Page 22 of Hazard a Guest
“Well, that’ll do, I suppose,” she said with a click of her tongue, “though really a man ought to think of his wife as the queen, not the wild card.”
She pulled it out and held it up, tracing the line of the heart. “Very well,” she decided, standing and walking back to the vanity.
She tucked the ace into the mirror so that she would see it every time she prepared herself to go to the tables. She met her reflection in the mirror and nodded to it, and she reminded herself of the most important thing of all.
The house always wins.
CHAPTER 8
Joe hadn’t been expecting to sleep half so well as he had. This was a strange place, after all, coming on the end of many days on the frigid road, and their arrival had hardly been a serene welcome into calmer waters.
In cases like this, he was happy to find his instinctive assumptions were incorrect.
Blackcove was unlike anywhere he’d ever laid his head before. Even at Dom Raul’s estate in Lisbon, the restrictions of the urban infrastructure around them would have prevented such a sprawl from ever being imagined, much less made manifest.
The interior, similarly, was a completely different species of luxury than the Portuguese manor had been. Where Lisbon had offered tile mosaics, gleaming bronze reliefs, and endless warm enclaves for lounging, this place had a distinctively more Renaissance charm, with darkly colored silk wallpapers hugging every room and a bounty of unsettling stone creatures carved into the corners and panels of a maze of twisting hallways and cavernous interior spaces.
Last night, when he had ventured into those halls to find a servant to bring them a small dinner before bed, he’d turned the wrong way on his return and found a trio of grotesques laughing at him from above a large fireplace cut into its own recess. They weren’t quite masculine or feminine, he had thought, peering closer despite the fireplace and the ugliness attempting to push him away.
He thought with open fascination that they looked like a chorus of beggars, not jealous at all of the opulence but sickeningly amused by it instead. He thought they looked like a child’s story of wicked instincts trapped forever in stone. And worst of all, he liked them very much.
He was no stranger to gargoyles and such, of course. He was a Londoner, after all. He simply didn’t think the similar things he’d seen back in the city ever looked quite so happy with their lot, even if their stone mouths were turned up at the corners. Not like these three.
He’d come back to the room with the wordgrotesquerietickling at his tongue, wanting to be said, and so he’d had no choice but to share what he’d found with Freddy and, inevitably, to take him there as well.
They’d ended up having their dinner under the eyes of the cackling tribunal. Freddy had called them a trio of piskies. Imps, he’d rectified later, upon realizing Joe didn’t know the word. Cornish imps.
They were the first thing Joe thought of that morning, blinking away the haze of fatigue and relief against the early rays of the rising sun. Almost as a reward to him, he immediately saw that his own bedroom had piskies too, cutting the upper corners of allfour edges of the room, perched on tilted shields, watching him sleep.
And still, even knowing he ought to be unsettled, he liked them quite a lot.
The shared washroom between his chamber and Freddy’s was already alight with the sound of sloshing water and the faint hum of the other man going about his morning ritual. Joe knocked, of course, even though he likely didn’t need to, and rather than answering, Freddy leaned back on one of the sideboards and opened the adjoining door with his stockinged foot, still holding a foamy razorblade in one hand.
“Morning!” he said, as though he hadn’t just performed bizarre acrobatics, and immediately went back to removing the stubble that had appeared during their journey.
Joe himself frowned at his reflection and the dark shadow of his own unkempt, road-worn face. He still very much needed a trim to his hair, he thought, and he’d have to find someone to launder all the clothes he’d brought that still fit him properly. It was exactly the type of irksome mundane task list that brought him fully back into his body and his reasons for being here.
“We’ll be the first to breakfast,” Freddy told him with cheer, making a show of slapping his own face with the warm, wet towel he’d prepared, twirling and dragging it over his shaven skin. “Which means all the best things will still be for the taking!”
And of course, like he had been since the first mention of Blackcove a week ago, Freddy had been correct.
The staff had put two long tables against the walls of a window-lined breakfast room, leaving plates and utensils in a stack onthe ends for guests to graze as necessary as they staggered out of their rooms, seeking repast. Freddy said this would happen over many hours, often until past what would traditionally be considered luncheon, because they had all been at the tables so late into the night.
When Joe wondered if that was true, a pair of gentlemen still clearly dressed for dinner stumbled by, asking for an escort back to their rooms.
“It’s terribly late,” one slurred.
“Terribly early,” the other returned with a sigh.
Joe remembered that feeling, he realized. He remembered it not from nights at tables, but from nights on cobbled streets during the hum of a revolution, sometimes out of dark necessity and sometimes out of indulgent celebration.
If someone had told him just a year ago that he’d witness this scene and recognize it, he would have thought them mad.
The breakfast room itself was a magnificent thing. The wall facing the cliffside was almost entirely made of glass, each window lined with gleaming wooden frames that slotted into one another like the pieces of a dissected puzzle. The closer you got to them, the more of the ocean you could see, crashing against the jagged rocks below as though the sea was attempting to knock it all down and claim it for its own.
Joe had intended to only take a quick look, to gaze down and appreciate the wild beauty of it, but he stood there for so long that his fingers started to tingle from the weight of his plate, which he was clutching far tighter than necessary.
“Looks like the water’s trying to climb the cliff, doesn’t it?” Freddy said, coming to stand beside him. “Like it wants its own plate and a shot at tonight’s game of hazard. I’d be jealous too, I think. If I were the sea.”
