“I’m sorry,” he said, rising and taking Theo’s hand. “I have been remiss. You shall have all the waltzes and promenades and formal dinners of me you please, but a problem at my club requires my immediate attention.”
She withdrew her hand. “Your club? Your gentlemen’s club?”
Her tone had acquired an edge, either worry or annoyance.
“A gentlemen’s club, yes. In a manner of speaking.” Though The Coventry was so much more, the situation was much larger than a mere problem, and the need for significant revenue beyond pressing.
“You are a suitor paying his addresses,” Theo said, gaze on the garden. “Can’t somebody else deal with this problem for the nonce?”
“Letting others handle the situation is how the problem arose, Theo. I apologize for the timing, but I assure you the difficulties are urgently in need of resolution.”
Another look—skeptical, full of strategy and unspoken discontent. The look put Jonathan in mind of his own late mother working up to a tirade.
“Clubs have staff and managers,” Theo said. “They have directors or some other managing body. What could possibly require your attention at a club, where gambling and wagering are of much greater significance than rare beefsteaks and overpriced libations?”
Too late, Jonathan realized that he’d misread Theo’s mood. She’d been distracted and worried rather than intent on a slow joining. She’d been upset—with him. A hundred family meals from Jonathan’s youth came back to him, with Mama muttering aspersions from one end of the table and Papa replying in veiled insults, while the servants pretended a marital brawl wasn’t taking place in the formal dining parlor.
If Theo was intent on brawling, then she’d find herself without a suitor. “I expect your trust on matters relating to our finances, madam. If I tell you the problem is mine to solve, then it’s mine to solve.”
She faced him from her post at the window and damned if her eyes weren’t sheened with tears.
Tears from his sensible, steady Theo? He hated tears, hated them especially from women with little to cry about. He hated even more that he’d provoked her to tears.
“I cannot attach myself to another wastrel, Jonathan. Archie’s club and the wagers and cards available there were more of a threat to my marriage than any courtesan. You’ve secured my affections, and then I don’t see you for days. Now you tell me you must sit night after night at some club that will doubtless claim half your affections after we’re married. What am I to think?”
The question was chilling for its logic. He’d done exactly as she’d said: secured her affections, then neglected her utterly while wrestling with the problems at The Coventry. Hadn’t sent a basket, hadn’t sent flowers or a note. Hadn’t dropped by for breakfast or brought Comus around to inspect the garden.
Hadn’t explained his absence.
“You have no answer,” Theo said, crossing the short distance to the spiral stairs. “I am determined that my first marriage will not haunt my second, but I truly do miss you, Jonathan. I want to know who your witnesses at the ceremony will be, and will you mind if I invite Lady Canmore. Should Seraphina and Diana attend? What if Penweather becomes difficult, and what are we to do about the settlements?”
An image came to Jonathan’s mind, of his father stumbling as he climbed down from a coach, the footman staring straight ahead rather than presume to assist a lord far gone with drink.
Theo was not intent on drama. She was intent on answers. The relief of that insight was enormous.
“I’ve hurt you,” Jonathan said, taking her in his arms. “I am so sorry, Theo. I am deeply, endlessly sorry. I’ve never been a suitor before, though I ought to know better. How can I make amends?”
She was quiet in his embrace, not cuddling. He could feel her thinking, feel her gathering her courage.
“Tell me the truth. Where do you go of an evening, and what has you so worried?”
Theo was to be his wife, his partner in all significant matters, the mother of his children. With her, he could and should be absolutely honest.
“I truly am tending to financial affairs,” he said, stealing a quick kiss. “My primary source of income now is a club, and during my years in Paris, I’ve allowed it to fall into some disarray—serious disarray, of which I’m only now becoming aware. Somebody has set out to sabotage the venture. I’m almost sure I know who and why, but not how. I must find that answer before I can put the club back on solid footing, which will give the dukedom a healthy source of funds as well.”
Theo’s gaze was troubled. “You own a gentlemen’s club?”
His idiot mouth was too eager to boast of his pride and joy, and his suitor’s heart wanted only to be honest with her.
“It’s a well-kept secret, but I am proprietor of the premier supper club and gambling establishment in all of London. The Coventry is mine, and I am pleased to include you in the small circle who know that. An employee of long standing has taken a notion to—Theo?”
She whirled away, as far away as the little chamber allowed. Her expression suggested Jonathan had confessed not to owning one of the best investments a ducal heir could aspire to, but rather, to ruling in hell.
* * *
“You have taken leave of what little sense you claim,” Casriel said, fitting the tuning key to the little screw that adjusted the tension on the harp strings. “The Coventry is an honest house. You’ve made a pest of yourself there for the past several weeks and only discovered that, once again, an older sibling is right and you are barking mad.”
Sycamore sidled past the harp, a great behemoth of an instrument with grapes and flowers fancifully carved all over the maple wood pillar.
“I have discovered that your friend Mr. Jonathan Tresham has more trouble afoot than he can handle on his own. What are you doing?”
Casriel gently plucked the string. “Having a polite difference of opinion with a venerable matron, a far more productive exchange than the one I’m having with you.”
Sycamore folded into the chair behind Casriel’s desk. “There’s a pattern. I just can’t see what it is.”
Another pluck, infinitesimally higher on the scale. “Jonathan Tresham can spot patterns in the stars, in wind undulating across a field of ripe oats, in attendance at church on Sunday mornings. He can’t help himself. If there were a pattern, he’d see it.”
Another tiny increase in pitch.
“I can spot patterns too, and I know I’m seeing one. Lipscomb always sits in the same place, for example, across from the dealer at every table. Viscount Henries prefers any chair with its back to the wall. The most expensive food is always at the end of the buffet, so that patrons will have a full plate when they come to it.”
Casriel bent closer to the harp and eased the tuning key a quarter turn. “And my youngest brother must stir up trouble.” He plucked the string again, sending a gentle tone wafting through the office.
Of all the rooms at the Dorning town house, this one alone bore a stamp personal to the earl. Grey loved his acres, and thus the landscape on the wall was the view from the Dorning family seat in Dorset. A sheep-dotted checkerboard of green fields stretched away to the abbey ruins where Sycamore had played as a boy—or watched his brothers play while his sisters had scolded them.
On the opposite wall was a painting of Durdle Door, an arched rock formation on the beach near Lulworth that looked like a dragon drinking from the sea.
“If you miss home so much, why have all these reminders of it around you?” Sycamore asked.
Grey moved the tuning key up one string. “To remind me why I serve out my penance in the Lords. To encourage me when my daily bout of faintheartedness threatens. To show some hapless female just how rustic”—pluck—“her circumstances will be if she throws in her lot with me.”
Sycamore stored away for later consideration the startling admission that the earl grew fainthearted nigh daily.
“The lady will be your countess, Grey. If you’re marrying some
cit’s daughter, she won’t care that rustication comes with it. She will care that you love your sheep more than you love her.”
Casriel plucked the next string and turned the key gently, the tone rising as the tension increased. “You’re an expert on courting heiresses now?”
“Lady Canmore is no heiress. Why did you bring her ’round The Coventry?”
Grey sounded the first string and the second in the do-re sequence that began the major scale.
“She brought me around.”
“She’s not an heiress, Grey.”
Do-re-mi. “My brilliant sibling states the obvious. She also already has a title.”
But does she have your heart? “Bad enough Ash has charged me with keeping an eye on Lady Della Haddonfield. Now you’re mooning after an unsuitable lady too. Why is it, when surrounded by such nonsense, I’m the one who’s accused of foolishness?”
Do-re-mi-fa. “Because if anybody is well suited to running an honest, profitable, well-respected gaming establishment, it’s Jonathan Tresham. The very fact that you lurk under the stairs, looking askance at all and sundry while you yourself appear suspicious, is likely to start talk. You’ve said your piece to Tresham, now leave it to him to take action if action is needed.”
Do-re-mi-fa-so.
“The G string is flat,” Sycamore said. “You are so determined to view your brothers as a burden that you can’t see what a problem it is for Tresham to have no brothers, nobody to guard his back. He hasn’t any sisters either.”
Sycamore let that observation vibrate in the air like a plucked note, because he was nearly certain he’d spoken in error. Della Haddonfield had the same cast to her features as Tresham, the same dark hair, the same widow’s peak. She moved as he did, a cross between a saunter and a prowl, and she had taken to the tables with a natural aptitude for numbers.
“If Ash hasn’t told you, then you didn’t hear this from me,” Grey said, “but Lady Della and Tresham share a bond of blood. Hush for a moment, please.”
He fiddled with the G string, winding it too sharp, then easing it down a halftone.
“You’ll break it, cranking it like that.”
“Sycamore, is there no topic about which you admit ignorance? Are you an expert on every God’s blessed subject?”
“Despite having six brothers who do know every God’s blessed thing, I’m not quite up to their weight yet. For example, I’m only now learning how to cheat.”
Grey sat back, the tuning key in his hand. “Must I beat you? A gentleman does not cheat.”
“You left beating me to Thorne and Oak, for the most part. Valerian and Ash pulled them off of me, and Willow tattled to you when they got out of hand. I’m learning to cheat because gentlemen do cheat. They mark cards, they use spotters, stacked decks, hidden cards, sleight of hand, and more.”
Grey tossed the tuning key onto the desk. “Never tell me you’ve observed that unscrupulous behavior at The Coventry?”
Sycamore rose and headed for the door. “Have I, or have I not, spent the last twenty minutes explaining to you that I smell a rat at The Coventry, but I haven’t hunted the rodent down yet? Somebody has marked the cards twice now, to no apparent end. Tresham is haunting the place, so he must have taken my warning to heart, but the problem remains. Lipscomb loses even when he’s sober, for example.”
Do-re-me-fa-so-la. “Lipscomb is seldom sober.”
“While I have eschewed inebriation of late. You should offer for Lady Canmore.”
Grey strummed the lower registers of the harp, setting a wonderfully resonant minor arpeggio adrift in the office.
“I will not bequeath to my son the sort of mess Papa left for us, Cam. Willow is married. Ash is besotted. I’ll marry well or not at all.”
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti. He twiddled the tuning peg this way and that.
“Papa was happy, Grey. He whiled away many a pleasant year in his greenhouses and gardens. He knew every tree in the home wood and every tenant’s dog’s name. When was the last time you were happy?”
“I’m happy right now. If you didn’t learn to cheat at The Coventry, then where did you cross paths with all the scurrilous knaves wielding their dirty tricks?”
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-ti-ti…
“Where else? At that great bastion of learning and sophistication, to which all the best families send their young men for an education unmatched anywhere in the world.”
“You’re learning to cheat at university?”
“I’d rather learn to not be cheated. Be careful not to break the strings, Grey. That’s a very pretty instrument, but like you, it has some age on it.”
“Stay away from The Coventry, Cam. Whatever is going on there is not your problem.”
Which statement all but confirmed that Grey too had felt the sour note in the club’s air.
“Ask the countess if you can court her. Ladies aren’t as concerned with money as they are with happiness. I like that about them.”
“Be off with you, Sycamore Erasmus.”
Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-spronnnng.
Sycamore left amid the earl’s soft curses. He did his older brother the courtesy of waiting until the door was closed before offering the empty corridor a quiet, long-suffering, “I told you so.”
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
Theo wanted to clamp her hands over her ears or demand that Jonathan unsay the words he’d spoken.
“You own The Coventry?” Her voice was steady, while her heart hammered with dread.
“I have for more than three years. I gather this is a problem.”
A problem he’d solve with patient good humor, apparently. “This is a disaster.” Theo needed the bannister of the spiral staircase for support. “You will please sell that… that establishment.”
Jonathan did not come to her, did not take her in his arms and offer soothing agreement. Instead, his posture shifted, becoming every inch ducal.
“The Coventry is the last hope the Quimbey estate has of avoiding bankruptcy. I’ll not be selling it.” He spoke gently, firmly, as one would to a fractious child. “In addition to the employees at the club and the Quimbey staff, others depend on The Coventry, and now of all times, I cannot step away from my responsibilities there.”
Theo cast around for any gesture that might hint of compromise or reconciliation. “Would you sell it if you could?”
He leaned back against the windowsill, an aristocrat in Bond Street finery, lord of all he cared to survey.
“Why should I liquidate an asset that generates substantial income? What I learned in that establishment has made me a wealthy man, the envy of my peers. I can offer Quimbey hope of solvency because of The Coventry. I offer polite society honest play, good food, good company, while I make a well-earned profit and employ dozens who’d otherwise have no work. I am proud of that, Theo. Why do you ask me to give it up?”
Because The Coventry killed my husband. How could Jonathan not see that?
Theo had grieved when Archimedes had been laid to rest. Nobody should die at such an age under such conditions. She’d also admitted to a guilty sliver of relief. With Archie for a father, Diana had been doomed to grow up cursed by scandal. His death had created the possibility of an upbringing amid genteel poverty rather than disgrace.
Not much of a silver lining, but Theo had seized it and dragged herself forward. Jonathan’s loyalty to his club held no silver lining.
“You should sell The Coventry because gaming hells ruin lives,” she said. “They aren’t even legal.”
Jonathan busied himself wrestling the window sash up a few inches. “The law is full of eccentricities, my dear. A Welshman who wanders into Chester after sundown commits an offense, while two hours of longbow practice for any lad over fourteen is still legally mandated. I can shoot a Scotsman in York with a bow and arrow on any day but Sunday, and a vast number of peers are engaged in selling illegal game to the better London restaurants. The law does not dictate moral absolutes, Theo.”
He was humoring her. Attempting rhetorical arguments. Theo’s despair edged toward rage.
“Gaming hells destroy lives, which fact—not moral conjecture, fact—I have had occasion to live firsthand, as have my daughter and sister.”
Jonathan ran a hand through his hair and offered a patient smile. “Must we argue, Theodosia? I own The Coventry, but I do not patronize similar venues. We are to be married. Your pin money will be ample. Your daughter and sister will be well provided for.”
Theo turned away, for she could not bear the sweet reason in his smile. “While my husband will be gone,” she said, “night after night, plighting his commercial troth to an operation that is little better than a turnpike on the road to ruin. You serve your patrons free champagne so they lose their judgment as play deepens. You lure them in with free food after midnight. Your dealers are all so pretty and friendly, they nearly flirt the money from the pockets of their customers.”
“Theo, it’s not like that.”
He was chiding her. Chiding her. “I haven’t seen you for nearly a week, Jonathan, and that’s your version of courtship when your club calls to you. You use beeswax candles because that is the scent of luxury rather than vice. You offer the gentlemen fine cigars for the same reason. Archie’s clothes bore the stink for the last year of his life. You allow no hint of a common nuisance about your establishment, not because trollops cheapen the place, but because this lessens the probability that the abbesses in your neighborhood will resent your presence.”
“Theo, please stop.”
With her back to the room, she was addressing a portrait of a youth who bore a strong resemblance to Jonathan—very likely his father, hidden away in this secret room.
“You avoid the trollops because brothels are also illegal,” she went on, “and the authorities delight in raiding them. I know so much more about running a successful gaming hell than any lady ever should.”
Footsteps sounded behind her. Jonathan’s hands landed softly on her shoulders.
“I do not own a gaming hell, Theo, and I will not quarrel with you about this. I grew up in the midst of pitched battle, and I refuse to allow my dealings with you to degenerate into endless conflict. We’ll simply not speak of the club. I don’t even gamble, and you must learn to distinguish between your first husband and me. I’ll put the club to rights, and you will never hear me mention it by name.”
My Own True Duchess Page 24