Judith Ivory (19 page)

Emma rotated her chair to face him, a chair that rocked and turned on pivots. She rested back, her wrists curving over the edge of padded armrests, and stretched her feet toward the fire. She envied him his full, reclining warmth, yet remained upright, necessarily distant.

“So tell me,” he said from his pile of pillows, “how are we going to get my statue back? I can’t tell you how thrilled I am with the idea of orchestrating its return without my uncle’s usual bad faith and grumbling.”

“Oh, your uncle’s bad faith will be a very necessary part of it. We’ll count on it, in fact.”

He raised his brow. “All right. What else?” He propped another pillow under his shoulder, one under his neck, then settled back to drink his brandy, while facing her. A long man in a loose jersey. He was wearing leather slippers, not boots. Soft ones that moved with his feet.

She asked, “Is he clever, this uncle?”

“As clever as I am.”

She pulled a face. “He’s bloody brilliant then.”

Stuart laughed, startled, but didn’t deny it.

She gave him the general outline. “I think we have to run a little Weasel Ranch on him.”

“Weasel Ranch,” he repeated, smiling. Intrigued. Pleased.

“Something for nothing. A ‘Weasel Ranch’ because: you tell them, essentially, that you’ll feed rats to weasels, skin the weasels, then feed their carcasses to the rats, thereby getting the weasel skins for free. It’s the sort of cleverness that appeals to smart fellows. It’s the damnedest thing, but it’s the
smart
dishonest ones who are the easiest to take. You’d think it would be the other way around, but the stupid ones never catch on fast enough.”

Which left a pregnant hole in the conversation. Since they had just discussed how clever Stuart was.

“You wouldn’t swindle me, would you?” he asked.

Yes, he was fairly quick. “Oh, no,” she promised. Some of the old patter ran through her mind, all the things you told someone to reassure them, but Stuart really
was
too smart for that, so she told him, “You have too much on me. I’d end up in prison.”

He made a small lift of his head, a nod of thoughtful, contemplative agreement.

Dear Heaven, did she ever wish she were dealing with a man just a tiny bit stupider or less observant. Or more plain-spoken.

He kept his own counsel, staring at her, his face blank but for his brow that drew down slightly, his large, sepia-black eyes leveled on her.

“Tell me more about the statue,” she said. “How big is it? What does it look like?”

“Ah. It’s about this tall.” He leveled one hand over the brandy glass, indicated a height of about ten inches. “And it’s green.”

She waited for more specifics.

But instead, he asked conversationally, “How many confidence games have you run?”

“Run? Dozens, I suppose, but only the small ones. I participated in bigger ones—every week something new. Though a long time ago, you must remember.”

“What kinds of swindles?” He added wryly, “Besides cooking the books.”

“I never did that before.” She looked down at her fingers at the end of one chair arm, wondering if he believed her. “Though I used to forge signatures. That’s what gave me the idea.” No, less worry about his believing her and more about being as vague as possible, since she was confessing to a member of the House of Lords. “I kept real books for a bishop once.”

Emma smiled, remembering suddenly, “There were ruses that were fun, though, funny. Most weren’t illegal, or not precisely. There was one”—she laughed—“where we’d put an ad in the paper for an elixir that cost eleven shillings by post. We called it ‘Man Medicine for the male of the house.’ The ad promised the medicine would give the man who took it ‘a return to the gusto and satisfaction, the pulse and throb of physical pleasure, the keen sense of man sensation.’” She laughed again, a little embarrassed to remember the whole spiel so well. “It was a laxative.

“Or Zach would stand up on a corner near Piccadilly and start in. He had a big, deep voice. He’d call out, ‘Here, my friends, is medicine for men. I do not know how it works. I only know I was blind, and now I see. It’s like Jesus. I believe. I took it and got well; others took it and got well. All I can tell you is, thanks to this’—he’d hold up the bottle and pat it—‘I am a man again.’”

She glanced down at the man on the cushions, the English polo player who could stretch himself out like a sultan. She was momentarily dazed to find his attention rapt upon her, no longer blank. He’d even smiled a bit over her man medicine story. Buoyed somehow, she said, “That one truly used to make me hoot”—she laughed, shaking her head—“because he so needed something of that nature himself that, if it had worked, he would have drunk it by the gallon.” She stopped, frowned.

Stuart, from his pile of cushions, watched Emma’s expression change, her mirth deteriorate into self-criticism. She bit her lip again, glanced off, then sighed. “I’m sorry. How uncouth of me. I can’t seem to stop talking about that.” Her wide eyes settled on him. “Honestly. I never thought about it as much when he was alive. We got on. We did all right. It’s just since—” She broke off.

He finished for her. “It’s just, since this morning, neither one of us can quite get that subject out of our minds.”

Emma. Funny, self-sufficient Emma. Had it only been
twelve hours ago that she’d sat, tied to a chair not unlike the one she inhabited now, letting him kiss her passionately. Talking to her at present—or this morning, come to think of it—one would never guess, never imagine she’d allow him to kiss her, not like that, not even once, let alone all the rest.

Once. Oh, no. He wanted more; he wasn’t finished.

There was a tap at the door, and two white-gloved footmen entered to gather the remains of dinner onto silver trays. At the doorway, balancing a tray, one asked, “Will there be anything else, sir?” The man had to ask again, before Stuart heard the question.

He blinked at him. “No, Miller. Thank you. Good night.”

The door clicked shut softly, just the crackle of the fire. While Emma Hotchkiss sat in her chair like a queen on a throne. Strange little woman.

What a lonely, frightening childhood.
It had been, though he had never thought of it in those terms. He’d thought how inadequate he’d been at six to cope with what was asked of him. How brattish he’d been, the bane—the worry—of everyone within knowledge of what his existence entailed. A sham. A disappointment. How far short he fell of being the son his father wanted or of being the son his mother thought he was.

Emma’s prince. There was a laugh. When his life had been so far from that. The little prince of Hell. Grown up now. Lying at her feet, trying not to let her see he was somewhat less interested in statues, more interested in looking up her skirt to where her ankles showed between her hem and slippers. Her legs were short, but quite shapely—and he had a rather good angle.

To his dismay, a moment later, she cleared her throat, shifted, and drew her legs up under her onto the chair. She pulled her skirts over herself, leaning to one side on the armrest. “So your statue is small and green?”

“I think so.”

“You
think
so. You don’t know what it looks like?”

“I’ve seen it a hundred times. A thousand.” He laughed. “All before I was six.”

She pursed her small mouth. “With familiarity like that, how in heaven’s name are we to know if he even gives us the right one?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.” He gave her a raise of his eyebrow to shut off any further complaint. “I have the provenance.” He snorted. “He has the art, though he refuses to admit it, the idiot. It isn’t worth as much, though, without its bills of receipt that prove its line of authenticity. From what I remember and the descriptions in the old bills of sale, I can piece together a fairly good description for you. It’s a religious icon. Byzantine. Very rare, very valuable. Its provenance goes back almost a hundred and eighty years, but the statue is much, much older—that was when it was discovered. I have the academic papers on its discovery as well. As I recall, it’s a little chimera sort of character. A kind of dragon-goddess, dancing.” He paused, then asked, “So how do we do it?”

Emma chewed her cheek, then seemed to finalize whatever she’d been considering. “We set me up as an art expert, I think, who works for an insurance company, one who runs a little humbug on the side. I’ve done that one before, though we always sent the fellow for money. I think we can send him for the statue though, if we work it right.

“Essentially, we get you and your uncle involved in making money with me, then lead him into distrusting your end. While he is busy worrying how he and I are to hoodwink you, he won’t notice I am hoodwinking him.” She frowned, pushing a plump lip out. “To work it right, I’ll have to find one or two of my old contacts in London. Though mostly, it will be just the two of us, you and I, running the game on—what was his name?”

“Leonard. Leonard Aysgarth. Good old Uncle Leo. And
am I hearing your correctly in that you intend to cozy up to him?” He pulled a distasteful face.

“It’s a job. If I do it well, he will be quite enchanted with me, very trusting. Confident of me. It’s not for nothing that it’s called a ‘confidence’ game. He’ll hand the statue right over, if we do it right. Your job will be, at midgame, to become a pain in the neck, a risk. You’re the distraction. Your bad faith allies Leonard and me more closely, closing ranks to protect ourselves—”

“A pain in the neck,” Stuart repeated and took a long drink of brandy. So part of this would be that a woman he wanted would get chummy with a man he detested. He tried to make light of that information. Yes, becoming a pain in the backside would be quite natural at that point. But he didn’t like it. “This is complicated,” he said.

Emma’s angelic face gazed back at him. “You’re right,” she said soberly. “Let’s not do it. There are dozens of places for us to make a box-up of it.”

“Can’t it be simpler?”

“You want to take something of great value from someone you know, someone smart enough to be dangerous. You want him off your back by the end, while getting exactly what you want from him, and all without being caught.
That
is the complexity of it, not what I’ve outlined. What we’ll run is the most elegant confidence game that exists, a variation on the payoff played half-against the wall with a poke, then a cackle-bladder at the end.”

He watched her, trying to calculate the extent of his risk. And there it was: The field of power between them was going to level out. In fact, at certain points, she’d have complete control.

“You don’t trust me,” she said and twisted in her chair. She swung her legs over the edge of it again, leaning to sit forward, elbows on her knees, her hands clasped. Her posture, her sweet face in the firelight looked all but pious—a
woman who’d made, he didn’t doubt, sturdier men than he believe what they shouldn’t. “Distrust between confidence partners is a horrible thing,” she told him. “Because once in the midst of it, we’d have to depend on each other the way the blood in our bodies depends on our veins. Once begun, there is no turning back.” She made a little, ladylike click of her tongue, which he took to mean she thought the next all but impossible: “You’d have to give up trying to run everything, including and especially me.”

“All right,” he said.

“Good!” She sat back. “We let it go. A wise decision. It was a stupid idea.”

“No. All right, let’s do it. You win.” She was right. He tried to control too much. He studied her—if ever there was a woman to trust, at least up to a point, here she was: Emma was brave and unflinching, with a kind of intransigent intelligence. He liked her. Plus the idea of seeing what she’d do when she had the power to do it was interesting. He decided he could take anything she could dish out. So be it. “Once we’re in London, we’ll do things your way.”

She blinked at him. “You still want to do it?”

“Yes. My uncle deserves it; wait till you meet him. I have seamstresses coming tomorrow. I have enough money to begin, with other accounts sure to open up soon. It can be done—”

“It’s more than just the right clothes, some money, and a tricky plan.” She wasn’t finished trying to dissuade him—the more she tried, the more resolve he felt. It was perverse, but there it was.

She told him, “A confidence game is an illusion, like a play on the stage, where one of the players, the mark, thinks it’s real. If that illusion is breached, for even a second, the whole thing crumbles.” Her sweet bright eyes looked for all the world sincerely concerned for him, for them. “Once we start, you can
never
break from role. Not even when you
think no one’s looking. You hold to it the whole time, play it out to the end. Do you think you can?”

“I suppose. Why couldn’t I?”

“Because it won’t feel good to watch your uncle’s trust slide toward me. It won’t be nice when we both start treating you as if you had the plague. How will you feel when you watch what you know is your uncle and myself setting up a double cross of you?”

“So long as it’s not true, I’ll be fine.”

“It won’t be true, but I’ll have to behave as if it is.” She let that sink in. “Do you see the difficulty? And neither of us can break out and ask. We have to trust.”

“Confidence,” he repeated.

“Exactly.”

He nodded. He was not the one who didn’t trust. He could let go. It was Emma who had trouble with surrender, he decided.

She looked at him as if he were mad. “Do you understand how wrong it can go?”

“Life can go wrong at any moment, Emma. So can this.”

She shook her head, no, no. Then she sighed and tilted her head back to look at the ceiling. “It was because Zach broke from role twelve years ago that our mark opened fire. Zach was smug for an instant: He smiled at me.” She glanced at Stuart, then let out a disconsolate little sigh. “It was the briefest grin.”

Remembering, Emma felt suddenly talkative. She wanted to spill every last reason for her own fear, then perhaps Stuart would understand, feel her dread, rethink what he considered an adventure, a lark. She sat up straight again, leveled her eyes, and told him, “But we were supposed to be at odds, you see, angry with each other. And there Zach was, throwing me this chummy, triumphant look. The mark saw it one second, and the delicate reality we’d built evaporated: He was shooting the next.