by Laura Parker
Winded by the fall, the larger woman thrashed about under the weight of her opponent like an overturned turtle before she gathered breath to cry out in an ale-slurred voice, “Ioy give!”
As hoarse cries of triumph and surprise rang in the rafters, Jack knew that he had made a grave error. Yet, for the moment, the loss did not seem important. He, too, had been caught up in the rare sight of a weaker soul besting impossible odds. He moved to the near end of his box and tossed the winner the full contents of his pocket, twenty gold sovereigns.
“Are you mad?” Revoit cried. “She’s just made you a pauper.”
“Demme, Jack, if that ain’t a daring bit of generosity,” Sir Alan pronounced in tones of frank appreciation.
“You flatter me,” Jack answered silkily as he stared down at the stage onto which he had flung the last of his wealth. The Irish girl, bleeding from a dozen small cuts, was staring agape at him.
Sauntering out of the box, he had the sudden sensation of having stepped off a precipice into the open air.
He was broken. Cleaned out.
So, why then, was he smiling?
Chapter Four
“You witnessed the battle of the gladiators?” Jack called above the din of the crowd pouring from the theater.
Zuberi inclined his head then interposed his formidable bulk between the surge of the crowd and the viscount and spread his arms. Without so much as a word, a breech opened in the swift current of humanity around the six foot, five inches of silver and black livery, forming a channel that led directly to the curb and the coach that awaited them outside the theater.
“I partook of a seat in the servants’ galley, my lord,” Zuberi continued in the formal, slightly archaic speech that was his own as he fell in step beside his lordship. “I was most anxious to witness the mighty victory of the chosen one.”
Jack paused before the coach and turned his head toward his servant, a quizzical look on his face. “What chosen one?”
Zuberi’s smile was as moonlight in his midnight face. “The female with the splendor of the sun in her hair and the spirit of the lion in her chest. Who could gaze upon her and not see the blessings of the spirits shining within her?”
“A man whose gaze was blighted by French brandy,” Jack replied drolly.
“You, my lord, bet against the flame-haired girl?” Zuberi’s often-passive face was expressive in his amazement.
The reminder skipped like a stone on the surface of Jack’s ennui, casting up ripples of faint annoyance. “The lesson is learned. The price was twenty thousand sovereigns.”
Zuberi sucked in a great breath. “ ’Tis a handsome sum.”
“ ’Tis a veritable Adonis gilded in my coin.”
“My lord! Viscount Darlington!”
Jack turned slowly, recognizing the ring of challenge in that pronouncement of his name.
“Lord Priestley,” he said icily as he spied the short, powerfully built baron of middle years. The man’s badly squashed nose, the result of an encounter with an iron door at the age of twelve, made him instantly recognizable. He was known throughout London as an inveterate bully, yet Jack could not remember any encounter between them that might have set up the man’s ire this night.
“You are Lord Darlington, are you not?” inquired Priestley’s younger and more slight companion.
Jack turned on him a glacial stare. “You are not known to me, sir.”
Though the younger man flushed, he rallied quickly. “I am Sir Alfred Ashewood, a cousin of Lord Lovelace’s, and a friend in all matters.”
“I see.” Jack gave him a second disinterested glance though he had long since noticed the youth’s brash stance with hand on his sword hilt. Lord, the youth would not live out the year if he so swaggered about Jamaica.
When Jack neither added to his comment nor moved so much as an eyelash, Priestley cleared his throat. “Lord Lovelace expects that you will wish to accompany us at once to his home in order to discharge your debt.”
“I think not.” Jack’s voice was singularly devoid of encouragement. “Good night, gentlemen. I am late for another more entertaining appointment.”
Priestly moved as though he would block Jack from entering his coach. Just as speedily, Zuberi stepped between the two noblemen, silent and impassive, yet as effective a checkmate to provocation as a knight on the chessboard.
Jack offered his servant a wry glance, then entered the coach without even glancing back at his would-be escorts.
When Zuberi had done likewise, Jack rapped briskly on the coach’s roof to indicate he was ready to proceed. Once the coach lurched away from the curb, Jack reached to open the lantern to dispel the gloom. “ ’Tis a witch’s tit of a night from which even the moon hides.”
“The moon always follows the sun,” Zuberi pronounced solemnly, as though he had followed his master’s thoughts.
Jack smiled slightly. “Had I but your calm acceptance of life, Zuberi. You are exempt from all contingencies of pain and longing and remorse and suffering.”
“One man may suffer much and understand nothing from it, my lord,” Zuberi responded as he draped a bristling robe of black bear fur over the viscount’s legs. “Another man may sit upon his reed mat and watch the day struggle with its own loss. Verily, the moon will follow the sun.”
Jack absently rubbed his throbbing brow with long lean fingers, his thoughts returning to Priestley’s appearance. It seemed that Lord Lovelace worked with a surprising rapidity when he found cause. The pair had, no doubt, been sent by the earl to provoke him to admit to the debt he could not pay. But why?
Lotte. He had no doubt Lovelace’s actions were the results of some contretemps with Lotte. Though he discouraged it, she had recently begun confiding in him her unhappiness with her husband’s neglect. Did Lovelace now suspect that he was seeking the role of his wife’s lover?
An unholy expression moved across Jack’s face.
If only Lovelace knew the truth! His interest in Lotte was not in the least carnal. The source of his chagrined affection was not love, not even lust, but a far more unnerving sensation. Lady Charlotte Lovelace reminded him, inexplicably, of his long dead mother.
The first time he had entered a salon in which she was present, her rich laughter had risen up and snared his attention. Even as he glanced in her direction he expected to sight another of London’s pretty, self-indulged ladies. But then he had spied her. Her back was to him, but the graceful arch of her bare neck and shoulders had stirred to life within him some inexpressibly dear, if faint, memory. His breath had caught and his stomach had constricted in shock while tears pushed hard at the back of his eyes. It had taken all his will to keep from rushing up to her and … and what?
The sudden sentiment had appalled him, he who prided himself on being void of emotions. Yet he could not look away from her. Even as he neared her and knew her to be a stranger … something that bespoke of another attachment too dim to be completely recalled, yet too indelible to be completely forgotten, remained.
In the months following, with the hope of mastering the resonation of tenderness her presence inevitably caused him, he had pressed his acquaintance to become part of her dull cadre of friends. She had proved to be as kind as her smile though not at all his type. Even so, he could not now shake the disquieting feeling that she aroused by her mere appearance.
The London residence he had inherited contained only one badly damaged and deteriorating portrait of his mother. It showed a quiet, self-possessed woman, looking frail in a brocade gown styled in the manner of a score of years earlier, her reddish hair piled up and unpowdered. The woman in the portrait did not possess Lotte’s surpassing beauty nor vivacious temperament, yet the link remained. His only consolation in his self-embarrassment was that no one else knew of his feelings.
Now her husband wanted his money, or his blood. For himself he would meet and best Lovelace without qualm or regret. But he would not risk making Lotte a
widow. He was a gambler and no gambler went against his instincts without courting disaster. He knew, instinctively, that he must not cause Lotte pain.
He leaned suddenly toward his servant. “Zuberi, I’ve no choice but to leave London, tonight.”
As their gaze met across the short distance, Zuberi nodded slightly but his black eyes were more serious than before. “A man must sometimes unmake his life that he may begin again the journey to himself.”
A wicked grin hoisted one corner of Jack’s mouth and he struck the larger man a blow on the front of his shoulder with the flat of his hand. “Perhaps you should have remained with the bishop to become a priest, Zuberi. Your unorthodox sermonizing might have lured even me to church upon occasion.”
Zuberi straightened as much as the low curvature of the coach ceiling would allow. “ ’Twas the expectation of my first master who offered me, at the tender age of six, to the bishop of Barbados as atonement for his sins. For seven years I studied the Bible, prayed, and learned to make sums that I might keep records for the rum distillery which the bishop operated. Alas, my wretched sinfulness caused me to be sold away.”
Jack offered him a fellow sinner’s smile. “As I recall the tale, ’twas your distinct fondness for women that ruined you.”
Zuberi’s handsome face split in a sensual, full-lipped smile. “Nature flourished early in me. The bishop’s cook ruined me for the church but not for life, my lord. At twelve years of age I was sold into the household of a sugarcane widow whose husband had recently perished from the yellow fever. She called me her little blackamoor after the Parisian fashion, and dressed me in silk turbans and brocade vests that I might fetch and carry in style for her wherever she went.”
The twinkle in Zuberi’s sloe-black eyes was apparent even in the darkness. “But I grew so quickly, my lord, that she soon found other uses more reasonable to one of my new stature.”
Jack chuckled, “I can well imagine, my grandly-proportioned friend.”
Zuberi again inclined his head, an action that often sufficed for speech when he wished to be tactful.
Zuberi was no longer a slave, though he had been one when Jack won him on a bet with a Louisiana planter three and a half years earlier. An abolitionist by inclination rather than politics, Jack had freed the man on the spot. In gratitude, Zuberi had offered to serve as Jack’s personal servant Now, as viscount, he had a dozen servants to do his bidding. A new thought struck Jack. “Have you ever thought of returning to your homeland, Zuberi?”
Zuberi shook his head. “I should not know it nor it I. My mother once told me it was a sign that I would journey much in my life but never set foot on the soil of my ancestors. I long to sail again on the great sea to the islands of my youth.” The smile returned to his voice. “In Barbados the air is perfumed with the warmth of the sea and the earthly delights of fruit and flower. There the wind carries the breath of the sun even into the shadows. And the soil, it is as brown and fertile as its women.”
“I envy your concept of paradise,” Jack murmured. “I’m told I have inherited several holdings in the West Indies, interests my Royalist grandfather established with Lord Willoughby and then saw restored after the defeat of the Commonwealth. Perhaps I will one day join you on your voyage westward.” A glimmer of the rogue brightened his gaze.
The larger man smiled. “My people believe in the Old Ways, which say that, of all God’s creatures, woman is the most perfect. ‘She maketh glad the heart of Man’, so even your Bible says. We say it is for man to seek the most fertile field upon which to sow his seed.”
“In that instance, I should be glad to do my part of the plowing,” Jack responded and then yawned, feeling the tug of sleep at the corners of his thoughts. Perhaps he would not leave tonight— No, if he tarried Lovelace would no doubt send his henchmen to beat upon his door. “Son of a whore!” he muttered darkly and reached again for his brandy.
He was not a man given much to thoughts of his own morality. But the day’s events had left him feeling as if he had taken a fork in a road before he had noticed there was a choice before him.
He allowed himself a final sip of brandy from his silver flask before saying to his man, “You shall remain in London until you hear from me.”
“You are embarking on a journey?” Zuberi’s handsome, broad-featured face split in a grin so irresistible that it soured Jack’s mood even further.
“Nothing so romantic. I hear the spa town of Bath has the best gambling to be found outside London. I am in need of a chance of air. It will do as well as any place.”
Zuberi’s expression resembled a mask carved from the monkey-pod wood of the islands. “The moon always follows the sun.”
Jack grunted as the coach lumbered down the lane. Zuberi’s statement did not seem a heartening one but rather a warning of the wages of sin.
It was an hour when nocturnal creatures feel the pull of their lairs and cockerals twitch in unconscious anticipation of the morn. It was an hour when men may think themselves exempt from the strictures of the mortal world, when reason slumbers and fantastic desires awaken and stretch in anticipation of mischief. It was an hour in which Jack Laughton did his best and most diabolical thinking.
“What would you have a man do who has lost his last shilling?” Jack spoke to the vast empty highway of the Great Western Road as he rode purposely through the deep blue night silvered at the edges by a dawn not yet born. “What indeed?”
The exercise and chill had brought him to a state of semi-sobriety, the worse part of any debauch. He was sober enough to feel every jolt of the road in his knees and spine. He was sober enough to comprehend what his defiant gesture hours’ earlier had cost him. He was sober enough to be galled by the fact that he had turned his back, for the first time in his life, on a challenge. And for the most prosaic of reasons, gallantry toward a woman.
He was also sober enough to know that he must find a way out of his predicament before Lovelace finished him in society by publicly branding him a coward and a defaulter on his debts.
Since he felt he did his best thinking when he was not quite sober, Jack decided to remedy his regrettable state. He reined in his horse, pulled from the pocket of his coat a flask, and drank deeply from it. The contents slipped familiarly down his throat, warming as it went straight to the pit of his empty stomach. After a moment, and two swallows more, his serviceable if threadbare pride cloaked his chagrined thoughts in the need for action.
The remedy to his troubles lay in discharging his debt as quickly as possible. A sudden withdrawal from town for a few days could be explained away by a vague reference to an ailing country relative. But only if he returned with a full purse. Once he had paid Lovelace, he would be able to bow out gracefully from their quarrel.
Jack closed his eyes in sullen reflection. He was being a fool! Why should he protect Lovelace? Why should he protect Lotte at the expense of his own pleasure? She was, after all, nothing to him but a dull reflection of an even duller memory.
He sank his chin into the folds of his collar and jerked his tricorner hat lower to stave off the chill eddying about his neck and ears. There was another fly firmly ensconced in the balm needed to soothe his troubles. That fly was destitution. He needed a stake in order to gamble in Bath. But where, oh where, was he to find such a stake?
After a moment he lifted his head and sniffed the air like a hound on the scent. The fresh chill of October and the sharp grassy odor of harvested hay stung his nostrils. Nothing, yet surely something more than his own dissatisfaction with himself carried on the wind, his keen senses told him. What?
Then he heard it. An unexpected sound came faintly but distinctly on the breeze, pricking up his horse’s ears as well as his own. This time he did not doubt his senses. He reined in his mount to glance back over his shoulder.
The black hulk of the traveling coach was all but indistinguishable from the tenebrous forest from which it had emerged. Backlit by the silvery hem of pred
awn, the occasional golden flashes of shuttered lantern light marked its progress across the heath.
“Some other desperate soul aflight,” he murmured as he leaned forward with a reassuring pat for his horse’s neck.
None but the desperate or those on secret missions dared travel this lonely stretch of road at night. Every sort of thief from footpads to well-mounted highwaymen traversed the deserted stretches of Hounslow Heath betwixt dusk and dawn. The sensible spent their nights at inns where the most dangerous thing likely to accost them would be bedbugs. Who, then, was so desperate or secretive as to risk being abroad at this hour?
Curiosity was an emotion that seldom visited Jack, yet he backed off the highway and into the shadow of a lone larch tree to await the vehicle’s approach. The merry sound of the harness bells, so at odds with the eerie silence of the surrounding night, quickened his whiskey-soured spirits as the coach approached. Who, indeed, traveled this night?
The richly appointed traveling coach rolled past him without recognition of his proximity. As it passed, light from the lanterns pegged on either side of the driver’s seat twinkled in the polished brass and silver trimmings, advertising the wealth of the occupants.
Cinderella’s coach could not have appeared finer in his envious gaze, or riper for the taking. The vehicle was without a guard, who usually rode with musket at the ready.
A guileful smile lifted the corners of Jack’s mouth as he stared after the vulnerable equipage rolling down the empty highway. Then he glanced up at the sky quilted with stars but showing at its eastern hem the beginnings of the dawn.
When in his cups his late grandfather had loved to boast of his years as a “knight of the road.” Like many Royalist Cavaliers dispossessed of their estates and property by Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Jack’s grandsire had turned to highway robbery in order to survive until the monarchy was restored. Those Royalist Cavaliers had, according to legend, stole only from their enemies, the supporters of the Commonwealth.