‘I curse the name. I curse the blood that has already dried in his worm-eaten body.’
‘Lead-lined casket, I’m afraid. Are you always this bloodthirsty?’
‘If anyone tries to hurt you,’ she said, as though he was being thick and he should understand this already, ‘I will kill them.’
And perhaps he shouldn’t, but he felt like swooning when she threatened murder instead of crying all over him in pity.
‘So,’ she said, and let out a long breath. ‘I really, really have to win this game, then.’
He shrugged. Right now, the only important thing was that she’d declared war on a dangerous, spiteful woman and Jude could give her the bargaining chip that might give her a chance.
She was frowning at the key, still turning it. ‘Do you know who your natural father is?’
‘Was,’ he said. ‘I’m fairly certain it was John Hardwicke.’
She stared at him. ‘The poet? The one who was butchered in a cathedral?
That
John Hardwicke?’
‘The very same.’
She stared for another shocked moment, and then she threw back her head and laughed. Her lovely small breasts lifted, her ribs pressed up against her skin. Her muscles flexed in that unapologetic way that would never cease to shock him. Her throat was a long, brown line.
She subsided back down to the mattress, and stroked one hand across his cheek with easy affection. ‘How perfect,’ she said. ‘How very like you, to have such a man for a father.’
‘Yes, well. He could have obliged me by not dying when I was a boy.’
‘Fathers aren’t terribly obliging creatures,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘Though I suppose there’s my uncle, Lord Barton. And the Squire, despite his every other deficiency.’
‘Let’s never mention the Squire again while we’re naked in bed. Ever.’
She punched him on the shoulder – and it hurt. It felt almost like that day down at the lake when he was a boy. The gardener’s fists forcing his heart to pound blood through him, forcing him to be alive.
‘Also, I —’ He frowned.
It’s not difficult
, he told himself crossly.
Don’t be so ridiculous
. He growled in frustration, and buried his face in the pillow. ‘I love you,’ he said, and felt hot blood flush up the back of his neck.
There was nothing for a long, awful moment. And then there were her fingers carding through his hair. And her voice that was so, so careful. So light.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Me, too.’
And then he could let his shoulders relax, just a little.
It felt all wrong to leave that warm bed and pull his clothes back on. Even though Katherine helped him with his fastenings and he stole kisses wherever he could, and just before he slipped back out the window she held him tightly, and he thought she might not let go.
He started to think about obtaining a special marriage licence, as he walked down the street to his waiting carriage. He couldn’t wait three weeks to be hers. He was not being dramatic to think so, merely truthful.
A footman opened the door for him, and he leapt gratefully inside. He was exhausted, he realised. Bone-tired and ready to be in an anonymous hotel in Rome, watching the effect of Mediterranean sunlight on Katherine’s skin. She would enjoy travelling. She would want to visit all sorts of dry, academic places, and he would oblige her and then feed her cheese and wine and olives until she grew fat and happy.
The ride home seemed interminable. When they finally arrived, he sprang out of the carriage with a muttered curse at his driver —
— and a split-second later a part of his brain that predated civilisation told him to run.
Now.
He hit the ground running, and the rest of his brain caught up. This wasn’t his street. This wasn’t even remotely his part of town.
The first cold fingers of fear reached into his gut when his foot slipped on something soft, almost sending him face-first into the cobblestones and God knows what else. Then he turned a corner, and it was so pitch-black he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face.
He felt fingers on his elbow and thrashed wildly, opening and closing his eyes, terrified because he couldn’t tell the difference. The dark was a crushing, suffocating thing. His lungs faltered. Fingers grasped at his hair and the only sound was his sobbing breath as he shook them off. He spun, suddenly unsure which direction the carriage lay, and a lantern opened in his face.
He shaded his eyes against the light and gradually made out the man who carried it. He was given enough time.
‘Lord BenRuin,’ he said, his voice thin. ‘We must stop meeting like this.’ His hands were like moths in the outer circle of the lantern’s light.
‘You’re a difficult man to get to in private.’
‘A shame I can’t offer you brandy,’ he said, fighting for control. ‘Or indeed anywhere to sit.’
‘You and I had a discussion about what would happen if you took advantage of Miss Sutherland. Do you remember it?’
‘Vividly.’
‘Then you understand what I am going to do to you.’
‘My Lord,’ Jude said, in the voice that had brought men more powerful than BenRuin to their knees, ‘if you wanted to touch me so badly, all you had to do was ask.’
‘There is a reason I’m not going to disembowel you right here. You make it almost impossible to tell you what I must tell you. Please shut up, and let me speak.’
Jude motioned for him to continue, and his hand barely shook at all.
‘You . . . I didn’t . . . I understand now why Lydia needed . . . you. The only bastard immoral enough to trespass where none was welcome.’ BenRuin spat the words like bloody nails.
Jude, who read the souls of men, had expected almost anything else.
‘I will not – will never thank you for seducing her. But I know her better now than I did previously.’
‘Well, well, well,’ Jude said, a jeweller inspecting what he had been given.
‘That’s why I won’t disembowel you.’ BenRuin stepped forward, so that his smile was very, very clear. ‘But I told you not to go near Kit, and you stole into my own house to take what you wanted. You know this is the least of what you deserve.’
Unseen hands held Jude fast, from behind, and the second before BenRuin’s fist hit him in the face he thought,
I wanted this, once
.
The lodgings were in a handsome blue-stone building. A respectable woman, who wore the lilac silk of long mourning, showed Kit into a sitting room and carried her card up.
Mr Albert Shrove had done well for himself.
The door had been left open, so she was aware of the muffled discussion taking place at the top of the stairs. When Mr Shrove appeared in the doorway, he bent and unbent Kit’s card between his fingers. He didn’t wear gloves. She thought, from nowhere, that his long, fast fingers would be an asset to a man who added columns of numbers for a living.
‘I wasn’t sure you would see me,’ she said, standing.
He bowed and said, with impeccable manners and a broad Northern accent, ‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Sutherland. Meg can write to me of nothing else since the Prime Minister’s ball. Neither can the papers, apparently. You’ve captured the nation’s imagination.’
‘If a girl from the country can come to town and claim a duke, then anyone may – that’s what they’re selling, isn’t it?’ She smiled at him and sat. ‘Please close the door, Mr Shrove. Your landlady said we’d have some privacy down here.’
She didn’t know if it was her words or her unpolished accent that calmed him a little, but he pressed her card down flat on the table by the door. He sat opposite her.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is more than a little awkward – you not quite the Duke of Darlington, me not quite the duchess of the same title. Our suits entirely opposed to one another.’
He made a helpless gesture with those long, jointed fingers, and shook the hair from his eyes.
‘I don’t know what Lady Marmotte has promised you, but you’re not going to win the title. You are not a duke, Mr Shrove. I think you know that.’
He stood – his long limbs unwrapping with startling speed – and hunched over the mantlepiece. One of those large hands slapped against it, and he looked startled at the loud sound it made in the quiet room.
‘I saw him for the first time last week,’ he said, without turning around. ‘He was so . . . I couldn’t even —’
‘There’s a reason it’s passed on to one’s children,’ she said, not without pity. ‘He’s had power conferred on him his whole life long. It’s a quality we don’t have, Mr Shrove. It’s something separate to money and privilege, though those things breed it. Lady Marmotte has the Committee in her pocket – she forces them to prefer you to him. But can you truly imagine that they’ll listen to you in Parliament when you tell them – how did he phrase it? – that they would do as well to sow their fields with salt and bleed the blood of their firstborn sons into the parched earth if they refused to understand the reasons riots have been breaking out all over the country?’
‘I am more sensible than he,’ Mr Shrove said. He walked over to the window, half facing her, and smoothed down the velvet drapes. ‘I would make better decisions.’
‘Britain doesn’t need another sensible man, Mr Shrove. It needs a brilliant one. Lady Marmotte is thinking of her pride, not her country.’
‘My claim is . . . I have the right to . . . Oh, God, Miss Sutherland, it’s so bollocksed up I can’t even see straight any more. I just want to sit across the table from Meg and drink a cup of tea. She looked so unhappy when she told me to go to London if that’s what I thought was right.’ He sank down into his chair, head in hands, his shoulders jutting up through his jacket.
‘I presume Meg’s a girl you’d quite like to marry.’
‘I have so much more in common with the footmen at those parties. I have to stop myself from begging them to let me come downstairs with them, and sit with the folk I could talk with and not have my tongue grow ungracious and fat in my mouth. I’m not an ungracious man, Miss Sutherland.’
She understood him so well. Had she not imposed on Soames for the same reasons? Shrove’s sweetheart, she suspected, worked below stairs.
Her sweetheart did not.
‘I’ve dreamed of wealth, same as any man. I thought I wanted it. It makes me . . . It’s so . . . Money and figures are not the same thing, and I’m ashamed to say it’s taken me this long to realise it. Now that it’s gone from me, I can feel the good, solid virtue in working for the small amount that’s mine. I think of Lord Edgecombe’s patience with me – his gruff commendations – and I wish I’d been just a little more patient myself.’
She resisted calling him an idiot. ‘Why on earth are you still in town? Lady Marmotte cannot keep you here against your will. You know that, I hope.’
He scrubbed his face, and gave a hollow laugh. ‘I told her weeks ago that I’d changed my mind. I thought London life was terrific – just the thing for a man moving up in the world. That was before the first party she took me to, when I realised the London I’d been enjoying so thoroughly was the London I could have afforded for myself in five or ten years. The
ton
was – well . . . I told her I didn’t want to be duke of anything. She was everything kind, and then she presented me with a bill for my lodgings and keep these weeks past.’
‘More than you can pay, I presume.’
‘It seems such a small sum, compared to the fortune I’ll come into if I win my claim, but I cannot pay it. My only choice is to continue on this path.’
‘Or you could have approached Darlington and asked him for the amount. He would pay it to you in a breath, stupid boy.’ Really, there was only so much idiocy one could take, and remain silent.
He pulled at his neat cravat and leaned his head, hard, against the seatback, so that his Adam’s apple ran as sharp as a spearhead under his skin. ‘I was audacious enough to claim the title, Miss Sutherland, but I can’t find it in me to approach the man. I tried, once or twice, and found I couldn’t move.’
Not so stupid, then.
‘Well you needn’t approach him. I’m here, aren’t I?’
His head snapped down to her, and for the first time his expression softened – became almost benevolent with hope.
‘What’s the figure?’ she asked.
He produced a folded paper from his pocket, filled with neat columns, and it made her smile. She glanced at the final figure. It was less than she’d owed the Squire – and it seemed a small amount to pay this man for what she wanted from him.
‘I’ll have it paid within the week,’ she said, tucking it into her pocket.
‘That’s . . . it? You pay the money, I renounce my claim and return to Leeds?’
‘It’s simple, isn’t it, Mr Shrove?’
‘It’s . . . a lot to give up.’
His face showed his struggle plainly. He hadn’t the constitution to fight for or keep a dukedom, but he was human enough to regret the future he wouldn’t have.
‘You’re still his heir. Go back to Leeds, accustom yourself to the idea of great wealth, and perhaps if you’re fortunate, he’ll die in five or so years leaving no offspring.’
Mr Shrove wouldn’t be so fortunate, of course. Kit would go to war with the gods, if she had to.
At eleven o’clock on the morning of Lady Marmotte’s card party, the
beau monde
began to gather in her Knightsbridge house. Her legendary annual party was normally small and private, fortunes made and lost behind closed doors. Her salon normally contained ten tables, each with two chairs, for the twenty players she invited every year. No more, no less.
Today, a single table sat at the centre of the room.
Today, only two people would be playing, and Lady Marmotte had invited the whole world to watch.
Sir Winston Feldon stood, large and uncertain, by the door. He almost hadn’t come. This morning, in his cold room, after his valet had left, he had felt . . . old. Being so close to so many of the bright stars of this age unnerved him, and the crowds of young people, laughing and chattering and striding across the room to greet one another. Their eyes glanced over him, as though they didn’t even see him.
‘If she wins today she’ll be a duchess.’
‘I heard her grandfather sent her to France for an education, but the French court sent her back again.’
‘I heard she was raised by pigs.’
‘I don’t care about any of that.
Who is her seamstress?’
Sir Winston’s eyes lit on Kit Sutherland, his greatest failure.
She was talking, rapid and intense, with Lord and Lady BenRuin. She wore a coat that called to mind the Hussars, gold braiding crossing her chest and falling from her shoulders. Her hair was pulled high onto her head in one plain knot. The coat flared from her waist, and every time she moved he could see those damn breeches that made him so hot with helpless rage. She should not be wearing them. But she’d engaged herself to the Duke in that public way, and put herself outside Sir Winston’s reach.
As if the world had spat him out and gone spinning on past him.
Lady Marmotte, magnificent in black, went to stand by the single table in the room and welcomed her guests. She asked the Prime Minister to provide the deck, then invited Kit to sit opposite her and begin the game.
The look in her eye made Sir Winston feel cold. She knew. She knew what he knew. That Kit was outmatched, outclassed, entirely out of her depth. And yet these people had seen her challenge Lady Marmotte – they had seen her take a duke’s future into her grubby, labourer’s hands.
Lady Marmotte wanted them to see Kit’s humiliation, as well.
Kit swept Lady Marmotte a deep, sarcastic bow and sat at the table across from her. Kit won the elder hand; Lady Marmotte dealt the cards and forty thousand pounds was laid out on the table.
For almost five years Kit had been in debt to Sir Winston. That drawn-out sum had been the only successful method he’d found for having some control over her. That amount, which had been the most important detail of her daily life, as Sir Winston had been well aware, was less than seven thousand pounds.
‘Miss Sutherland!’ one of the Barton boy’s friends called out. ‘Would you say a pig is a good present to give to a girl?’
Kit raised a brow. ‘Dear boy, if you’re going to inflict your company on her as well, my answer is a decided no.’
Used to keeping her in her place, Sir Winston opened his mouth to reprimand her. Lord Barton’s son and his friend burst into delighted laughter. Her witticism was repeated down the room, and laughter broke out afresh. He closed his mouth again.
She won the first game: one hundred and one to Lady Marmotte’s ninety-six.
She opened more strongly on the second game. She was ahead by thirty points at the end of the first hand, and won the elder hand for the second. Against all the odds she was doing well – until the Duke of Darlington arrived. He slipped in quietly; Sir Winston didn’t notice him at all until Kit turned, and her gaze fixed without error on him.
She cried out, all her supernatural poise gone. It was a dirty, low sound, that cry, and Sir Winston wished again he had not come. He wasn’t sure he could watch her humiliation all the way to its brutal end.
She went to the Duke, her coat flapping about her. The crowd of spectators followed her progress, and all saw what she had seen: the Duke, with the bloom of bruises across his cheek.
Kit’s voice was a horrified whisper, but it carried in the quiet room.
No
, she kept saying, as she touched a duke all over, in public.
No, no, no
. ‘Who did this?’
The Duke shook his head and reached out for her. ‘No, love,’ he murmured, low; there was still no other sound in the room. He ran one finger down her nose and said, ‘It is not the same.’
Abe had needed to chastise the stupid girl. Sir Winston remembered his friend’s frustration, his anguish. Remembered him saying, ‘She’s like a peasant child – my own daughter! My own flesh and blood. There’s not even a glimmer of sense in her, but she’s stubborn. It’s almost frightening, Win. She’s like something inhuman, and she wants to take her sister with her into it. She just won’t stop!’
She was Abe’s flesh and blood. It had been his place – his right – to stop her.
But watching a duke’s finger stroke the broken line of her nose, Sir Winston grew uncomfortable. He didn’t think badly of Abe. Couldn’t. But he knew there was nothing on this earth Violet could do that would make him take a fist to her.
‘We are both grown men,’ the Duke said. ‘He told me exactly what the consequences would be. I did it anyway.’
‘Darlington,’ said Lord Liverpool. ‘You are, as ever, a lovely distraction, but might we borrow your bride-to-be and return her to her game? Rather a lot depends on the outcome, as you may remember.’
‘Of course,’ the Duke said courteously, and Kit stepped in and kissed him on the cheek.
It was quick – careful – but Sir Winston found himself looking away. There was something painfully intimate in the way the Duke’s face changed. Like expecting to see a man in full regalia and surprising him in a worn garden coat, potting dahlias.
Kit strode back to the table and the Duke went to stand behind her chair; Tom and Crispin Scott came up to flank him.
Kit picked her cards back up and shuffled them. Reshuffled them. She glanced uneasily around at the Duke, again and again, as though looking for reassurance. After she played the wrong suit for the second time, the Duke squeezed her shoulder and kept his hand there, but she simply couldn’t seem to draw that arrogant calm back around her.
Damn him, but the Duke shouldn’t have come! Didn’t he realise what it would mean if – when – she lost?
And she began to lose. Spectacularly.
It became clear that Lady Marmotte had an undeclared four of aces, and Kit didn’t seem to understand the game well enough to even show her points properly. She lost sixty thousand, because she had called a quart when she had none, but it was not discovered till halfway through the hand. Lady Marmotte claimed her quatorze, a quint and six points.
The Duke leaned down and spoke calmly to Kit.
‘No, it’s . . . ‘ she said. ‘I know. I know.’
She used to play cards when she was a child, Sir Winston remembered. It had kept Abe’s hope alive long after he should have given up on her, because she seemed to have a head for it. But a child was a different thing to a woman grown, and Sir Winston couldn’t remember seeing her play in the last decade at all.
Did she even understand all the rules of this game?
Lord Liverpool stopped them once when Kit dealt nine cards into the stock. Lord Liverpool and the Duke both spoke to her; she wiped the back of her hand compulsively across her forehead and told them she understood.
Sir Winston watched her clumsy façade disintegrate, so that the coarse girl from the country with no formal education was more and more obvious for anyone to see. He had known it would happen – of everyone here, he had known. He found himself wishing she could have kept up her pretence just a little bit longer.
She lost the next hand and with a sick lurch of recognition he knew what he was feeling. He had felt it sitting by Abe’s side, watching him play so deep that it ceased to feel real.
When Sir Winston went for the second time to use the washroom, he lingered in the room where footmen served cups of tea. He could simply go home. He suspected no one would notice his absence. But he felt – he felt that old loyalty to the man who had accepted his friendship, and given friendship in return. The only person in Sir Winston’s life who had chosen him.
When Kit had come to offer him the mortgage of the Manor against a loan, it had shamed Sir Winston to deal with her behind Abe’s back. He hadn’t looked too closely, then, at the reasons he’d agreed to her offer, and let her sign her father’s name. He suspected he had understood that Abe would have lost the entire sum, and needed his daughter to hold some funds he couldn’t touch. It was because Kit didn’t gamble that Sir Winston had trusted her.
He stayed for a cup of tea, but a noisy group came in and began laughing about the Pigpen Duchess, and Sir Winston found he preferred to watch Kit lose than hear her betters laugh at her.
He was shocked to find the room so crowded he almost couldn’t enter it. He had to squeeze by a noisy crowd of young men, who were placing bets with – it looked like Tom and Crispin Scott were keeping the books, of all the ridiculous . . . He had to ask a brown-haired boy twice, before he discovered that Kit had won one game since he’d left.
He couldn’t get to the side of the room where Lord and Lady BenRuin stood without pushing right past the table and making a spectacle of himself, so he stood in an ignominious corner where every time he moved he almost tripped over a man kneeling with a sketching board. The man was copying the scene in quick, bold lines, flipping the page to begin afresh every couple of minutes. He was recording every play on the corner of the page.
As the afternoon wore on, the Duke’s solicitor consulted with Lady Marmotte’s solicitor as to the value of Redbrook, then the Surrey hunting lodge and Caergard, the Welsh estate that had been in the Duke’s family for nine generations. Kit lost the deeds to every one, and when they were gone she lost a cotton mill, two factories – all goods and monies therefrom inclusive – and a row of houses newly built in Cheapside.
By six o’clock Kit had lost three hundred and forty thousand pounds.
Jude rubbed his thumb up into Katherine’s hair. Gentle and constant. She was so exhausted, he could feel her trembling with it. She had been playing for almost seven hours now. But she would not fall apart, not Katherine.
‘The crowd’s changed,’ Crispin said, coming to stand close beside him. ‘Every player in your game is here, or represented.’
Jude looked up, surprised. Crispin was right. It wasn’t only the fast set who had arrived as day turned to night: almost every faction in the Upper House was represented – and the Lower as well. He nodded to Castlereagh across the room, and received a spare, cautious nod in return.
Crispin held out a blue leather-bound book. ‘Tom has another two, already full. No one’s betting on the game any more. There are a couple of the usual wagers – whether Miss Sutherland is increasing, that sort of thing. But mostly it’s about the Darlington title and the Corn Laws.’
Jude kept his touch light on Katherine’s neck, even when he saw over her shoulder what cards she held – no chance she would win this hand, either.
He looked over at the accountant from Leeds, and took careful note of who courted the boy’s attention. Tall, freckled, the accountant looked as though a shot had been fired direct before his face – shocked, giddy, faint. Jude wondered how often he had vomited into his chamber pot, as he considered the wealth and consequence that would soon be his.
‘Poor boy,’ he said, and laughed with genuine sympathy. ‘Katherine and I have stripped everything from the title but what was nailed fast down. He’ll be made duke and pauper in the same instant.’
He ignored the worry on Crispin’s open face. ‘I take it more than one man has declared himself with his wagers tonight?’
Crispin nodded and held up the book. ‘The allegiances of almost every man in this room are inked in here.’
‘Good boy,’ Jude said, his voice an affectionate caress. ‘Keep them safe, won’t you?’
Crispin smiled and left to speak quickly in Tom’s ear. Jude banished him from his mind – banished everything but Katherine and the hopeless task they had, between them, set her.
The last hand of the game played out and she lost Jude’s coal mines, his stable and all of his carriages.
Lady Marmotte gathered the cards together and tapped them into a neat pack. She considered Katherine across the table. ‘If I had your best interests at heart, Miss Sutherland, I would advise you to quit the game. You play like a child just learning the rules – and while I grant that you’ve grasped some tactics throughout the day, that is not enough. Not nearly enough. You have beggared Darlington so thoroughly that I could turn my back on him this instant and all my best dreams for him would still come true. No one can consider him fit, after this display. You’ve ruined him.’
‘Not if I win.’
‘You have nothing left to pit against me. You have no skill. Your friends should tell you to walk away.’
Lady Marmotte looked up at Jude, and he saw for the first time, properly, the signs of exhaustion around her eyes and in her listless fingers, still tapping the cards against the table.
‘There would be no sense in my walking away now,’ said Katherine. ‘I’ve lost everything already. Everything but this.’
She pulled the ribbon from her neck, and the key made a dull noise when it hit the table.
Lady Marmotte couldn’t know for certain what the key unlocked. But it was clear on her face – not triumph exactly; the possibility of triumph. As if she had been waiting all day for just this moment.
She looked up at him, and he remembered the endless, sickening void when she’d made noisy sounds of pleasure into his ear.
He couldn’t hold her gaze.
‘I accept,’ she said. She shuffled the cards, and offered them to Katherine, who cut and dealt.
Castlereagh spoke quietly in Liverpool’s ear. Before the players could pick up their cards Liverpool said, ‘Ladies, you have my apologies, but my advice is urgently needed on a diplomatic matter. We will break for tea, and resume the game in forty minutes.’