Miranda Jarrett - Rake's Wager

Cassia nodded, closing her fan with a little click. She gave one last smile to Lord Russell, with what she hoped was sufficient regret, then hurried down the curving staircase after Pratt. The opening was supposed to be genteel, elegant, meant to make gentlemen want to join their club. It was not supposed to degenerate into a brawl.

“What has happened, Pratt?” she whispered. “Tell me! What’s wrong?”

“Nothing that can’t be set to rights in a moment, miss,” Pratt answered discreetly, no real answer at all. “Miss Amariah will explain.”

He cut a path for her through the sea of gentlemen, keeping her moving through the crowd still clustered in the front hall, while newcomers at the door tried to make their way inside. “Excuse me, my lord. This way, miss, if you please, this way.”

He opened the door to the small anteroom reserved for the porter, and held it ajar just long enough for Cassia to squeeze through. Two of the largest of the house orderly men were holding a gentleman tightly by the arms, keeping him from breaking free, his broad-shouldered back to her. His dark hair was mussed, and there was a rip in one sleeve of his jacket, testimony to the scuffle in the front hall that had brought him here now.

“Thank you for joining us, Cassia.” Her sister stood at the end of the tiny room, another orderly man on one side and Pratt on the other. With her hands clasped over the royal-blue gown, Amariah still clung to her usual serenity, though her cheeks were flushed and the fingers of her clasped hands so tightly clenched together that the knuckles were white. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, but this gentleman here has posed quite a quandary for us, and you, it seems, are part of it.”

“Cassia.” The man being held repeated her name with relish, almost as if he could taste the word on his tongue. He tried to twist around to see her, but the two guards jerked him back to face Amariah. “So that’s the young lady’s name? Cassia? She would be called something rare like that.”

Cassia pressed her hand over her mouth so he wouldn’t hear her gasp. She recognized that voice, even without a face to it: he was the man from Christie’s who’d stolen The Fortune Teller away from her.

But why was he here now at Penny House? How had he known where to find her? Or had he followed her here, intent on further humiliating her?

“What the lady is called is of no importance to you, sir,” Pratt ordered, his eyes hooded. “You would do far better to consider your own situation, and how it will be viewed by a judge. Forced entry, trespassing, threats of violence against the people of this house—such charges will not be taken lightly by a court of law.”

“But as they are all lies of your making, they shall not be considered at all.” The man paused, and Cassia knew he must be smiling. “Now what would those selfsame courts make of your treatment of me, I wonder? A respectable gentleman of wealth and position, treated like some sort of thieving scoundrel—but you can vouch for me, can’t you, Cassia? You can tell them what kind of man I am, can’t you?”

She flushed at the intimacy he implied, but before she could speak, Pratt answered for her.

“Do not reply, miss,” he said. “The rascal has no right to address you, let along to ask you to speak on his behalf.”

“Very well, then,” the man said. “Forgive me my rascally ways, my dear Cassia. I shall defend myself.”

Cassia took a step forward, stunned that he’d dare be so presumptuous. He’d no right to say such things, or to shame her this way before the others, and she longed to tell him exactly that. But she’d promised Amariah she’d behave, and as hard as it was to keep quiet, Cassia did, biting back the rebuttal the man deserved.

“Sir, you still do not seem to understand.” Amariah’s smile was tightly polite. “Penny House is a club for the first gentlemen of this country, where they can amuse themselves among their peers. Admission tonight is by invitation only, sir, and regardless of what my sister says of you, you were not invited.”

“But I should have been.” With his arms still restrained, he tossed his dark hair back from his forehead with an impatience that Cassia also recognized all too well. “You should all be on your knees to beg me to stay, instead of tossing me out in St. James Street like yesterday’s rubbish.”

That was more than enough for Pratt. “What is your name, sir?” he demanded. “Your home?”

“I am Richard Blackley, of Greenwood Hall in Hampshire,” the man answered, the pride in his voice unmistakable. “Recently returned from my plantations in the royal colony of Barbados, and presently residing at the Clarendon.”

“You lie, sir.” Pratt’s words were clipped with contempt. “The true owner of Greenwood Hall is not you, but Sir Henry Green. The estate has been in his family for centuries.”

“But no longer.” Again Cassia guessed the man—he had a name now, Mr. Richard Blackley—must be smiling, despite the edge that had crept into his voice. “Shortly before I sailed, Sir Henry and I engaged in an evening of cards in a tavern in Bridgetown. He was drunk, and he lost. I wasn’t, and I won, and now own Greenwood.”

Pratt’s expression didn’t change. “Is there anyone here who can vouch for what you claim, sir?”

Blackley shrugged, or would have, if the other two hadn’t held his arms. “I doubt it, not in this crowd. Best to ask poor Sir Henry himself. If you can find him, that is. Ruin can make a man damned near invisible.”

Cassia listened, shocked. Since coming to London, she’d heard many stories of men who’d played deep and had lost everything, but the stories had always been remote, as distant as a nursery tale. Rich gentlemen lost money they could spare, and Penny House’s bank would profit for the sake of the poor.

But this careless, offhanded description by one man who’d stripped another of his patrimony had such a grim ring of reality that Cassia couldn’t look at Mr. Blackley the same way. At the auction she had called him a pirate and a thief. How could she have known how true that was?

“Cassia.” Her sister’s inflection dragged Cassia back to the little room. “Is this the gentleman you met today at Christie’s?”

She nodded, and the two guards released him. He shook himself free, squaring his shoulders and shooting the cuffs of his black coat. He took another second to smooth back his hair, and then, ready at last, he turned around.

“Miss Cassia Penny,” he said, his bow more an athlete’s than a courtier’s. “How happy I am to make your formal acquaintance. But will you now say the same of me, I wonder? Can I trust you to speak the truth?”

Cassia lifted her chin, determined to meet his eye without flinching. He was even more handsome in his evening clothes than she remembered from this afternoon, and the advantage it gave him was decidedly unfair.

“You can trust me to be truthful, Mr. Blackley,” she said, her voice slow and deliberate, “because this is a square house in every way, you know.”

“So you do know him, Cassia?” Amariah asked. “This is the man?”

“The man who outbid me fairly for the painting?” Cassia forced herself to smile, opening her fan before her in a graceful arc. He was daring her to blush, daring her to look away or stammer, and she would not do it. She would treat him like every other gentleman here tonight, no better nor no worse. “Yes, Amariah, it was Mr. Blackley.”

He bowed again, though not as low, so he could keep watching her. “Your servant, Miss Penny,” he said softly. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

Swiftly she looked away, back to her sister. “But that is all, Amariah. Beyond Mr. Blackley’s paying a preposterous amount for a very average painting, I cannot speak for his family, his estate or his honor, and that is the truth.”