Page 61 of My Own True Duchess
“So why are you attempting it?”
Casriel stood perhaps an inch taller than Sycamore’s six feet, one and a half inches. Casriel was well built, but Sycamore had taken up rowing because it was cheap and could be done as a crew of one. Then too, he was not done growing. Dornings were late bloomers, witness five of his idiot brothers still stumbling around without wives.
“I do not attempt this sartorial wonder, I define it, while you hide amid the potted palms hoping no matchmaker has planted an heiress among them.”
“Or hoping I do find an heiress. The Season is both expensive and trying.”
That Casriel would complain about expenses was simply what happened when he opened his mouth under most circumstances. But to complain here, amid his peers, and to his younger brother…
“I’m investing my allowance,” Sycamore said. Though this was true only in a symbolic sense. “The Coventry has free food and drink after midnight, and you needn’t play a hand to partake. You might consider sending Thorne and Oak round of a night. They eat like horses.”
“You eat like a horse.”
“I have better manners than my elders because every single one of my brothers took a solemn vow to correct me when I erred at table, usually by a prolonged and zealous application of his fists. Such fraternal love has created a paragon.” Also a terror, in the words of Gentleman Jackson.
Casriel left off studying the buffet line—or the ladies in the buffet line—long enough to flick a glance over Sycamore. Something he saw must have caught his notice, for his inspection acquired a puzzled air.
“Is that my coat?”
“No. This is my coat. Yours are too narrow in the shoulders.” A plain fact that made all those frigid mornings on the river a joyous memory. “Jonathan Tresham owns The Coventry Club, or owns a significant portion of it. You will please alert him to the fact that somebody is out to undermine his establishment.”
Casriel ambled deeper amid the greenery under the minstrel’s gallery, leaving Sycamore no choice but to follow. “One doesn’t discuss such a topic in public, Cam. For shame.”
“One has more privacy while the good folk of Mayfair are circling their feed trough than one has at our own breakfast table. I said something to Anselm more than a fortnight ago, and I can’t see that he acted on my warnings.”
“You expect not only a lowly earl but a duke to report his doings to you?”
The urge to smack Casriel on the arm, to shove him in the chest, was almost overwhelming. “To have this discussion here, where any gossip might lurk six feet away amid the ferns, is foolish. We had more privacy in plain sight.”
He sauntered off, in the direction of the music room, batting aside fronds with a gloved hand. With the buffet set up, the music room would be empty, unless a canoodling couple was putting it to use.
Sycamore would certainly like to be canoodling with somebody, though doing his gentlemanly duty toward an acquaintance had to come first. An honest club was a thing of beauty, and all true gentlemen were bound to protect its good name.
Or some such twaddle.
The music room was empty, the quiet a pleasant shock to the ears. Casriel closed the door save for a few inches.
“Either leave it open,” Sycamore said, “so we can hear and even see any who approach, or close it, so we have privacy of a sort.” Something or somebody was distracting Casriel. As the eldest of a herd of rambunctious siblings, he ought to know about half-open doors, dense greenery, and eavesdroppers.
Casriel closed the door. “Say what you have to say, Cam.”
“Tresham’s club is using marked cards again. The decks were all changed out, but last night, I spotted another one. He has three new waiters, which is unusual for The Coventry, and one of them finds it necessary to pick up every used glass and plate left anywhere on the premises. I can’t figure what he’s about, but he makes that unreachable spot in the middle of my back itch.”
Casriel ran a bare hand over the strings of the great harp. Once upon a time, he’d been an accomplished harpist. Cam hadn’t heard him play for years.
“Isn’t that what waiters do? Clean up the tables?”
“He marches around with an empty tray, doesn’t seem to do much else besides that, unless he’s setting the tray down and piling dirty dishes on it. He has a perfect opportunity to swap out a deck of cards or a pair of dice at the unused tables early or late in the evening. He’s older, blond, skinny. Looks like a former footman down on his luck.”
Casriel took the stool at the harp and bowed his head, as if recalling a tune. “Say something to Tresham. I’ll pay your physician’s bills, and you will have, as usual, created a great stir where none is warranted. People wear rings, Cam, they have sleeve buttons and other jewelry that can nick a card. You are imagining things, but be warned that Tresham is dangerously good with his fists.”
A few delicate notes sang out from the harp, and Sycamore longed to sit as he used to and watch his brother play. The grace Casriel could summon with his hands—hands that spent too much time with the abacus and the ledger book—created an ache in Sycamore’s chest and a sense of unnamed regrets.
He’d never be able to play like that, not if he studied for ten years.
“Use your imagination,” Sycamore said over the ethereal beauty of some lament. “The cards don’t have to be marked. They only have to feel marked. A slur on The Coventry’s reputation will bring the authorities down in force. A raid will set the place back enormously. Of all the clubs, only The Coventry seems to reliably avoid entanglement with the law. And if you don’t believe me about the cards, I suspect somebody is using a spotter.”
“What’s a spotter?”
