Page 39 of Enticing Odds
Why would she, of all people, do something so ruinous? She shooed the notion from her head. There were plenty of other things to concern herself with.
“Gaming?” Mrs. Rickard exclaimed, staring at a pamphlet while holding out a stack of the rest to Cressida.
Suddenly the scraggly little dog in her relative’s lap sat up and unleashed a flurry of yaps from the other side of Mrs. Rickard.
“Walter! Walter, hush now!” admonished the dog’s owner.
One of the elderly ladies seated in front of them glanced over her shoulder, her eyes filled with censure.
Mrs. Rickard sighed dramatically. “Remember, dear, if hemustcome, he needs to maintain proper decorum.”
“It’s his hearing,” the elder lady said, shaking her head sadly. “He must be imagining things in his old age. Ah, me!”
Cressida, now questioning her choice of seat, took the stack of pamphlets from Mrs. Rickard and pulled her own copy from the top before passing it to the lady on her left.STREET BETTING, THE ACCUMULATING DANGER, it screamed at her in massive block letters.THE SICKENING OF ENGLAND, THE UNBRIDLED BARBARIAN TEMPERAMENT!
“What, pray tell, is wrong withgaming?” Mrs. Rickard added,sotto voce.
“I’d imagine it’s something to do with people enjoying themselves,” Cressida drawled.
At the front of the room, Lady Louisa gently clapped her hands and began to present their guest speaker, an angular man who wore his whiskers long and scraggly and must have been as old as Methuselah. Cressida supposed it had been an age since he had been acquainted with a razor and a hot towel. Mr. Zebulon Gillig, Lady Louisa introduced him as.
Then she took a seat off to the side, and Mr. Gillig approached the lectern to a smattering of unenthusiastic applause. He cleared his throat with a great deal of effort and surveyed the room with a disdainful eye.
“Gambling!”
He paused, clutching both sides of the lectern as he let the single word sink in.
“Surely he jests, you think. Surely a rubber of whist here, a harmless wager there… surely notI, you protest.” The man chortled, which ended in a rather alarming spell of wheezing and coughing. He banged upon his chest with a fist and continued. “Cards after dinner? How, you ask, could something as benign as a subdued game of cards between friends and family be anathematic to everything this great empire stands for?”
Cressida glanced about. Most of the ladies sat wide-eyed with alarm. The room was deathly silent, everyone on the edge of their seats, waiting to be eviscerated by this pedantic old man.
“But!” he boomed, causing more than one person in the audience to jump. “But! It is not you good, civilized Christian ladies who threaten the sanctity of the moral order. ’Tis not your parties and your homes that foster this filthy epidemic, this deplorable addiction that breeds in the darkness and squalor.”
A few sighs of relief were heard. Cressida did her best to keep from smirking. She glanced surreptitiously at Mrs. Rickard. The younger lady sat completely still, but with one winged brow arched to its limit.
“No, the crimes of which we speak are perpetrated not by you…”
“Thank heavens, I presumed he meant to lead us out in shackles,” Cressida murmured, low enough that Mrs. Rickard could hear.
“…but by those in the list houses, the spielers. Gangs and mobs that terrorize and brutalize our poorer corners…”
“Honestly, I might prefer that to this,” Mrs. Rickard whispered back, her eyes still trained up front.
“Shh!” the older lady in front of them hissed, glaring daggers over her shoulder.
This scolding riled the lapdog of Mrs. Rickard’s companion; he sat up and barked in alarm, his tiny body quivering as his milky eyes looked around uncertainly.
Cressida couldn’t help but smile, even as she held her tongue for the rest of the droning, reproachful screed. The true fault when it came to gambling, in Mr. Gillig’s opinion, lay with the greedy, grasping nature of the poor, which was why the Betting Houses Act had been passed. To ban gambling away from the racetracks was a critical step; after all, if one wanted to punt upon on the ponies, one ought to make their way to the races like any civilized creature. Of course, it was not lost on Cressida that this excluded nearly every resident of the city without the means to travel to the racecourses in the countryside, or to track down a respectable commission agent within the city.
She was awash with relief when he finally finished, to a round of thunderous applause. This, of course, also set off Walter the dog again, but this time his barking was drowned out by the clapping. He finished with a string of sneezes, apparently quite pleased with himself, and a flustered Mrs. Hartley hastily excused herself, carrying the little creature out before he could go off again.
“Do you think Mr. Gillig lost a fortune at hazard once, ages ago?” Cressida mused, tapping at her skirts with the rolled-up pamphlet.
“I don’t think that man has ever smiled in his life, let alone taken a crack at dice,” Mrs. Rickard replied.
Cressida looked at Mrs. Rickard, considering her. In the past she’d always thought her too capricious, too tempestuous. Butperhaps she’d been wrong in her judgment of the younger woman.
“We’re rather similar in our thinking,” she finally said. “Are we not?”
