The Gamble

by Laura Parker

  “My first—? Lotte? Lotte?”

  But she could move with remarkable rapidity when she rose. She was through the door before he reached it, slamming it in his face with such force that the sound resounded throughout the house. Enraged, he stuck it with a fist. “What devil’s trick is this?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  London, January 1, 1741

  “Once again I ask you, where is that bastard brother of yours?”

  Sabrina held her chin high, too weary to think of a clever remark today. “I do not know.”

  She was dressed in a plain gray serge gown, her hair bound in a plait down her back. There were no adornments on her, not even the natural sparkle of her fine eyes. She had been a prisoner in her guardian’s home for nearly a month. After the first week, when he had beaten her daily with his belt, he had curtailed physical punishment, but only because Merripace had arrived in the midst of the ordeal and had been horrified by the thought that his prize bride might be damaged.

  He would bend her to his will in his own way once they were married, she had heard Merripace say in cloistered argument with Cousin Robert, but he would not take an openly scarred or battered bride. He needed an heir out of her. She must not suffer a ruptured womb.

  Robert McDonnell paced the floor of his library, infuriated to be reduced to less overt methods of punishment and persuasion in interrogating his ward. He had put her on bread and water rations and sequestered her in a tiny dark closet for days when she was not standing before him, as now, being drilled by the same questions. Yet she had never varied from the first; she would say nothing about the whereabouts of her brother.

  “You will tell me, Sabrina, eventually.”

  “Not even with my dying breath,” Sabrina answered in a bare whisper.

  Truth be told, she did not know where Kit was to be found, yet she suffered no deep qualms over his disappearance. She was certain Jack had had a hand in the boy’s escape and was equally certain that he was being better looked after than he would have been under Cousin Robert’s roof. She would withstand a great deal. Starvation would have killed Kit.

  What she could not fathom was why Jack remained adamant in his story that he was a highwayman.

  His announcement had electrified the soldiers. The startled sergeant had asked the viscount to repeat his assertion. Jack had, adding that the young woman they had come to arrest was not only guiltless of any crime but that she had been his victim. She was being held captive in his home.

  Something in his manner, so calm yet so emotionally flat, had kept her from contradicting him. Over Robert McDonnell’s vocal objections, the beleaguered sergeant had said it was all too much for him to untangle and that they would all have to be taken to headquarters.

  Sabrina did not even know what Jack had said to the officers once they reached the Home Office because she and her guardian, mere commoners, had been held in the hallway while Lord Darlington was entertained as the aristocrat he was.

  After what seemed an eternity, she was released, uncharged, and remanded into the care of her guardian. On their way out of the military headquarters she spied a flyer tacked to the barracks door which offered a reward of five hundred pounds for the capture of “Blackjack” Law and the return of the Lyndsey woolen heiress. Jack had known about this. Why had he not told her?

  Her gaze moved quickly toward her cousin as he stopped short before her. “Where is he?”

  She flinched but did not cower as his hand swept with stinging force across her face.

  Pain flared in her cheek and the dull ache of a hunger headache flared to full throbbing in her temples. The one question she had gotten an answer to just this morning was how the soldiers had found her.

  She cradled her cheek as angry tears burned her eyes. “I should be careful, cousin. Sir Millpost will soon be here to collect his reward.”

  “Damned snoop!” She saw with satisfaction as the gibe found its mark.

  “Merripace was most generous in the reward he put forward on your behalf,” she continued, for words were her only defense.

  “Too generous,” he muttered and turned abruptly away.

  Sabrina relaxed as he moved from her. Millpost the thief taker! And Cousin Robert forced to be his benefactor. What a merry pair they made! “I am amazed that you offered a ha’penny for me.”

  “I did not. That was Merripace’s doing. I did not suspect when I suggested he return to London from Bath while I led the search for you that impatience would drive the old fool to plaster the countryside with the news that you had been kidnapped. Had he stayed out of the matter, I would have recovered you soon enough.”

  Never, thought Sabrina. She had almost won free. A few hours more and she and Kit would have been away to sea, sailing away from England and their cousin forever. The bitterness of that near escape was with her still.

  “Why did you not simply allow me to vanish? What matter to you—oh, of course!” Sabrina wondered why she had not thought of it before. The answer was that she had no interest in the legal ascendancy of inheritance laws. Since coming to London all her attention had been upon securing Kit’s claim. Now she saw her error.

  “You cannot afford for me to die, can you?” She smiled for the first time in weeks. “My father would not have been so foolish as to name as our guardian the next in line to his fortune. The temptation would be too great to simply do away with us. If I should die you would lose control of the inheritance.”

  He shot her a truculent glance that made her stomach quiver. “Now that Millpost has made public knowledge of the circumstance of your recovery, I can do little but play out the tarradiddle that you are a victim and that Lord Darlington is a highwayman and the true culprit.”

  “He is not guilty of anything and you know it.”

  “What do I care? They will hang him in any case.”

  “You cannot be certain.” Sabrina played a desperate game and she knew it. The cards were stacked against her and at stake was her life. Yet she needed the challenge of matching wits with her enemy, trumping where she could, or she would go insane. “Lord Darlington is an aristocrat. The House of Lords will judge him. They may not consider it a genuine crime to debauch the daughter of a merchant. And if they free him what do you think he will do?” She smiled broadly. “He will come here and skewer you for the trouble you have given him.”

  McDonnell smirked. “He would not dare.”

  “You don’t know him as I do. Believe me when I tell you, his methods are as ruthless as they are thorough,” she continued confidently. “He will, most likely, confront you in a public place and offer you his challenge. If you refuse he may take a bullwhip to you in the streets. You are, after all, a commoner and you have set yourself against an aristocratic house.”

  He had turned very white and she saw his hand tremble as he lifted it to adjust his cravat. “There’s nothing I can do in any case. He freely made his claim.”

  Sabrina held back the opinion that Jack had done what he did for her sake. It would further inflame her tormentor. “Were I you I would seek to present myself as friend to him instead of a foe.”

  “How so?” he questioned in disbelief.

  Sabrina shrugged. “You might allow me to speak for him at his trial.”

  He sneered. “Disabuse yourself of the notion. Until Kit is returned to my care, you are little more than a criminal yourself.”

  “Then you will have nothing, for all your trouble. Darlington will be freed. When he is, he will kill you or leave you as good as dead. Then who will wish to align themselves with a cowardly commoner and his wanton of a ward? There won’t be enough guineas in all the world to buy back your respectability.”

  She knew he was listening to her, though he resented every moment of it. “You are free with your threats, but I do not see any profit to be had in allowing you to save him.”

  Sabrina met his eye and played her final trump card. “I will marry as you wish, if L
ord Darlington is set free.”

  “Yes, of course, your word on that is sufficient inducement,” he jeered.

  She held his gaze. “I swear upon my father’s grave to wed as you will it, if you allow me to speak in court for Lord Darlington and he thereby wins free.”

  She saw the calculation going on behind her guardian’s pale stare. “And if he is not freed?”

  She did not even blink. “Then you may murder me, for I will never again do your bidding.”

  The barest hint of a smile, as cold as it was unpleasant, lifted a corner of his lipless mouth. “Now that he’s seen you again, Merripace is still willing to take you on.” She felt the pricking of her skin as his gaze raked her shapeless gown. “It must be the smell of soiled goods that makes his prick puckish.”

  She ignored the ugliness of his remark, for she had already suffered the indignity of having him order Mrs. Varney to confirm the fact that she was no longer a virgin. “That is to your advantage and mine. So what is it to be, Cousin Robert? Is there a bargain between us?”

  “You will swear, your hand on the holy Bible?”

  The cell into which the Earl of Lovelace was shown by the gaoler was clean and spacious and sparsely furnished by a cot spread in heavy winter linens, a basin, chamber pot, a small trunk, and a chair and desk at which the prisoner sat.

  Though the day was wintry gray, Darlington sat in his shirtsleeves before an open window, his bright head bent over his moving quill, his face bearing a tense absorbed expression unlike any Ran had ever seen on the man’s face before. Boredom yes, indifference certainly, icy rage mayhap, and most often mocking disdain. But this concentration lent his features a wholly new and unsuspected refined and intelligent quality.

  Or perhaps I am looking for excuses, Ran thought. Lotte was with child. Though she claimed different, how could he believe other than the man before him was the sire?

  He stepped onto the small rug that had been spread against the chill of the stones beneath his feet. Regardless of the amenities available to many of the stateside residents of Newgate, the thick walls and the bars at the window were there to remind a soul that even on the best of days he was a prisoner.

  “Darlington!”

  The viscount looked up distractedly and then, seeing who his visitor was, stood and bowed slightly, but said nothing.

  “I have received the remittance of your gambling debt.”

  “I am glad to hear it.” Darlington’s voice lacked its usual drawl of interest. “I regret it could not be tendered personally and in a more timely manner.”

  Ran loosed the top button of his riding cloak and shed it, laying it over his arm. “I hear you sold Rockingham Estate to raise the funds.”

  Darlington nodded. “You are well informed.”

  Ran frowned. This mild conversation was neither what he had expected nor come for. “Why do such a thing?”

  “Contrary to the sentiment engendered by the ownership of such memorials, my ancestral home means nothing to me. One way or the other I do not intend to return to England.”

  “It would seem your life has caught up with you at last.”

  Darlington closed the lid of his inkwell. “So it would appear.”

  “You beg to differ?”

  “Not in substance of your condemnation, only in the particulars of the events which have led me to this juncture.”

  Ran smiled. “You will now protest your innocence.”

  “Never innocence.” He dusted his letter with sand as he spoke. “Yet I will own that I am not in fact the real Jack Law. Nor did I kidnap Miss Lyndsey. I did seduce her away from the safety of your wife’s residence. I did take her to my bed. I did help her liberate her brother from what was little more than prison.” He looked up a moment from his activity. “And, of course, I did shoot the Scottish fellow, but only because he was about to knife Miss Lyndsey’s brother. All that, I fully confess. I do not believe any of it is accounted crime enough to hang a noble.”

  “We will see.” Ran was suddenly impatient to be gone, regretting his decision to come at all. For this man, Lotte had ruined herself!

  “The House of Lords is prepared to sit in special session in order to bring this matter to a quick and just end.”

  “How thoughtful of them. I do grow weary of my cage.”

  Ran felt the strength of personality in the gaze Darlington turned on him and took an equal measure of him. Had Lotte loved him? Why then had he not spared himself the humiliation? And why did he now wonder about the motives of a man whom he had wished most fervently dead these past weeks?

  “If you are innocent, as you say, of criminal activities as Jack Law, why confess?”

  Darlington met his question with a brief smile. “Miss Lyndsey may be wealthy, but she is a commoner. She would have been held in one of Newgate’s common rooms where she would not have lasted a night. If she had not been killed for her garments, she would have been driven mad by the dishonorable attentions of the males. I would have done anything to prevent that.”

  Ran could not argue the truth of his words. The vileness and depravity of Newgate was notorious. A young woman of Sabrina’s beauty would have been raped first by the guards and then any prisoner with coin to buy her, and then finally left to the rabble of the common cells.

  An honorable impulse from a dishonorable man? Lotte claimed Darlington was in love with Miss Lyndsey. Yet he could not quite believe that there was not some other discreditable motive in the man’s actions. “When you first made your confession, Miss Lyndsey is said to have cried out that she shot the Scotsman.”

  Darlington’s face lit up briefly. “She is a noble thing, is she not? I doubt she realized they would hang her out of hand for that confession.”

  “You would have me believe that she was thinking only of saving your graceless neck?”

  Darlington smiled. “I have that affect on women. Alas, in this instance, it is of little good to me.”

  “You use your mistresses hard.”

  “And cast them off just as easily,” Darlington finished self-mockingly.

  If he had had his sword Ran believed he would have run the unharmed man through at that instant. “Lotte is with child.”

  “Yes.” He smiled at Ran. “Congratulations.”

  Ran felt as if he had been slapped. His face burned with indignation. “Your salutations are misdirected. I am quite certain the child is yours.”

  He saw the old wicked humor return in Darlington’s gaze. “Believe me, were the deed mine I would show no compunction in admitting it, even to you.”

  “If?”

  “If.”

  Ran turned to pace the room. Now that he had begun this damned interview, he would see it through. “I know you were lovers.”

  “You know nothing of the kind,” Darlington answered smoothly. “If you choose to believe so, that is your folly.”

  Ran paused a few feet from him. “Why should I disbelieve my own eyes?”

  Darlington grinned. “You spied on her?”

  “I saw you both together!”

  Darlington held his gaze, as he seemed to give the matter fresh thought. “If your lady wife had given me any genuine encouragement, Lovelace, I should have taken her. You know me well enough to believe that,” he said coolly. “But you know her infinitely better. If you believe other than she tells you, then you are a fool and deserve to lose her.”

  “I see.” Ran could barely force the words through his teeth. “Then we have nothing else to discuss.” He swung away.

  “One moment, Lovelace.”

  Ran turned and looked him up and down, the act insulting in its silence.

  Darlington hooked a thigh over the edge of his desk and sat. “You are an honest man, Lovelace, if sometimes a damned stupid one. Therefore, I have a request to make of you.”

  Ran stiffened. “Yes?”

  Darlington picked up the letter he had been addressing, folded it in thirds, an
d then picked up another official document and tucked it inside the first. When he had set his seal upon it, he held it out to the earl. “I would ask that you see this delivered into the hands of Miss Lyndsey. Into her hands only, and without the knowledge of her guardian.”

  Ran did not move to take the missive. “I don’t know that I can make you that promise. Don’t know that I should.”

  Darlington smiled. “I sold my soul to the devil a long time ago. I am not going to die for my actions but I could remain imprisoned for a time. It is vitally important that she have those papers immediately.”

  “What are they?”

  Something flickered in Darlington’s gaze and Ran knew he was not accustomed to having his requests questioned, even by his equals. Nor was he comfortable with requiring assistance.

  He stood up and came forward slowly. “I have never begged a soul on this earth for anything. I am asking you.” He proffered the missive again, this time within arm’s length. “Take this to her. It is passage for three to America. I have given her directions to her brother’s whereabouts. She is to take my manservant Zuberi with her for protection. I promised her I would see her to safety. If you do not help me, her guardian will surely see her as good as dead.”

  Ran stared at him a moment longer before accepting the letter. Could Lotte be right? Could Darlington be risking his life in a selfless act to save Sabrina? Why, unless … “You are in love with her?”

  “Doubtless you are correct.” He managed a brief self-conscious smile. “Foolish whim for a man who was thought to own no heart.”

  Darlington turned away and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of weariness and resignation. “Was there any other reason for your visit?”

  “Yes, there is.” Ran took his time with the news he had come to impart. “I have been asked to stand for the prosecution at your trial.”

  Darlington glanced sharply at Ran but his expression remained neutral. “How awkward for me.”