by Ruth Owen
“Ruth Owen writes with a wonderfully original voice.
GAMBLER’S DAUGHTER is a feast for the senses from
beginning to end!” —Joan Johnston
PRAISE FOR GAMBLER’S DAUGHTER
BY RUTH OWEN
“The plot was engrossing,
the characters were refreshingly
realistic, their passions
volatile enough to affect my own. An
intensely emotional story I
would recommend to anyone who
loves a brooding, tormented
hero and an unlikely heroine
who must heal her own heart before
redeeming his.”
—Marsha Cranham
“A marvelous read. Charming,
witty and wonderful. Be prepared
to stay up all night. I simply
couldn’t put it down.”
—Patricia Potter
“A wonderful love story,
well written, with characters you
will remember long after
you’ve finished.”
—Kat Martin
Gambler’s Daughter
Ruth Owen
A Bantam Book / May 1999
All rights reserved
Copyright (c) 1999 by Ruth Owen
Cover art copyright (c) 1999 by Pino Dangelico
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By any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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permission in writing from the publisher. For information address:
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ISBN 0-553-57742-5
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Carol and Michael Quinto,
two of the brightest stars in heaven.
I miss you.
Chapter One
London 1821
“That’s his daughter,” Lavinia Sneed whispered to Agnes Peak as she nudged her soundly in the ribs. “The tall girl standing alone at the grave’s edge. That’s Murphy’s daughter, sure as frost.”
Agnes craned her stubby neck to follow her friend’s gaze over the somber crowd assembled in the small London graveyard. Her eyes flickered past the priest, whose words of spiritual comfort jarred with his well-fed cheeks and haughty countenance, and the various mourners, whose expressions ranged from boredom and impatience to gawking curiosity. Daniel Murphy wasn’t the most popular man in Cheapside, or the most well-respected, but he was easily the most infamous, and precious few had passed up the chance to see the notorious gambler laid to rest.
A fat man in front of her shifted to the left, and Agnes spotted a slim, black-garbed woman standing alone by the granite headstone, her head bent low in prayer. The falling snow dusted her long eyelashes and her auburn hair, which was pulled back in a severe bun. Aggie frowned, feeling vaguely cheated. Daniel Murphy had been as handsome as the devil, but his daughter was plain as a pikestaff. “You certain that’s her, Livy?”
“Course I am. Got his hair, don’t she? Nobody gets red hair like that unless they got a bloomin’ Irishman for a da.”
“Well, she didn’t get the rest of his looks,” Agnes commented bluntly as she pulled her coat closer against the bitter March wind.
“It’s the Almighty’s own justice it is,” Livy pronounced, then paused as she blew a honking sneeze into a flimsy lace handkerchief that was woefully inadequate for the task. Sniffing loudly, she bent back down to Agnes’s ear. “Sabrina Murphy may look all pious and holy, but I’ve got it on good authority that her soul’s as black as the inside of a witch’s cupboard.”
Agnes gasped. “You don’t say.”
“I most certainly do say,” Livy whispered with a knowing nod. “That girl’s got a temper like hell’s own fire, God forgive me for speaking so bold. She’s nearly nineteen, but they say that no man has ever come to court her, nor likely will, considering her looks and her unfortunate disposition. More than once she’s driven her poor stepmother to vapors.”
Aggie’s gaze traveled to the well-padded matron standing with regimental stiffness at the priest’s side. The widow Murphy didn’t look like the kind of woman who could be driven to vapors by a mere girl, however ill-tempered, but if Livy said it, it must be true. Besides, everyone knew that Daniel Murphy was a rake and a rascal, and it followed that his daughter would be the same. “Who’s that young man standing just behind the widow?”
“Her son, Albert Tremaine. By her first husband Ned, who died fighting in the Peninsula War. They say he were a fine man, and his own son takes after ‘im. A better, more devoted boy never lived.”
Considering Albert’s girth, Aggie doubted whether he was devoted to anything beyond his dinner plate, but she kept the sentiment to herself. Instead, her gaze was drawn back to the bleak, snow-dusted figure on the other side of the grave, standing so still that she might have been carved of granite herself. An unexpected twinge of pity tugged at Aggie’s heart. Sabrina Murphy had just lost her father, even if that father was only a worthless gambler like Daniel Murphy. It was a hard thing for a young girl to bear, even an ill-tempered one. “What will become of her?”
“A better fate than she deserves, and that’s a fact.” Mrs. Murphy takes in boarders, and I know she’s let her stepdaughter tutor some of the tenants’ children. Seems the girl knows something of French and such, though it takes more than book learning to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, if you take my meaning. Good manners can be taught, but good breeding—”
Livy paused, and used her thumbnail to pick a bit of beef from between her teeth. “Good breeding’s in the blood, Aggie, and that girl’s blood is rife with sin.”
The priest closed his prayer book with a harsh snap. With the weather turning bleaker by the minute, the crowd broke up in a hurry, leaving the memory of notorious Daniel Murphy behind like their muddy boot-prints in the snow. The widow turned to go, pausing just long enough to order her stepdaughter along. The woman might as well have spoken to the headstone. Sabrina remained standing by the grave, her head bent and her hands clasped in front of her, ignoring both the chilling wind and her stepmother’s wishes.
“See, what did I tell you?” Livy hissed as she and Aggie watched the widow depart the cemetery with Albert in tow. “That wicked girl is trouble sure. Never a thought for the poor, grieving mother. Shameless, I call it. As shameless as her brazen red hair.”
“I don’t see how we can blame her for the color of her hair,” Aggie offered as they turned to go.
Livy brushed aside the comment. “She’s got her father’s red hair and her father’s black heart, and she’ll come to a bad end, you mark my words. Blood will tell, Aggie. Blood will…ooh, look, there’s that Betsy Miller. Now you know I ain’t one to carry tales, but I heard tell that she and the butcher’s boy…”
The sky grew bleaker and the wind blew stronger, in sharp, stabbing gusts through the cemetery, it drove the snowflakes like slithering white snakes across the dark granite slabs, pilin
g them up into the joins and cracks that abounded in the graveyard. A small, frigid blow swirled the snow against the yard’s newest headstone, building it into a sudden heap that obscured the occupant’s name. in her first move since the funeral ended, Sabrina Murphy knelt down beside the stone and carefully brushed out each one of the carved letters.
Pay it no mind, Rina-lass. Pay it no mind.
Her father’s loud, laughing voice echoed in her mind. Daniel Murphy had never give a brass farthing for appearances—the costly headstone had been her stepmother’s idea, not his. He’d never pretended to be anything other than what he was, and had shrugged off the jibes and insults of the self-righteous as easily as he’d shrugged off an unlucky roll of the dice. As a young girl Sabrina had striven to do the same, but no matter how hard she tried, she always ended up running into her father’s arms in tears. “Ah, Rina-lass,” he’d say as he gathered her against him, stroking her hair, “you’ve your mother’s soft heart and that’s a fact. It’s a powerful blessing, a powerful responsibility, to feel things so fine and deep. But the small, mean words, said by small, mean people—pay it no mind. It’s a sure bet they’ll all be singing a different tune when our ship comes in. Pay it no mind.”
And she hadn’t—or she’d tried not to whenever the other children made fun of her for being a gambler’s daughter. As she’d grown older she’d been able to hide her feelings so successfully that in time she seemed to forget how to feel at all. Sometimes she wondered if the cure wasn’t worse than the symptom. She hadn’t shed a single tear for her father, even though his passing had left an aching hole in the place where other people kept their hearts.
She brushed out the final letter and sat back on her heels. Here lies Daniel Patrick Murphy, beloved husband of Eugenia Temaine Murphy. Anger kindled inside her. She scooped up a handful of snow and smeared it against the granite, obscuring her stepmother’s name. “Papa, I know you’re with mama and little Shawn now. That woman has no hold over you, whatever the stone says.”
A bell tolled. Sabrina’s head jerked up as she looked at the clock in the church tower. Heavens, was it that late? If she didn’t get back to the boardinghouse soon she’d miss her tutoring session—her last, though she was the only one who knew it.
Carefully she reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded letter. “It came this morning, Papa. From the Hampton School for Young Ladies of Quality. They want me to come and work for them as soon as possible. They even sent me the fare. I’ve got a job, a good one. And if Stepmother doesn’t like it, I’ll happily tell her to—”
A strand of hair whipped across her cheek, as if to censor her unladylike words. Sabrina tucked the unruly strand behind her ear, a soft smile rising to her lips for the first time in longer than she could remember. “Well, it’s your own fault, Daniel Murphy. Stepmother may have tried to make a proper lady of me, but at the end of the day I’m still a gambler’s daughter.”
“That you are, lassie.”
Sabrina glanced up in alarm, and saw a short, wiry fellow with a face like a dried apple. He looked down at her with a mischievous smile, his elbows propped on the sacred marker as if he were bellying up to the taproom bar. His well-worn brown topcoat was suitably somber, but the bright yellow-striped waistcoat he wore underneath looked as if it had been cut from the side of gaudy carnival tent.
Sabrina leapt to her feet and started to back away, conscious of the fact that she was alone in a graveyard with a total stranger, even if that stranger looked about as dangerous as an organ-grinder’s monkey.
Apparently he sensed her alarm. “Lord in heaven, child, I ain’t goin’ to hurt you. It’s you I’ve come to see, if’n you’re Dan’l;s girl, that is.”
“I am,” she replied cautiously as she continued to back away, “though I don’t see as that’s any of your business, sir.”
“Sir,” he repeated, his grin widening. “Very pretty. I can see there’s a bit of Katie Poole in you.”
“You knew my mother?”
“Aye. She was the fairest colleen in all of County Cork, though few knew it since her parsimonious father kept her locked up like a porcelain doll.” He left the headstone and walked over to her, offering his hand. “The name’s Quinn, lassie.”
Quinn. She hadn’t heard the name in years, not since those golden years when her mother was still alive. Sabrina and her family had lived in a small house in Sussex, but to Rina it had seemed like a palace, because the rooms were always filled with laughter. Her father had a steady job as the head groom at a nearby farm, and her mother had taken in fancy needlework and laundry. During the day her mother would teach her her letters, or take Rina with her as she delivered food and extra clothing to the poorer families in the neighborhood. But at night she’d sit with her father by the fire and listen as he spun fantastic, flamboyant tales of Irish kings and warriors.
She loved his elaborate yarns, but her favorite story by far—the one she’d made him tell her over and over again—was absolutely true. It was the tale of a beautiful lady who’d grown up in a grand but loveless manor house. Her father, Lord Harry Poole, was a greedy man who cared more for land than his daughter’s happiness, and had pledged her to marry a fat, wealthy merchant. She’d been resigned to her fate—until she looked into the green eyes of her father’s bold, red-haired groom, and found love. Laughing merrily, Sabrina’s father would tell how he and her mother had outfoxed Lord Poole and eloped, escaping to England only a step ahead of the law. But that escape would not have been possible without the help of Daniel’s mate, the man who’d helped him rescue the beautiful Katie and had stoop up for him at his wedding. Michael Quinn.
Sabrina reached out her hand, warmly clasping the man’s offered one. “Papa told me about you. You used to call him the King of Diamonds.”
“Aye, and he called me the Knave,” Quinn added, giving his knee a lusty slap. “Together we gave the magistrates a gray hair or two, and that’s a fact! Your da was the best mate I ever had, and it’s sorry I am that I came too late to be saying the same to himself. Dan’l had his faults but he were a good man. He knew how to live. And to love.”
In a few short words Quinn had summed up her father far better than the flowery, pretentious words of the minister’s oration. She thought about the crowd gathered around the grave. The people had only known her father as a drunk and a gambler, a disappointed man who’d died long before consumption took his life. “Thank you,” she said softly, gripping Quinn’s hand a little tighter. “I’m only sorry you had to come all this way for nothing.”
“But it weren’t for nothing. Dan’l passing is a fierce disappointment, but it’s you I came to see.”
“Me?”
“I told him when he left that I’d be on the lookout for a situation, something that would set us up for the rest of our lives. Well, I finally found it. The sweetest deal you ever did see. Practically like taking candy from a babe.”
The word deal set off Rina’s mental alarms. She’d seen the same nefarious gleam in her father’s eyes when he was getting ready to tell her about one of his gambling schemes. “Mr. Quinn, is this, um, situation you’re talking about legal?”
Quinn dropped his gaze, and self-consciously brushed a bit of snow from his waistcoat. “Of course it’s legal. Well, mostly. Look, it don’t signify. There’s easy money to be made, enough money to keep both you and me comfortable for the rest of our lives. You’d be beholden to no one except your own sweet self.”
Beholden to no one. The words spun through Sabrina’s mind like a brightly twirling kaleidoscope. To live by her own rules. To have enough money to buy her own house in the country, with a flower garden and well-trimmed hedgerows, and maybe a horse or two. To wake up in the morning to a life where she didn’t have to worry about the dishes to be washed, or the bread to be baked, or the lessons to be graded…well, she was enough of her father’s daughter to be tempted by the notion. But the beautiful dream sputtered out. She had an honest future ahead of her—staid and unrema
rkable, but honest. She’d seen what a life of empty dreams and wishes had done to her father, and she wanted no part of it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Quinn. I know you mean well, but—”
The church bell chimed again.
“Heavens, I’m late!” She turned back to Quinn. “Forgive me, I cannot stay. My stepmother—”
“Will have your guts for garters if you’re late,” Quinn supplied colorfully. He pulled off his cap and stroked back what was left of his hair, which was sparse but still bright as a copper penny. “Be off with you, lass. But I’ll be staying at the Green Dragon in Greygallows Lane through Sunday, if’n you change your mind.”
She leaned over and gave him a swift, impulsive kiss. “Thank you, sir. For everything. I…I hope we shall meet each other again.”
Quinn watched her hurry toward the iron gate of the churchyard, noting how she moved among the stones with a dancer’s grace, and how her thick auburn hair escaped from her torturous bun and cascaded across her shoulders like a ruddy waterfall.