Jane Feather - [V Series] (45 page)

When Sebastian arrived, he was all smiling good humor, greeting friends and acquaintances, obliging his hostess by dancing with several unfortunate ladies who were without partners, imbibing liberally of champagne, and generally behaving like any other young blood.

To his relief and Harriet’s not-so-secret chagrin, Harriet had not received an invitation to the ball. It was her
first Season and she was too young and unknown to move invariably in the first circles. Once Sebastian declared his suit and her engagement to the Marquis of Carrington’s brother-in-law was known, that would change, as Letitia told her, but this was small comfort to Harriet, spending the evening in dutiful attendance upon her mama.

It was after midnight when Sebastian and Gracemere met in the card room. Judith was watching for the moment when they both disappeared from the dance floor. It had been agreed that she wouldn’t make her own appearance at the table until after they’d been playing for a while, by which time Sebastian would have established a winning pattern and they assumed that Gracemere would be ready to resort to marked cards.

For nearly an hour she continued to dance, to smile, to talk. She ate supper, sipped champagne, and forced herself not to think of what was happening in the card room. If it was going according to plan, Bernard Melville would by now be wondering what was happening to him.

At one o’clock she made her way to the gaming room. Immediately it was clear that something unusual was happening. Although there were people playing at the hazard, faro, macao, and basset tables, there was a distracted air in the room. Eyes were flickering to a small table in an alcove, where two men played piquet.

Judith crossed the room. “I’ve come to keep my promise, my lord,” she said gaily.

Gracemere looked up from his cards and she recognized the look in his eye. It was the haunted feverishness of a man in captivity to the cards. “Your brother’s luck has turned, it would seem,” he said, clearing his throat.

Judith saw the pile of rouleaux at her brother’s elbow.
The earl was not yet resorting to vowels, then. She took up her place, casually, behind the earl’s chair.

Gracemere was confusedly aware that the man he was playing with was not the man he thought he knew. Davenport’s face was utterly impassive, he was silent most of the time, and when he spoke it was with staccato precision. The only part of his body he seemed to move were his long white hands on the cards.

Initially, the earl put his losses down to an uneven fall of the cards. When first he thought there must be more to it than that, he dismissed the idea. He’d played often enough with Sebastian Davenport to know what quality of player he was. True, occasionally he had won, sometimes puzzlingly, but even poor gamesters had occasional successes. As Gracemere’s losses mounted, the ridiculousness of it all struck him powerfully. He increased the stakes, knowing that everything would go back to normal in a minute—it always did. All he needed was to win one game when the stakes were really high, and he would recoup his losses in one fell swoop. With that knowledge in mind, he played his first marked card. His sleight-of-hand was so expert that Judith missed it the first time and he won heavily.

Sebastian was unmoved, merely pushing across a substantial pile of rouleaux. Judith gave an excited little cry, saying in an exaggerated whisper, “Oh, well done, sir.”

Gracemere didn’t seem to hear her. He increased the stakes yet again. By now people were drifting toward the table, attracted by the tension. It was warm and Judith opened her fan.

Gracemere began to have a dreadful sense of topsyturvy familiarity. This scene had happened before but there was an essential difference. He was not winning. He played with a dogged concentration, writing vowels
now much as his adversary had done the previous evening. He played his marked cards, and yet he still didn’t win. At one point, he looked wildly across the small table at his opponent as he played a heart that would spoil a repique. But Davenport seemed prepared and played his own ten, keeping his point advantage. How could it be happening? There was no explanation, except that his adversary had changed from a conceited greenhorn to a card player of awesome skill. And not just skill—it would take a magician to withstand the earl’s special cards.

He glanced up at the woman, gently fanning herself at his shoulder. She smiled reassuringly at him, as if she didn’t understand what was happening to him … as if she simply thought her brother was having a run of good luck for once.

He was a gamester. He knew he needed only one win. If he staked everything he had left, then he could recoup everything and bring his opponent to the ground.

George Devereux had at the last wagered the family estates in Yorkshire. Bernard Melville drew another sheet of paper and wrote his stake, the estate he had won from George Devereux, pushing it across the table to his adversary. Sebastian glanced at it, then swept his own winnings, rouleaux and vowels, together with his own IOU to match his opponent’s extraordinary stake, into a pile at the side of the table. He put his hand in his pocket and deliberately drew out an elaborately carved signet ring. This last game he played for his father. His eyes flicked upward to his sister, who nodded infinitesimally in acknowledgment, before he slipped the ring onto his finger, shook back the ruffles on his shirt-sleeves, and broke a new pack of cards, beginning to deal.

Agnes Barret stared at the ring on Sebastian Davenport’s finger. Her world seemed to turn on its axis, a slow roll into a nightmare of disbelief. She wanted to scream
some kind of a warning to Bernard, so powerful was her sense of the danger embodied in that ring, but no sound would emerge from her throat. Her eyes were riveted on it: the Devereux family ring. She tore her eyes from Sebastian’s long slender fingers and gazed at his sister. For a second Judith’s golden brown eyes met Agnes’s gaze, and the shock of her own recognition stunned Agnes with its primitive, vital force. And she wondered with a horrified desperation why she hadn’t known it before … why some instinctive maternal essence had failed to recognize the children she hadn’t seen since their babyhood.

Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington, stood in the open doorway of the card room. The buzz of the attentive crowd around the players was so low as to be almost subliminal. He could see across the throng. He could see his wife, the steady, purposeful movement of her fan. He knew what she was doing. She and her brother were defrauding the Earl of Gracemere under the eyes of fashionable London. He couldn’t imagine why, he knew only that he could do nothing about it. Only by exposing them could he stop it.

Distantly, in abject cowardice, he wished his evening had not ended when it had, or that he had gone straight home from Horseguard’s Parade instead of following temptation and coming to find his wife. Wretchedly he wished he could have been spared this knowledge, because it was a knowledge he didn’t know what to do with. It was a knowledge that destroyed love … that made impossible any kind of trust and confidence on which love and marriage could be based.

The moment when the Devereux estate passed back into the hands of its rightful heir, Agnes Barret understood everything. Bernard Melville had been beaten at his own game by the children of the man he had destroyed twenty years earlier. She didn’t know how they’d
done it, but she knew both brother and sister were partners. The nincompoops, the greenhorns, the simpletons, had been working toward this moment from the day they’d set foot in London.

A sick, impotent rage filled her throat as she saw Bernard’s blank incomprehension as he lost the final hand. Agnes’s eyes rose again to the face of her daughter standing behind him. Judith’s gaze met hers—met and read the wild fury, the depths of a vindictive rage. And Judith’s eyes carried a cold triumph that met and matched that vindictive rage. Agnes dropped her wineglass. It fell from suddenly nerveless fingers to smash on the parquet at her feet, splattering ruby red drops.

The low buzz increased in volume. Desperately Gracemere struggled to control his disordered thoughts. There was one chance to salvage everything. Twenty years ago he had placed a marked card in the hand of his opponent. And George Devereux had been dishonored and destroyed. If he could do the same now, at this moment publicly expose his adversary, he would recoup his losses. A cheat would not be permitted to keep his dishonorable winnings.

Hope soared and his confusion died as his thoughts became icily clear. “Well played, Davenport,” he said into the tense hush. Lightly he shook down his sleeve, palming a card.

Judith’s fan snapped shut.

“You won’t mind if I take a look at—”

Before he could finish the sentence, before his hand could reach to caress his opponent’s cards on the table—to remove and substitute—Sebastian Davenport suddenly spoke, and the words sent a wave of nausea through the earl, bile filling his mouth.

“Permit me,” George Devereux’s son said, grasping his adversary’s stretched wrist. “Permit me, my lord.”

It was at this moment that Marcus moved. He pushed through the crowd, reaching his wife’s side. He said nothing, but he grasped her elbow and the knuckles of his other hand punched into the small of her back, compelling her forward, away from the table.

She hadn’t known he was there, and when she looked up at him, at the rigid set of his jaw, the fine line of his mouth, the black, adamantine eyes, she knew that he had seen it all. In that moment she fully understood what she was about to lose.

Marcus saw the dazed look in her eyes … the look of someone who has been inhabiting another world, a world of acute, single-minded concentration. He continued to compel her toward the door, oblivious of the scene still at the table.

“No …” Judith said, her voice thick. “Please, wait, just one minute.… It must be completed.”

The intensity in the low voice caught him off balance, and he stopped. Sebastian’s voice was cold and steady in the now totally hushed room.

“May I see the card in your hand, my lord.”

Sebastian’s long fingers were bloodless as they gripped Gracemere’s wrist, forcing his hand over to reveal the card lying snug in the palm.

Marcus turned his head slowly, although he maintained his hold on Judith. He watched in amazement as his brother-in-law slid the card from the earl’s now-slack grasp. He heard his brother-in-law say, “Such an interesting pip on the corner, Gracemere. I don’t think I’ve seen its like before. Harry, do you care to look at this card?”

Judith sighed, her entire body seeming to lose its rigidity as Harry Middleton took the card from his friend. Marcus wondered if he would ever understand anything again. And then with cold ferocity he decided
that he would understand this if he had to put his wife on the rack to do so.

“March!” he spat out, and the pressure of his knuckles in the small of her back increased.

Judith made no further protest. She had now to face the one thing she’d feared more than anything.

They left Devonshire House without so much as a polite farewell and journeyed home in a silence weighted with dread. When the chaise drew up, Marcus sprang to the pavement, lifted Judith down before she had a chance to put a foot on the step, and swung her in front of him, propelling her up the steps and into the hall with his knuckles still pressed deeply into her back so she began to imagine she would always bear their imprint.

Inside, she glanced bleakly up at him. “Book room?”

“Just so.” But he still didn’t allow her to make unhindered progress and drove her ahead of him down the passage.

He pushed her into the room and flung the door shut with similar roughness. Judith shivered, afraid not so much of what he would do to her but of what she had done to him. He let her go as the door slammed and went to the fireplace, leaning his shoulders against the mantelshelf, his expression black as he stared at her standing silently in front of him.

“You are now going to tell me the truth,” he said flatly. “It’s possible you have never told the whole truth in your life before, but now you are going to do so. Everything. You will dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t,’ because, so help me, if you leave anything out—if you obfuscate in any way whatsoever—I will not answer for the consequences. Now, begin.”

It was the only chance to salvage anything out of the ruins. But it was a desperate chance at best. Judith took a
deep breath and began at the beginning—twenty years earlier.

Marcus listened, unmoving, unspeaking, until she fell silent and the room seemed to close around them, the weight of her words a leaden pall to smother trust.

“I now understand why your brother was so anxious to make peace between us,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully, articulating every word as if formulating the thought as he spoke. “Estranged from your husband, you wouldn’t be much use to him, would you?”

“No,” Judith agreed bleakly. What defense was there?

“So you were both looking for the perfect gull … that is the right word, isn’t it? The perfect gull who would facilitate your long-planned vengeance.”

Judith shook her head. “No, that’s not true. I can see why you would think that, but it’s not true. I didn’t plot to marry you. Sebastian told the truth.”

Marcus raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Deny if you can that I have been very useful to you.”

“I can’t deny that,” she said miserably. “Any more than I can’t fail to understand your anger and hurt. I ask only that you believe there was no deliberate intention to use you.”

“But you didn’t feel able to confide in me,” he stated. “Even after matters were going smoothly between us. What have I done in these last weeks, Judith, that would deny me your trust?”

She shook her head again. “Nothing … nothing … but if I’d told you what we intended to do you would have prevented me, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said savagely. “I would have locked you up and thrown away the key if it was the only way to prevent my wife from disgracing my honor in such despicable fashion.”

Judith flushed and for the first time a note of vibrancy returned to her voice. “Gracemere got what he deserved. He’s been robbing Sebastian blind for weeks now. Just as he defrauded our father … defrauded him and then accused
him
of cheating. Would you be so poor-spirited as to allow a man who did that to
your
father to go scot free? Can’t you understand the need for vengeance, for justice, Marcus? The driving power that closes one’s mind to all else but the need to avenge … to take back what has been stolen?”