Page 22 of My Own True Duchess
Jonathan silently slid back the cover over the spy-hole, saw no movement on the other side, and used his key—one of only three to fit this lock—and entered the premises where his fondest dream had come true.
He made his way to the mezzanine offices, marveling, as always, at the quiet in some quarters of the club and the noise in others. The wine cellar was as peaceful as a chapel, while the kitchen was in riot. From the hazard room came raucous laughter, suggesting the cards were running against the house tonight, and the supper room bubbled with quiet conversations and late-night flirtation.
The vingt-et-un tables knit the whole together, partly social, partly earnest—for some, desperate—play.
He loved it all, loved how the club had moods, like a lively woman. One evening tense with excitement, the next full of chatter and casual play, another placid and friendly. He lingered on the screened stairway that shielded all of his comings and goings, and decided that tonight, The Coventry Club sounded happy.
Jonathan gained his office to find Moira sitting at his desk, looking as prim as a spinster, a pair of spectacles on her nose, a pencil in her hand.
“The waltz should be outlawed,” Jonathan said. “Whoever imported it from the Continent failed to realize how thrilled the buttoned-up English would be to have an excuse to do more than bow and curtsey to the opposite sex.”
Moira rose and poured him a brandy from the crystal decanter on the credenza. “And yet, there’s never a shortage of English children, suggesting the English have sorted a few details out nonetheless.”
She brought the scent of good tobacco with her. Moira would never smoke before the patrons, though she indulged in private. She was tall for a woman, with hands more competent than graceful. Those hands had made her rich, and Jonathan richer.
“I trust the evening has been uneventful,” Jonathan said, accepting the drink.
She resumed the place behind his desk. Her movements were not consciously flirtatious, and yet, she was built to torment the male imagination. Jonathan hadn’t noticed that at first. What mattered alluring curves, big green eyes, and glossy blond hair when a woman had taught herself how to count cards?
“I still do not understand why our food and drink must be free after midnight.” She pulled off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “We make a fortune at the tables, then spend it in the kitchen. Frannie is expecting.”
The brandy was exquisite. Moira’s mood was threatening to turn troublesome. “For God’s sake, she still has one at the breast.” Frances Mulholland was their bookkeeper, and for months at a time, she’d bring an infant with her to the club.
Moira idly flipped the beads on an abacus, arranging half on each side. “She’s not due until September. We can hire a replacement this time, one who won’t be gone for weeks to drop a brat, wipe its nose, or stay up half the night with it when the croup strikes. This is not a foundling home, to be overrun with infants during daylight hours.”
Jonathan set his brandy before her. “Frannie has been with us since I bought this place. We do not replace her. I’ll manage the books in her absence, the same as I’ve done for her last two confinements.”
Though Frannie hardly knew what a confinement was. She rolled along through her pregnancies like a coal barge plowing through choppy seas. She might arrive to the club some days later than scheduled, but she delivered on her promises and did so with sturdy good cheer.
Mr. Mulholland was a lucky fellow.
“This wife hunting has addled your brains,” Moira retorted, the beads moving with a steady flick, flick, flick. “By September, you might well be on a wedding journey. By September, you might have a duchess in an interesting condition. By September…”
Jonathan passed the brandy beneath her nose. “By September, nothing will have changed. Just because I’ve sold the Paris properties doesn’t mean I’ll sell The Coventry. This is where I proved to my disgrace of a father that I would not be him, that I would most assuredly never need his influence or emulate his folly.”
She gently pushed the brandy aside. “Your father is dead. You’ve promised your uncle you’ll take a wife. Things change, Jonathan.”
To a boy raised amid chaos, change was the enemy, while predictability was evidence of a reliable order to the universe. Jonathan had made a mathematical study of predictability and applied it to card-playing. The Coventry was his temple to what he’d learned.
“My ownership of The Coventry won’t change because I’m taking a wife. I won’t allow it. Any duchess of mine will understand that certain spheres are hers to command, others are mine. This one is mine, and you really should have a sip of the brandy. It’s exquisite.”
She obliged him. One of Moira’s many gifts was a sense of when to confront and when to compromise. Jonathan had occasionally considered marrying her and suspected she had considered marrying him. She was a gentleman’s daughter—her papa was a vicar—but she’d run afoul of strict propriety in the wilds of Nottingham and become a lady’s companion in Paris.
And that lady had enjoyed the occasional discreet game of hazard, and vingt-et-un, and roulette. Jonathan had first met Moira when she’d been hole-carding for her employer in Paris, spying on the dealer’s hidden card in a game of vingt-et-un. When the dealer took a glance at his facedown card, Moira signaled her employer as to its value. The system had been subtle, involving casual gestures, facial expressions, glances, and slight movements of Moira’s fan.
Jonathan had studied Moira and her employer for three consecutive nights before he’d drawn Moira aside and given her a choice: He would turn her over to the authorities, who were ready to arrest her as part of a periodic “raid” on Jonathan’s premises, or he would become her employer.
Moira’s smile at that offer had lit up the Paris night sky.
She wasn’t smiling now. “Lord Lipscomb is playing too deeply,” she said. “He hasn’t left the table to so much as piss for four hours.”
“Is he sober?”
“For him, yes.”
“Then we do not intervene. He can stand the blunt. Davington will be leaving for Calais as soon as I can get him traveling papers.”
“So he’ll not make good on his markers.”
