Page 66 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“Yes, and in a fairly obvious way,” Oliver explained. “I want to get caught.”
Georgie idly lit his cheroot. “You’ll get booted from your club, you know.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“Does my brother know about this?”
“Certainly not.”
Georgie raised a finely arched eyebrow. “And I’m not to tell him, I suppose.” He puffed out a cloud of smoke. “Well, I’ve always longed to play Cupid. I’m dying of curiosity, but I think it would be beneath my dignity to beg for details.” And then, without dislodging the woman from his lap, he proceeded to show Oliver the rudiments of card sharping.
Georgie interspersed his lessons with bits of commentary. “You know you’ll never get another voucher to Almack’s. No, no, dear fellow, you can’t fold the edge down quite so much. They can see you doing it as far as Cheapside. Rein your degenerate impulses in a bit, if only to spare my sensibilities. Now, if this succeeds, even your sister won’t invite you to her best parties—yes, that’s precisely the way I meant for you to palm that card. People you’ve known all your life will pretend not to know you.”
“That’s rather the point. I don’t care about any of that,” Oliver assured him.
“You think you don’t, but when people start looking at you like you’re a rancid piece of meat, you’ll change your tune fast enough.” Georgie and the man across the table from him were now exchanging heavy-lidded glances that both Oliver and the courtesan found very interesting.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Oliver said. “I don’t suppose I’ll know until it’s too late to go back.” He had spent nearly thirty years being beloved and welcomed everywhere he went, and he didn’t relish the prospect of being snubbed. But that still seemed preferable to a future without Jack.
“Tell me one thing. Exactly how cross will my brother be with me when he finds out what I’ve done?”
Oliver smiled. “I’m hoping he’ll only be slightly irritated.”
“Good God. A slight irritation in Jack Turner is a flight of ecstasy in any other man. He’s more than slightly irritated on the best of days. I wish you luck in your fall from grace.”
By dawn, Oliver was ready to meet his fate.
Jack had opened and shut the silver card case so many times over the last week that he thought the clasp ought to snap off. But it didn’t, which probably went to show that the Rivingtons knew how to spend their money. He could sell this trinket and use the proceeds to feed a family of five in the rookeries for God knew how long.
Not that he would. He was too much of a besotted idiot for that. He’d keep his case as a bloody keepsake, a reminder of precisely how daft he was capable of being. He remembered what Oliver had told him the day they’d met, about how he had once known a man who clung to his father’s watch long after he ought to have sold it. So this was what it felt like to be a thoroughgoing idiot.
But here he was, opening and closing the case, watching the way the light from his candle glinted off the engraved R, running his hands along it as if it were some kind of rosary. Sarah had noticed him performing this ritual and remarked on the object’s fine craftsmanship, from which Jack inferred that she was giving her blessing upon an affair with its original owner. As if her pointed remarks about missing “that nice Rivington man” weren’t blessing enough.
Blessings were quite beside the point now, however. Oliver had returned to his life of honor and respectability, and rightly so. Jack might have hoped that every knock on his door was Oliver coming to wheedle his way back into Jack’s life, he may have felt his heart race whenever he saw a curricle and matched grays being driven especially well. But he knew it was for the best that Oliver kept away.
As for Jack, he had too much pride to seek out a man who would eventually be embarrassed by his company. Truly, he told himself for the hundredth time this evening, it was all for the best that Oliver had made a clean break of it.
There was no wood in the fireplace at this time of year, but Jack tossed all the cards that had to do with the Wraxhalls onto the empty grate. Crouching down, he used his candle to light them on fire. He waited until they were ashes, and then stared at the case some more.
“You might have warned me,” said a voice from the doorway. Jack turned to see Georgie, dressed in evening clothes. “I’ve come from Lady Bedford’s musical evening last night, you know.”
Alarmed, Jack got to his feet. “Did Sarah recognize you?”
“I dare say she didn’t see me. Once I realized it was her under all those shawls, I did my damnedest to disappear into the shadows.”
“Do you think it worked?”
“Like a charm. As soon as she began with that blasted glass ball and those accursed cards, she had them all eating out of her hand. She started with the usual rubbish—I see a sea voyage in your future. Offensively trite, the lot of it. And then she comes out with, I see a W, a dark lady who brings good fortune.”
Jack had managed things so Lady Bedford’s personal maid, an enterprising young woman who had jumped at the chance to have Jack Turner in her debt, suggested to her mistress that it might be amusingly novel to have a fortune-teller as one of the entertainments at her musical evening.
“By the time the party broke up,” Georgie continued, “two ladies were contemplating inviting both Lydia Wraxhall and Winifred Darby to various house parties. W females will be very fashionable this autumn. Don’t you look like you’ve gotten the plum from the pie? No, don’t explain why, I dare say I don’t have the stomach for finer feelings tonight.” Georgie turned to leave, but paused in the doorway. “Oh, before I leave, your friend is in a bad way. The pretty one.”
Jack’s mind reeled for a moment. “Rivington?” he asked.
“Do you have any other pretty friends? Or, really, any other friends at all?”
Ignoring that, Jack reached for his coat. “What’s the matter with him?” He thought of ruffians lurking in dark alleys; he thought of the thousand ways a man could come to grief driving that godforsaken curricle.
