Untamed

by Anna Cowan

  ‘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.’

  Lady Marmotte’s fingertips were as possessive and angry as a spider, splayed over the backs of her cards as though she could divine what they might be. She watched Liverpool and Castlereagh leave the room, heads already bent together in fierce conference. Then she transferred her gaze to Jude.

  ‘Delaying won’t make a jot of difference,’ she said. ‘Your duchess cannot play.’

  Lady Marmotte left her seat and moved from one group of guests to the next – the consummate hostess. Katherine’s hands, when she took them from her cards, shook. Jude was desperate with the need to hold her and kiss her eyes closed, her cheeks, her lips. He could do no more than keep his hand on her shoulder, where it had rested all day.

  ‘She needs food and tea,’ Lydia said, pushing her way through to his side. ‘You are incompetent, and should not be allowed to be anyone’s husband.’

  Jude let her pull Katherine from his grasp, because she was right.

  He watched them walk away from him, Lydia’s elbows and glares equally sharp when anyone dared approach.

  ‘That key,’ said BenRuin, watching beside him, ‘I assume it has the power to utterly ruin you.’

  Jude watched for the last glimpse of Katherine’s hair. She disappeared from view, and he fell onto her chair as though a string had been snipped. He realised with a kind of puzzled annoyance that he couldn’t bring his legs to stand him back up again.

  ‘— brandy and sandwiches,’ BenRuin was saying above him. ‘You need to eat, you brainless dolt.’

  Jude wondered vaguely who the giant Scott was harassing this time, and spent the last of his energy trying to keep as far from him as possible.

  Then BenRuin was looming over him and slapping his face. He flinched, before he realised that it hadn’t been a painful blow. Just a stinging reminder to stay awake.

  ‘Eat,’ BenRuin said, shoving a plate of food at him.

  Crispin handed him a glass of something dark and alcoholic, which he downed in one grateful mouthful.

  ‘Eat,’ BenRuin insisted again, and Jude ventured to take the plate from his hand.

  ‘The last thing she needs is for you to faint away on her,’ BenRuin said, and sat opposite him.

  Jude started eating, for fear that BenRuin would feel obliged to force-feed him if he didn’t.

  ‘Christ,’ said BenRuin, leaning back into the chair. ‘You have the constitution of a woman.’

  ‘Would that be the woman who has been playing cards against the ton’s best for the past eight hours? Or the woman who’s over there elbowing the Lord Chancellor?’

  BenRuin cast a lazy eye over to where his wife was cutting a swathe towards them through the room, and of all things he laughed.

  Then he said, ‘It’s not too late to stop. You still have the title, and that’s worth something. Mr Shrove’s claim is unlikely to be successful – but I assume you can’t say the same if the bloody Marmotte woman gets hold of that key.’

  ‘Why do you care?’ Jude said. He felt revived enough to look curiously at the Earl. It was a little like standing at the very edge of a very high cliff and looking over. Oddly bracing. If a little sick and dizzying, also.

  ‘Kit’s thrown her lot in with you. And I won’t say the other reason again.’

  Jude was bent on improving himself, but that – ah, that was more temptation than any man could resist.

  ‘But you looked so pretty the last time,’ he said, looking up from beneath his lashes.

  BenRuin drew sharply back and began to blush, a deep red from the tips of his ears that spilled down over his face.

  Lydia thwacked Jude over the back of the head and said, ‘Hands off.’

  Katherine shook her head, and smiled fondly at him.

  He slipped his hand into Katherine’s and pulled her closer, and nothing existed but this. ‘Are you well, my love?’ he murmured. She reminded him of an old doll with all its stuffing pulled out.

  She kissed him – that passionate press of her lips that was becoming familiar to him. It wasn’t about desire. And it unravelled the mess in him a little more every time.

  Two minutes were called until the game resumed. He relinquished the seat, and took his place behind her. Her lover, her champion, her servant.

  He saw the reluctance in her calloused fingers as she pushed the key to the centre of the table and let go of it, and he loved her. Few people on this earth would have the strength to care for him as she did. Even fewer would have the strength to care for him and put that key at risk anyway.

  The room was so full a mouse couldn’t have pushed its way in – but nobody spoke. No one knew what the key unlocked, and each person present was free to imagine what secret might be so huge, so devastating. Perhaps mere bastardry was nothing compared to what they imagined.

  ‘Why don’t we make this more interesting?’ Katherine said, picking up her cards. ‘Let’s bet on every hand.’

  Lady Marmotte shrugged, unfazed. ‘You have a remarkable instinct for self-annihilation,’ she said. ‘Ten thousand pounds should more than cover your key.’

  ‘It doesn’t even come close,’ said Katherine.

  Lady Marmotte’s solicitor spoke hurriedly in her ear, but she hesitated only a moment before placing a note for five hundred thousand pounds on the table. Her smile took in the hushed crowd – let them see Katherine as ridiculous. ‘I shall enjoy owning the most expensive key in history,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a glass case made to exhibit it in this very room.’

  The oppressive silence in the room – this would be the last game, this had to be the last game – broke a little as spectators released some tension through laughter. Katherine said nothing.

  Lady Marmotte’s eyes, when they began to play, were avid on the key. Jude could feel her want, feel the illogical, desperate need to grind him under her shoe. And the only thing she needed to do it was right there. One tiny piece of metal. She won the first trick, and shook her head indulgently when Katherine played a king of spades on her ten of clubs.

  ‘Darlington,’ said Crispin, who had been pressed into his side by the crush.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘It’s important,’ Tom said, and actually pinched him through his coat.

  Jude spun on them. How dare they pull his attention away?

  Crispin shoved the betting book in his face.

  ‘The accountant just placed a bet,’ he said, his voice low, urgent, triumphant. ‘He put thirty pounds on Kit to win. He thinks Kit’s going to win.’

  Jude stared at the proud knot of her hair – her fingers steady on her cards.

  It was so obvious.

  That gormless boy from the North had seen what Jude himself hadn’t dared to. Katherine had lost the who
le day long, because she wasn’t content to win a small amount of money back. She was going after a fortune.

  I admire you, he would tell her, when he had her to himself. I adore you. How did you get so frightening, and so wonderful?

  ‘Do you remember Randall Thompson?’ she asked Lady Marmotte, but her voice invited the crowd into the conversation.

  ‘Still owes me ten guineas!’ one man called out with a laugh.

  ‘The man from Hackney who never lost a card game in three years?’

  ‘Aye, I remember the rhymes. Poor sod’s name rhymed with —’

  Katherine cut smoothly in. ‘He was all over the papers when I was a girl. Father even brought me back a penny novel about him once, from London. He’d built himself a fortune by the time he died. Ate some bad meat, didn’t he? His end was something wasteful and stupid like that.’

  ‘I assume you have a point?’ Lady Marmotte said, and she was almost entirely collected, except that her eyes flickered over to the key, just once.

  ‘Did you ever hear of Abe Sutherland?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘Some relative of yours, I presume. Could I prevail upon you to get on with the game, Miss Sutherland?’

  Katherine nodded and smiled. ‘My father,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t surprise me you haven’t heard of him. He wasn’t as good at cards as Randall Thompson. In fact, he was a good deal worse, but it never stopped him. He was the one who taught me to play.’

  ‘Then he couldn’t play worth a damn.’

  ‘No, he couldn’t, aside from the occasional stroke of brilliance. He could never keep his emotions in check. He gave himself away entirely.’

  Theatres were never so hushed as this.

  ‘He had this delusion, though, that he could beat Randall Thompson. He invited him to our country estate.’

  God she was incredible – building the impression even now that she had grown up wealthy and privileged, even now when that dangerous poise was costing her every last bit of energy she had.

  ‘Father failed to win, of course. Over and over. It had been three years since Thompson lost a game, and my father wasn’t the man to break his luck. On his last morning with us, he found me playing solitaire in the parlour, and he proposed a friendly game of piquet.’

  Kit put down the queen of spades.

  ‘I beat him,’ she said. ‘Four times.’

  The hushed silence broke somewhere around Tom and Crispin, as the books were reopened.

  To her credit, Lady Marmotte’s expression barely changed. ‘A lucky play, Miss Sutherland. I see you also inherited your father’s inability to know when he was beaten.’

  But Katherine kept winning. That hand and the next.

  Lady Marmotte put her tongue to use. She invited the crowd to reminisce with her on Katherine’s unfortunate debut earlier in the season. She went over the old ground of Darlington’s disgrace.

  But the tide of the game was turning. Only an idiot would not have felt it – not seen the subtle change in Katherine, who had become cool and unreadable.

  And the crowd, who had come to see Katherine soar or burn, were willing her higher, willing her into the firmament.

  She won the third hand.

  Lady Marmotte managed a sophisticated smile, but she couldn’t seem to stop her teeth from grinding together. She would have a headache soon. She still hadn’t properly grasped Katherine, and she couldn’t find a way under her skin. All the telltale signs she’d spent the day learning were false.

  Katherine won the hotel, the printing press, the factories and mines.

  Lady Marmotte’s hands opened, closed. Her hair was imperfect. Sweat slid down the side of her face, and when she brought out her handkerchief it was like an unfinished letter, balled up. Her eyes were hungry on the key – it seemed to burn a hole in her.

  They were not so far apart in points – sixty-five to fifty-eight in favour of Katherine, and the fifth hand just dealt. Lady Marmotte was not being foolish to think she could win it all back.

  She put shares in twelve separate companies and concerns on the table. Lord Marmotte entered the room in time to see her put down her fleet of three ships. Liverpool called Marmotte and Harrington over to consult with him, and shook his head at Lady Marmotte. She still didn’t meet Katherine’s new opening bet.

  She looked directly up at Jude then, her eyes filled with pure loathing. It was a feeling her body contained badly – it flared from her in nervous fits and starts. There was a kind of despair buried deep in her.

  ‘This house,’ Lady Marmotte said, ‘should make up the deficit.’

  He almost opened his mouth to stop her. It was too much.

  But there was no corresponding softness in her. If he relented for even a second, she would destroy him.

  Katherine tilted her cards up so that he could see them easily enough, and for the first time he felt gripped by some cold, awful thing. Like waking and remembering he’d been supposed to meet his father that morning, and he hadn’t told him yet that he’d been sent down from Oxford. A shock so bad it hurt in his hands, and in his feet.

  She had no face cards.

  She was going to lose.

  Everything.

  He felt her wince, and realised how hard his fingers gripped her. He couldn’t stop. The world had become oddly distant; he had lost true north and had only Katherine to hold on to.

  He concentrated on the feel of her, the way he had all those nights in the Manor. The world came gradually back, and he remembered, like whisky pouring warm through his chest, that it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t leave him if he was declared a bastard.

  She didn’t love him because he was a duke.

  It didn’t matter.

  ‘Jude,’ she murmured, his name an endearment because she was the only person in the world who called him by it. ‘Lady Marmotte is an avid scholar of your face. Time for you to step away.’

  She was right, of course. Lady Marmotte wasn’t watching Katherine, she was watching him. Her cards curved lovingly into her palm; she knew she was going to win. Once she had the key in her possession, nothing would make her put it on the table again. The last hand wouldn’t matter one jot.

  Jude made himself let go of Katherine, one finger at a time, and went to stand beside Liverpool. Katherine had assumed she could trust him to keep his face as impassive as she kept hers. And he had. Except for that one electrifying moment when he’d realised the world was going to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was not his father’s son.

  She looked remarkably calm from here.

  Then Lady Marmotte said, ‘I can understand why you’d want to snare him for yourself, Miss Sutherland. I never had a lover like him. I can feel it even now – his tongue on my breast, his fingers between my thighs.’

  Breath was drawn all around the room, almost as if the crowd was a single lung. The faces were appalled, hungry.

  All the blood left Katherine’s face.

  ‘He has clever fingers, doesn’t he?’ Lady Marmotte said. ‘They have been all over me. They found parts of me I had no acquaintance with and parts of me no decent man would touch. He told me my flesh was gorgeous and white, like a transcendental souffle. I remember it made me laugh, and then he worked to make me laugh again because the movement delighted him so.’

  He had no memory of saying it, but it sounded exactly like him. He watched as Katherine went whiter still.

  ‘Every woman should try him at least once. But you’re a damned fool if you think you can hold his attention for longer than a month. Can you even imagine the Herculean effort a year will be? Two years? Thirty?’

  ‘Enough talking,’ said Katherine, and it was silk pouring red from a husky shell. ‘Carte blanche.’ She laid her cards quickly on the table, then took them up again. Long enough only for him to see a profusion of red, and no face cards. Lady Marmotte smirked and discarded two. Her hand must be good – though it really only needed to be passable. She’d probably discarded the red suits. It’s what Jude would have d
one in her place.

  Katherine sat completely still, as though frozen hard in some internal conflict. Everything hung in the balance, and skill could not win this hand for her. After everything – after a whole day pulled to her will – she was forced to trust to luck.

  She discarded three, which was playing well against the odds.

  That was it, then.

  It shouldn’t surprise him, really, that it would feel this way. He’d had the weight of a dukedom on him his whole life. Lifting it off would make him so light it was as good as wax and feathers.

  He looked at BenRuin and Tom and saw dismay there. Lydia’s eyes were fixed defiantly on her sister, head high. Katherine sat entirely still, in that severe coat, her hair pulled clear off her white face.

  ‘If you hadn’t brought Jude into it,’ Katherine said, ‘I might have felt bad about this.’

  She played the king of diamonds, and called seventy-six points.

  Lady Marmotte, who had discarded her red suits, had no answer to it. Katherine played the suits against her, and forced every card from her, trick by trick. When it came to the last trick, Katherine played a six of diamonds, and called eighty-seven points. If she won this trick as well, it was worth forty points. It would win her the game.

  Lady Marmotte didn’t look at Katherine before she laid down her last card. She looked right at Jude.

  It was an ace of spades, and it was useless.

  In the rage of emotion in him there was indignation because Katherine had used him to throw Lady Marmotte completely off the scent. Made him believe she couldn’t win it.

  And then it hit him: Katherine had won Lady Marmotte’s entire fortune from her.

  The room erupted.