The Lady Risks All (6 page)

On that ringing note, Gladys stomped through the open door to her room and shut it.

Suddenly feeling claustrophobic, Miranda dragged in a breath, let it out on a sigh, then continued down the corridor, and into her room at its end.

Closing the door, she paused, all but palpably feeling the restraints of her aunt’s doctrine of inviolate respectability cinching around her.

Weighing her down. Hemming her in.

Trapping her. Smothering her.

While she’d been focused on saving Roderick, through her interaction with Roscoe and the walk back to the house, that feeling of being smothered, of being restricted and restrained—of being, as the Bard had put it, “cabined, cribbed, confined”—had weakened, eased.

Grimacing, she walked to her dressing table and started getting ready for bed. Tonight had been a momentary escape. A fleeting few hours in a different world, one that operated under different license.

But this was her real life, where she had to guard against putting so much as a toe wrong, where if she was ever to have a life of her own she had to, at all times and in all ways, adhere without the slightest deviation to propriety’s dictates.

Courtesy of those few hours of freedom, the returning weight of society’s expectations felt heavier than ever, a millstone around her neck. One that, according to her aunts, she especially could never escape.

Not if she expected to have more of a life than her ill-fated mother and sister.

Gown and chemise doffed, her nightgown donned, she lifted the covers and slid into bed. Turning on her side, she gazed at the window—at the moonlit night outside.

“Sometimes, I wonder.” Her voice was so low she barely heard the words. “They might have died, but at least for a few years they were happy.”

After a moment, she settled her cheek on the pillow, closed her eyes, and sank into slumber within her prescribed world—the one in which respectability ruled.

Chapter Two

M
iranda next came face-to-face with her aunt over the breakfast table the following morning.

Iron-gray hair scraped back in a tight bun, her heavy figure concealed beneath multiple layers of fluttering draperies, already engaged with reading her correspondence, Gladys merely hmmed when Miranda greeted her.

Sitting and thanking Hughes, their butler, for the fresh pot of tea he set before her, Miranda busied herself with pouring a cup, then helped herself to toast, waiting for Gladys to make some reference to their midnight meeting on the stairs, but as the minutes ticked past in blessed silence it seemed Gladys’s correspondents had succeed in diverting her mind. Grateful for the reprieve, Miranda did nothing to draw her aunt’s attention.

As usual, Roderick had already broken his fast and gone out riding. She crunched, sipped, and pondered the revelations of the evening, in particular Roscoe’s assertion that her brother had grown to be a steady young man, and the implication that Roderick therefore no longer needed her protection.

“Well, miss!”

She glanced at Gladys. Pince-nez perched on the end of her long nose, her aunt was holding a letter almost at arm’s length as she perused it.

“It seems that Mr. Wraxby still has you in his sights. He writes that he’ll be visiting town next week and will look to call on us.” Lowering the letter, Gladys focused sharp brown eyes on Miranda. “So you still have a chance there. Mr. Wraxby is everything and more Corrine and I might have hoped for you.”

Corrine had been Gladys’s elder sister; spinsters both, and bitterly resentful of what they’d termed their younger sister Georgiana’s irresponsible love-match, the pair had nevertheless assumed responsibility for Georgiana’s three children when Georgiana and her regrettable husband, Frederick Clifford, a well-educated mill owner’s son, had perished in a boating accident twenty-three years ago.

If anything, Corrine had been even more adamant than Gladys that Georgiana’s children had to consistently and devoutly worship at the altar of respectability in order to minimize the taint of that most deplorable of stigmas, Trade. The daughters of Sir Augustus Cuthbert, Baronet, as minor gentry, and determined to cling to every vestige of social advantage that station might confer, Corrine and Gladys had never allowed their wards to forget that they forever remained just one small step away from social ostracism.

When they’d all resided in the country, at Oakgrove Manor in Cheshire—the house and estate Roderick had inherited from Frederick, purchased with the despised fortune Frederick had inherited from his mill owner father—Miranda hadn’t found the social restrictions imposed by their aunts either remarkable or onerous. Having lived under her aunts’ thumbs from the age of six, their view of the world had been all she’d known.

But the years had passed, and on Corrine’s death two years ago, with Miranda still unwed and with suitors thin on the ground, Gladys had agreed that they—Roderick and Miranda with Gladys as chaperon—should spend a few years in London, assessing the marital opportunities there, for Roderick as well as Miranda.

Roderick had bought the Claverton Street house, and a year ago they’d moved to Pimlico, only on the fringes of the expanding metropolis, but the quieter area had found favor with Gladys.

Miranda wondered if anyone had ever mentioned to her aunt that the neighborhood was also the home of London’s most notorious gambling lord. . . .

“Miranda! Pay attention!”

She blinked, dispelling the image of a chiseled face with dark eyes and a sardonic expression. “I’m sorry, Aunt. Wraxby, you said?”

“Indeed.” Gladys’s eyes were hard chips of cloudy onyx. “You’d do well to reflect on the fact that after so foolishly rejecting the Honorable Mr. Jeffers, you’ve never had another offer. If you ever want a household of your own, you’d do well to keep your mind on the task of landing Mr. Wraxby. Put yourself out to be everything he’s looking for in a wife, and the signs are that he might well offer for you.”

“Indeed, Aunt.” Miranda looked down at her plate. “I daresay you’re right.”

Jeffers
. Despite the passage of time, the name still shook her. Depressed her. The memory opened a deep well of bruised emotions, of lasting, lingering, deadening self-doubt.

Lionel Jeffers had been a Cheshire gentleman, rather older than the usual suitor, but that had only made his attentiveness toward her twenty-year-old self seem more special. She’d been swept off her feet, and had for a short time lived in hope that she would find the sort of happiness her mother and sister had aspired to, until a kind matron had told her the truth. Jeffers wasn’t interested in her, only in her fortune.

Bad enough, but when, shattered and dismayed, she’d told her aunts, they’d blinked at her uncomprehendingly. They’d known the basis of Jeffers’s interest, and of the existence of his long-standing and very expensive mistress, all along.

Recollection of the railings and recriminations that had followed her rejection of Jeffers still held the power to make her shudder.

Roscoe would be about the same age Jeffers had been . . . but she wasn’t twenty anymore.

Hauling her mind from the distraction—from the face and the body that had, last night, invaded her dreams—she forced her mind to the here and now. “Next week . . . I’ll make sure the house will be presentable, and I’ll warn Cook that we’ll be entertaining and wish to show our best.”

“Do that,” Gladys forcefully replied. She ran critical eyes over Miranda. “At least now it’s cooler, your gowns have long sleeves. Wraxby seemed taken aback when he last visited and your summer gowns showed too much skin. I’m quite sure that was one of the aspects that made him hesitate. Make sure this time that you give him no reason to question your respectability.”

“Yes, Aunt.” Miranda pushed back from the table and rose. “I must speak with Mrs. Flannery.”

Gladys dismissed her with a wave.

Heading to the morning room for her daily meeting with the housekeeper, Miranda bludgeoned her brain into providing an image of Wraxby—a forty-something-year-old widower who lived in Suffolk, and who had spotted her in Bond Street and subsequently sought her out. She studied her mental picture of that stultifyingly reserved gentleman . . .

She’d known Wraxby for nearly a year, Roscoe for just one evening.

Yet Wraxby had never appeared in her dreams.

“G
elman is waiting downstairs and, as requested, he’s brought Jennifer Edger with him.”

Seated in the admiral’s chair behind the massive desk in his study, Roscoe glanced up from the ledger he was perusing—the monthly accounts from the Pall Mall Club, which Gelman managed for him—and arched a cynical brow at Jordan Draper.

Brown-haired, brown-eyed, garbed in a brown suit deliberately designed to make him appear innocuous, Jordan, returning from checking downstairs, crossed to the desk and took his customary seat on Roscoe’s right.

“And how are they getting along?” Roscoe inquired. “Any hints of acrimony? Of Jenny wanting to slit Gelman’s throat, or vice versa?”

Jordan grinned. “Actually, no. Your lecture last month appears to have borne fruit.”

Roscoe snorted. “We’ll see.” He returned his gaze to the columns of figures. After a moment, admitted, “Regardless of whether they kill each other or not, the club’s doing well.”

“Yes.” Jordan leaned forward, pointing to a series of subtotals and explaining his projections for the coming months.

Roscoe listened and learned; he might have the world’s best head for figuring odds, but he remained eternally grateful that Jordan had, years ago, consented to leave his father’s country-based practice and throw his lot in with him. Over the last twelve years, while he’d grown and developed his now massive empire of clubs, dens, and hells, Jordan had stood, quiet and self-effacing, by his side—and made sure every last farthing was accounted for.

Even now, while he thought in multiples of thousands of pounds, Jordan was likely to chase a shilling.

In the matter of building his gambling empire, and in the even more difficult and ongoing challenge of managing what was in essence a massive enterprise built of myriad small units, they’d become a near invincible team. There was no one he trusted more than Jordan Draper.

After studying the accounts for another five minutes, he sat back. “Let’s have them up.” He looked at the footman standing beside the distant door. “Fetch Mr. Gelman and Miss Edger, Tomkins.”

The footman—rather larger and distinctly heavier than the general run of fashionable footmen—nodded and left on his errand.

He was back within minutes, ushering in a tall, aesthetic-looking man who, by his attire and manner, would easily pass for a gentleman, and a woman of middle height with lush black hair and strikingly pale skin, neatly turned out in a dark blue gown.

Both male and female paused some yards from the desk and inclined their heads. “Sir,” they said in unison.

Roscoe studied their faces, their eyes, then, slowly straightening from his elegant slouch, waved to the chairs before the desk. “Please be seated.”

His initial impression was that, as Jordan had said, the pair had buried their differences, but, given the root cause of those differences, he felt it prudent to reserve judgment. Jenny Edger was unquestionably the best piquet player he had on his books, other than himself. As such, she was best employed in the Pall Mall establishment, his club closest to the houses of the older aristocrats, who still preferred that particular game and were happy to wager large amounts on every point.

Jenny was an asset he intended to exploit to the full, but Gelman, who otherwise managed the subtleties of running the Pall Mall Club to his and Jordan’s complete satisfaction, had taken what, on the surface, appeared to be an instant and unreasoning dislike to Jenny, matched in virulence only by her apparently equally instant dislike of him.

Roscoe’s own assessment was that the pair should just sleep with each other and get it over with—or at least move on to whatever the next stage in their relationship might be—but meanwhile each too often provided the spark for the other’s tinder. Both were otherwise levelheaded and pragmatic, but put them together and drama and fireworks inevitably ensued. Last month, after being alerted to a near disaster on the floor of the club, Roscoe had called the pair before him and given them both a vicious dressing down.

By insisting on continuing to see them both together—holding them both responsible for the profitability of the club, which in fact was the case—he hoped to make each of them more aware of the other’s importance to him, as well as underscoring that their continuing employment hinged on them both performing to his satisfaction.

The meeting went well; by its end he was hopeful that the pair had at least accepted that they had to work together.

Satisfied for the moment, as Tomkins ushered Gelman and Jenny out, he turned to Jordan. “Who’s next?”

“The Tower.” Having closed and removed the ledgers of the Pall Mall Club, Jordan opened another set, laying them on the desk. “I think we need to take a closer look at the faro table. I’m not sure, but I think there’s something not quite right there.”

That was the sort of thing Roscoe would know; just by looking at the figures he could tell whether the variation in take was within reasonable limits, or . . .

Two minutes of looking and he grunted. “You’re right. Clapham’s the manager—is he here?”

“Yes. He’s waiting.”

“Good. Let’s have him up so we can ask him who he’s let loose on his faro table this month.”

T
he rest of the day proved very much a case of business as usual. Of the four reviews he conducted—two clubs, one den, and one hell—the Pall Mall meeting was the least troublesome. He sent two of his men back with Clapham to the Tower Club to deal with the crooked faro dealer—to explain his transgressions and see him off the premises. The Tower had its own security staff, but his men were of a different caliber—the sort to instill fear into those who sought to cheat without resorting to violence. He himself had taught them the knack of intimidation by suggestion, a skill he’d been forced to perfect through his early years in the business.

The den, in Soho, a recent acquisition, was having difficulties coming up to scratch in the matter of adhering to his standards of play; he had from his first foray into managing gambling establishments instituted a policy of no cheating, no card sharps, no weighted dice. In all his establishments, the house played fair—one of the principal reasons gamblers of all stripes flocked to his doors. His ironclad rule, backed by an inflexible will and an iron fist where necessary, had at first been regarded as a ridiculously naive ploy . . . until the results had started to show.

Ten years later, those few others who owned gambling establishments in London knew that to compete with his premises, they had to provide the same uncompromising guarantee . . . which very few could.

After due deliberation, he sent the den’s manager off with a flea in his ear, then called in one of his gambling specialists, an unprepossessing little man who could spot a cheat with remarkable and unerring accuracy. After dispatching Bowen to monitor the den for the next week, he spent half an hour with Jordan working out limits the exceeding of which would instantly trigger another, more urgent, review. Between Jordan’s financial vetting and Bowen’s practical vetting, Roscoe felt confident that if the den did not swiftly rectify its problems, he would be in a position to do so.

The problem at the hell, off the Strand, was more disturbing, but more easily dealt with. Two female staff leaving from the back of the building in the early hours had been attacked. They’d managed to scream and guards from the hell had come to their rescue. Roscoe consulted with his bodyguards, Mudd and Rawlins, then dispatched them to hire additional men to monitor the alleys surrounding the hell sufficiently to ensure the female staff were safely away every night.

Very early in his career, he’d realized that women were far better dealers and bankers; a very large percentage of those who ran his tables were female. As he reiterated to the hell’s manager, keeping his female staff safe and happy to work was critical to generating income; to drive the point home to the manager, his male staff, and the females concerned, Roscoe arranged to have several of the large, well-trained men he kept on retainer step in for a time to oversee the new recruits.