken stupor, his brothers could turn themselves into opium eaters and whoremongers, but honor dictated that as the heir to the title the young earl must now make good on every shilling of those vowels. As an English gentleman he could do no less.

"I trust you find it all in order," Aloysius said when the earl looked up from his perusal of the document.

The earl said nothing, merely reached for the standish, and Aloysius noticed for the first time the bloodstained bandage wrapped around the knuckles of the man's right hand. "Been engaging in a bout of fisticuffs, eh?"

The fingers of the injured hand curled slightly. "Only with myself."

"You ought to have a care with it. I had a brother who died of a cut that became septic...." Aloysius's voice trailed off. The earl in his arrogance would doubtless have little sympathy for the fate of a poor collier's son.

Aloysius's jowls sunk back into the starched points of his shirt collar as he watched the fine-boned fingers ink the pen. He bit back a smile of satisfaction at the scratching sound of the nub moving across the paper. Until this moment he had been half convinced that when it came right down to it, his mount would balk at the fence.

The earl's hand shook slightly as he replaced the pen in its stand. Slowly he raised his head, and for a moment Aloysius thought those dark eyes glittered with a raw and savage pain. But then he shuttered them with his lids.

Aloysius nodded at the pile of money bags. "That lot all goes to pay off your brother's vowels, does it not?"

"Money easily earned is easily spent," the earl said with a wry twist of his lips.

"And have you considered, then, my other offer—to buy the BRC from you?"

The earl lifted a haughty brow. "You have just acquired my body and soul. Isn't that enough?"

Aloysius had not become one of the richest men in England by being timid. When he got a man down, the man stayed down—even a damned peer of the realm.

He fixed the earl with a hard stare. His eyes were the color of spittle, and he knew how to make them go empty and cold. "Rumor has it you need to come up with at least ten thousand pounds in ten months or your company goes bust and you go to gaol. The way I see it you have little choice, dear boy. You're going to sell it to me either now or later." He flicked a finger at the sheaf of papers that lay between them. "Because if you insist upon using the twenty thousand I have just paid you to buy back your precious honor, then you're going to have to make short work of it, dear boy, to
earn
the remainder of the settlement before July."

The earl leaned forward, and something wild and desperate and dangerous flashed in his eyes. "When you buy yourself a stud,
dear boy,
it is for one thing only. I wager you a thousand pounds the girl is breeding within a month after the wedding."

"Done, by Jove!"

Leaning back, Aloysius hooked a thumb into his fob pocket and barked a laugh. He d bought himself a peer, by God—body and soul. And he'd have the lad's company, too, in the end. Aloysius Hamilton might be a corn merchant, but a man did not become one of the richest men in England by putting all his eggs in one basket. And he had more than a few of those eggs nested in coaching inns the length and breadth of England, coaching inns that would lose a lot of trade should bleedin' railways start crisscrossing the countryside like a chess board. No, as Aloysius saw it, there were only two ways to deal with competition like that: either absorb it or destroy it.

All in all, Aloysius thought, he was pleased with this evening's work, though it had cost him a tidy fifty thousand pounds. Twenty in exchange for a signature on the nuptial settlement, and an additional thirty to be paid over on the day the first boy child made an appearance in this world. In some ways, he hardly cared whether it happened as soon as ten months, thereby costing him his wager and a shot at the railway company. For on that blessed day, he—Aloysius Hamilton, nabob corn merchant and son of a collier— would become grandfather to a title.

It was more of a heaven than a hell.

Or so thought the young bloods who frequented the Jermyn Street house—it was what heaven would be were God a gaming man.

It wasn't much from the outside, with an iron-grilled door that required a password to get through. But inside spread a palatial hall ablaze with chandeliers and scented candles. In the dining room the board groaned beneath such delicacies as roasted swan with chevreuil sauce and larded sweetmeats. Upstairs were mirrored ceilings and satin sheets and women of easy virtue to enjoy them with.

But the gaming room was the pulsating heart of the house. There the dark paneled walls stood bare of ornament and paintings, so as not to distract the players from their game. There tense silence reigned, broken only by the ring of a crystal glass, the click of a snuffbox, the rattle of dice. There the play was very deep and only a little dirty.

And there Lady Margaret Atwood, mistress of it all, floated around the room in a black sarcenet evening dress, a sable tippet, and a choker of twelve diamonds that were each as big as a man's thumbnail and very real.

She would stop to whisper in an ear here, to caress a cheek there, but she always kept a careful eye on the play. She watched to see that the croupiers were fleecing her customers and not herself and that the flashers were busy earning their keep, luring fresh pigeons into her net.

It was hard for her to remember sometimes that she had been born to gentler pursuits. The daughter of an ambitious vicar, she had been married at sixteen to a viscount three times her age. He had been a four-bottle man, had Lord Atwood. Every night after dinner he sat alone at the worm-eaten table in his moldy castle and put away four bottles of claret. One night he broached a fifth and didn't live to see the morning. That was when she had learned that a widow's personal property could be sold to cover her husband's debts.

That was when she became a whore.

Oh, she minced no words about what she was. A woman who sold her body for money was a whore, whether she did it for five shillings or a gaming house on Jermyn Street. She didn't have to sell her body anymore, but when she looked in the mirror, she still saw a whore. It was the eyes. When you did certain things, when certain things were done to you, it left shadows in the eyes that never went away.

Lady Atwood paused to watch the play at a whist table. One of the players was her man, a puff, who bet deeply with the house's money and thus encouraged others to follow suit. The puff was working on a plump young pigeon— Lord Sterns, who was heir to a dukedom with a handsome allowance, a gaming habit, and little skill at the cards. Tonight the lordling looked more the fool than usual, for he was wearing his coat inside out to bring him luck. He was going to need it. He was playing against Nigel Payne, who was very good indeed and merciless with his victims. It was Nigel who had taken poor Stephen Trelawny for twenty thousand pounds and then hounded the man to suicide by accusing him of cheating and demanding that the vowels be settled at once.

Nigel flashed a sly grin as he glanced up at Lady Atwood from beneath the broad-brimmed straw hat he wore to cut down the glare from the chandeliers. At the moment there was only a modest stack of ivory fishes next to the candle dish in his comer, but she knew the pile would grow considerably before dawn lightened the sky. The trouble with Nigel was that he had a tendency to pluck
her
pigeons.

Nigel adjusted his leather cuff protectors. He was about to deal the cards when the door opened and the already quiet room fell still as a church on Monday morning.

The earl of Caerhays entered the room, and it was as if something wild and fierce had been let loose to prowl her house. Lady Atwood felt her heartbeat quicken, a thing that hadn't happened to her in quite some time.

The earl was followed by a strapping blond fellow, carrying a musket in one big hand and a pistol tucked through his belt for good measure, and Lady Atwood feared there was about to be blood spilled on her expensive Axminster carpet. The golden god was followed in turn by men wheeling barrows loaded with dozens of small brown leather bags.

Caerhays stopped before Nigel and blessed him with a languid smile. "Evening, Payne." He picked up one of the leather bags, pulled open the string, and emptied it on the table. Gold sovereigns spilled across the green baize, winking and spinning in the bright light. "Twenty thousand canaries. Would you care to count them?"

Nigel's narrow eyes flickered to the money, and he cleared his throat. "Course not, Caerhays. Trust you. Word of a gentleman and all that."

"Quite. Might I suggest you use some of it to buy yourself a pistol."

Nigel's face turned the color of old suet, and a muscle began to tic beneath his right eye. "Do—do you mean to call me out?"

"Whyever would I want to do that?" Caerhays drawled, with a mocking lift of one dark brow. "On the contrary, it is the matter of your continued good health that concerns me.

It is dangerous to carry such a large sum through the streets of London. Such a target for thieves and footpads, don't you know."

"But what am I... my God. Banks are closed." Nigel's gaze widened as he took in the size of the barrows and the number of bags each contained. He suddenly realized that the big fellow with the barking irons and his cronies all had vanished, leaving him holding the bag. Two hundred bags, to be precise. Two hundred bags of gold, to be even more precise. "Can hardly expect me to—to—I protest this, sir..." But he was speaking to the earl's disappearing back.

The silent room suddenly erupted into chatter and nervous laughter. Lady Atwood gave the gamester a gentle pat on the shoulder. "Darling Nigel, I am certain you'll be wanting to remove yourself from my premises at once. My servants will see you and your golden canaries to the door," she said, with emphasis on the last word, thereby implying that the door was the farthest they would see him to. Once out on the street, Nigel would be on his own.