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.
A flash of white muslin flickered in the window, catching his eye. Aloysius stood, tugging his silk pistachio-and-cream-striped waistcoat down over the bulge of his stomach. "Come, my lord," he said, gesturing at the French doors that opened onto a pleasing vista of clipped evergreens and leaden statues, and a young woman with gilded hair and a shy and gentle smile. "I believe you have something of particular import to ask my daughter, eh?"
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.
The gambler would be on his own, and all his gold be snatched, disappearing into London's wretched rookeries. It was a sardonic stroke of revenge worthy of a Trelawny. The debt of honor would be settled, and London's poor would eat heartily and sleep warmly tonight at Nigel Payne's expense.
Lord Caerhays had almost escaped by the time she caught up with him. She slipped her arm through his and steered him down the hall. "McCady, you naughty boy, you cannot possibly be leaving. Not when I haven't seen you for ages."
At a sharp nod of her head, a handsome young footman resplendent in livery and powdered wig opened the door to the green salon. "Fetch us some champagne," she said, not bothering to look in the servant's direction.
The room was too hot, and she moved the pole screen in front of the fire. A faint memory of hashish lingered in the air from last night's debauch. Its scent of sweet decay clung to the opulently upholstered furniture and the heavy green velvet curtains. The windows ought to have been opened that afternoon, and the wilting flowers that graced the cut-crystal vases and bowls replaced. Such lack of attention, she vowed, would cost the majordomo his job on the morrow.
After the servant had poured the champagne and quit the room, she lounged back on a midnight black sofa. She knew the opaque velvet complemented the vivid brightness of her henna-washed hair and the whiteness of the skin she bathed nightly with distilled pineapple water. She sipped at the sparkling iced wine, enjoying the tingle of it on the roof of her mouth and the sight of McCady Trelawny looking blatantly virile in a dark blue tail coat and thigh-hugging cream pantaloons.
There was a wildness about him tonight that stirred her. She wondered what he had done to get his hands on so much money, for she'd heard he hadn't a feather to fly with. She hoped it wasn't anything that would land him in Newgate, though in truth she wouldn't put it past him to have robbed the National Treasury.
She had known all three of the Trelawny boys for years— much too handsome for their or anyone else's good; sullen, proud, and filled with such joyless restlessness. Hell-bent on self-destruction, they drugged themselves with pleasure and flirted with danger, courting their destiny of disgrace and violent death with wild abandon. But a part of her had always hoped that McCady would somehow find a way to escape his fate.
She had never forgotten the first time she had seen him, the night his older brothers had brought him to this house. So young he had been, a mere boy. Too young to understand what was being been done to him. Until that next morning—after a night of debauchery that had put even herself to the blush—when she had seen the shadows in his dark Trelawny eyes and known that deep within him some- thing that was gentle and good had been brutalized beyond repair.
"McCady?"
He turned, still lost in thought, and for a moment all his defenses were down, and she was shocked by what she saw in his eyes.
She had seen those eyes hard and sharp as an ax blade as he wagered more than he could afford on the turn of a card. She had seen them looming above her in the night, hot and glowing with passion. She had seen them turn dull and remote with self-disgust the morning after. But she had never seen them as they were now, filled with such raw pain. Whatever or whoever had hurt him—it had gone soul-deep.
He noticed her studying him, and he lowered his lids, hiding his thoughts. His mouth curved into a cynical smile. Only she, who knew him well, saw that it lacked his usual bravado.
He tilted his champagne glass at her in a mocking toast. "You ought to congratulate me, Maggie. I'm about to become a married man."
She felt a sharp and unexpected pain in her chest. "So it has happened to you at last," she said, and her smile felt tight. "What is she like—this girl who has managed to capture a wicked Trelawny's heart?"
He lifted a shoulder in a dismissive shrug. "I haven't the vaguest notion what she's like. I only met the chit for the first time two hours ago."
"The money. I see..." The odd tightness in her chest eased somewhat. She rubbed her finger around the rim of the champagne glass, making it sing a mournful hymn. "Haven't you ever felt it, McCady? That breathless excitement when someone enters the room. That hot surging in the blood. That tingly, dizzying, wild and frightening feeling called—"
"I take the girl to bed, and it's gone by morning."
"Love," she finished softly.
This time his smile was cruel. "You're slipping, Maggie. A good whore should never allow herself to become sentimental over what she sells."
She arched a perfectly plucked brow. "Are you describing me or yourself?"
An emotion flared behind the shadows in his eyes, gone before she could read it. He set his champagne down untouched. "It's too late anyway," he said, so softly she wasn't sure she'd heard him right or for that matter what he meant by it. "It's too late," he said again, and shrugged as if he didn't care. But even separated by the width of the room, she could feel a tension vibrating along every inch of his whipcord-taut frame.
She went to him. She used her little finger to trace the beautiful, sulky curve of his mouth. It had been a long time. Years. "Share my bed tonight, McCady."
"I am not in a generous mood."
"Then take."
His fingers closed over her wrist, and he brought her hand to his lips. He smiled, but shook his head. He bade her a polite good-bye, and when the door had shut behind him, she pressed the hand that he had kissed against her cheek.
It was a sentimental thing to do, and she sneered at herself for it, but she went to the window for one last glimpse of him. She knew somehow that he would never return to this house again.
He stood in the spill of a streetlamp, the light shining full on his face. He did nothing, simply stood there, and she had never seen anyone look more alone.
Jessalyn Letty peered out the carriage window at the long line of stanhopes, landaus, and phaetons winding ahead of them. "We shall be another hour at this rate," she said, as their red-lacquered vehicle rolled forward a few more inches, then swayed and jolted to a stop. "We could have walked there by now ten times over."
"Tain't the done thing, gel," Lady Letty pronounced, "hoofing it to a ball." She flicked open a silver plate snuffbox and took a pinch, then offered some to Clarence Tiltwell, who declined. The sharp smell of ambergris and bitter almonds filled the carriage, making Jessalyn's eyes water.
Lady Letty blew a loud sneeze into her handkerchief. "What a sad crush." She sneezed again. "One would think all of London is determined to attend this Hamilton person's rout. What is the world coming to? The man is a mere corn merchant."
"Aloysius Hamilton is also a banker," Clarence said. "A lot of people owe him money."
Lady Letty heaved a great whistling snort, like a boiling kettl
e. "Aha! So you're in hock to him, are you?" Using her quizzing glass, she appraised the blue satin and black leather interior of Clarence Tiltwell's town coach. It was top-of-the-line and ruinously expensive. "Just how badly dipped are you?"
Clarence's gentle laugh echoed in the roomy carriage. "I am a banker as well, Lady Letty. People owe me money."
"Tain't the done thing, Tiltwell, to bring up a subject so crass as debts and money whilst in polite society," Lady Letty said, completely oblivious of the fact that she had been the one to raise the subject. "If you are ever to rise above your tutworker origins, you should know that, boy."
"Oh, Gram..." Jessalyn cast a glance at Clarence, but if his feelings had been wounded, his face didn't show it. No color mottled his fair complexion, and his eyes, reflecting the light from the roof lanterns, merely looked amused.
The coach, which had been rattling across the cobbles, suddenly quieted as they pulled onto the bed of straw that had been laid in the street to cut the noise in front of the Hamilton Mayfair mansion. Lights blazed from the unshuttered windows, and lanterns flickered on decorated poles. A linkboy ran down carpeted steps to open their carriage door.
No sooner had they descended into the street than a ragged urchin squirmed his way past the footmen and postilions to shove a rusty tea tray up into their faces. "Buy me gingerbread, yer honors!" he cried. "Fresh and 'ot!"
Lady Letty opened her reticule, but the postboy drove the child off with a crack of his whip. "Don't," Clarence said, stilling the old woman's hand. "For if you buy from him, there'll be a hundred others to take his place. You cannot feed them all."
It did indeed seem as if a hundred gaping faces crowded around the carriages. These thin, pale faces of the poor who had come to witness the lavish sight of Quality arriving at a ball. The stink of their unwashed bodies and pawned clothes hung over the street, mixing with the smell of horse dung. Their murmuring voices and occasional cries reminded Jessalyn of the sea slapping the Cornish cliffs and the screams of the gulls.
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