Page 11 of Enticing Odds (The Sedleys #5)

Cressida stared into the glass as her maid worked her long, thick locks into a charming, yet subdued creation. Something eye-catching, but still wholly appropriate for the unbearably dull meeting she was about to attend.

It had been four days since Dr. Collier had approached her in the conservatory.

Four days since she’d done the bawdy thing, calling attention to her lovely figure and its unladylike beads of sweat in indelicate places. It had been ill-considered, even for her.

What had happened to the Cressida who never broke the rules inside her own home? Who wore her plainest, ugliest garments to the most unfashionable and out-of-the-way hotels for her assignations, who rode across the city in ghastly public carriages to escape notice? Once she would have cut out her lover’s tongue out if he were to speak of her sons, let alone see them, or speak with them. But now she was blatantly seducing a middle-class doctor she’d engaged as a tutor for Henry? Within the walls of her husband’s garish London manse, no less?

She frowned at her reflection.

Perhaps she ought to consider taking the doctor right in the library, atop one of the tables. How better to insult her dead husband’s memory than to mount an actual intellectual of a lower social class in Bartholomew’s monument to his own idle and wasted life?

Her expression relaxed.

Perhaps that explained all of this. Vengeful, spiteful widow that she was, she couldn’t help but lust after the man who was everything that Bartholomew was not. Kind. Intelligent. Tall and well-built. Gentle. A handsome devil. Her gaze drifted to the gilt jewelry chest atop her vanity. Within would be her gold filigree earrings, the ones Bartholomew had gifted her. It had been nearly two months since she’d last worn them.

“You don’t like it, my lady?”

At the sound of her maid’s worried voice, Cressida snapped back to the present. The mirror reflected a twisted, deeply contemplative scowl. Immediately she brightened.

“No, it’s quite alright.” She turned her head to one side. “I imagine it’ll do, at any rate.”

A short time later, she found herself trying not to think of Dr. Collier as she rode in her carriage.

Unlike the Metropolitan Gardening Society, which she found engaging and looked forward to, Cressida dreaded each and every meeting of the Ladies Union for the Cessation of Social Ills. She—and the majority of the member body, she supposed—attended so as to appear noble-hearted. And to remain in the good graces of the group’s founder, Lady Louisa Ossington, a duke’s daughter with a head more for learning and philosophizing than gossip and social posturing.

Lady Caplin found her a sweet girl, even if her conversation was a dreadful bore. Or at least, that’s how she explained her decision to instead find a seat alongside Mrs. Rickard and her matronly relation, Mrs. Hartley. After all, it certainly had nothing to do with Dr. Collier’s friendship with Mrs. Rickard and her husband. Cressida was not about to incriminate herself by asking after the doctor’s nature and history.

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 he must come, 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 with gaming ?” 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 not I , 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. But perhaps she’d been wrong in her judgment of the younger woman.

“We’re rather similar in our thinking,” she finally said. “Are we not?”

“Why, my lady, are you suggesting I do not take the campaigns of the Ladies Union for the Cessation of Social Ills seriously?” Mrs. Rickard kept her face expertly neutral. “I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth.”

Unrolling the pamphlet and smoothing it upon her lap, Cressida allowed herself a half-smile.

“I confess, I had higher expectations for this lecture. I expected Mr. Gillig to condemn us all for skirting the law, rather than lay the blame solely on the poor. A contentious debate would have been far more entertaining; why, I know for a fact that Mrs. Tillotson nearly beggared her husband with her gaming debts.” She glanced up, searching the crowd to make sure the lady in question was not within earshot. “Others may have forgotten, on account of it having been nearly twenty years ago, but I have not.”

Mrs. Rickard’s gaze narrowed. “Nearly twenty years ago?”

Cressida raised her brows, that most useful of gestures when gossiping, for it was conveniently both affirmative and noncommittal.

“But you must have been in the schoolroom,” Mrs. Rickard said, puzzled.

“Oh, no,” Cressida said, smiling wide enough that her cheeks dimpled. “I remember it quite well. It was the first year I was out in society.”

“I confess, I thought we were of an age,” replied a surprised Mrs. Rickard.

“How flattering,” Cressida said. “But no, not quite.”

“I suppose next you’ll inform me that you bathe in buttermilk or some other such nonsense,” Mrs. Rickard said, incredulous.

“Actually, I meant to pose a question to you. About a mutual acquaintance.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Rickard turned, interest sparking in her brown eyes. “Who?”

“Dr. Matthew Collier,” Cressida said, looking to the front of the room lest her face divulge any telltale enthusiasm. The room had nearly cleared; only a few clutches of ladies stood about, still conversing. “I’ve engaged him as a tutor of sorts for my younger son, Henry. He’s had… difficulties when it comes to gaming. Losing to his classmates at cards. That sort of thing.”

Mrs. Rickard’s eyes widened. So, Dr. Collier had kept their association to himself. For some odd reason, Cressida felt a strange sense of disappointment.

“At any rate, Henry has improved greatly with the instruction. I’m much obliged to Dr. Collier and wish to gift him something… some token to express my gratitude. However, I find myself at a loss as to his interests, his pursuits.” She paused, then added with a lighthearted chuckle, “Aside from cards, that is.”

“I see.” Mrs. Rickard glanced down to her hands, folded primly in her lap. She pursed her lips, thinking. “I know he possesses a collection of stuffed and mounted animals.”

“Hideous.”

“Absolutely,” Mrs. Rickard readily agreed. “But what else? I confess, he’s a bit of a reserved individual. He’s far more forthcoming with my husband. I do know he’s an avid reader. Classics, essays, medical journals…”

“Of course,” Cressida agreed. This wasn’t quite what she was after; every insight Mrs. Rickard offered was knowledge she already possessed.

“Perhaps a book? Something light and cheerful, to raise his spirits? He’s been a tad low lately. Low enough that even Mr. Rickard found himself compelled to comment on it.”

“A tad low? Whatever for?”

“He’s always been a bit of a romantic. Seems he was keen on a lady back in his hometown. And for decades! She waited ages for him… until this past spring, when she gave up and married someone else. Apparently did very well for herself.”

“Why did he not ask for her hand himself?” Cressida asked innocently, as if she didn’t know his excuse.

Mrs. Rickard glanced around conspiratorially, which Cressida found adorable. None of these aristocratic women cared a fig for the private matters of a middle-class doctor. Of course, if they were to set eyes upon him… Suddenly she felt an irritating stab of jealousy.

“Well, in my estimation, it was a lack of initiative on both sides,” Mrs. Rickard said, affecting an authoritative tone she’d never used with Cressida before. But she must have done enough to win her way into the younger lady’s good graces to be shown this side of her. “Dr. Collier is kind to a fault. But to hear tell of this woman, I gather that she and the doctor were practically of a kind. It doesn’t do, like with like. One must…” She paused, then lowered her voice. “Compatibility, it seems, is not due to an excessive similarity in character, but rather, a similarity in… desires. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Oh, yes,” Cressida said, with a slight smirk. But what, Dr. Collier, are your desires?

Back in the conservatory, his eyes had been so wide and serious, so intently focused on the progress of his handkerchief across her bosom.

It had taken some doing, but she seemed in the perfect position to uncover what secret pleasures the mild-mannered doctor kept hidden. And Cressida would bet a pound to a penny that she would be the one to ferret it out.

“In any case,” Mrs. Rickard said with a sigh, “I’m beginning to wonder why exactly I continue to attend these wretched meetings.”

“Have you considered taking up gardening?” Cressida asked mildly.

Mrs. Rickard wrinkled her nose.

“Point taken.”

Cressida stood, and Mrs. Rickard followed. They carefully made their way through the assembled chairs, all of them now empty. Lady Louisa still stood at the front of the room in conversation with Mr. Gillig.

“I suppose we ought to thank him,” Mrs. Rickard groused under her breath.

“Or thank her , for arranging an unexpected afternoon of satirical entertainment.”

Mrs. Rickard paused to look over her shoulder. Cressida halted, so as not to crash into her bustle.

“Egad, you really are past thirty years of age, aren’t you? I confess I feel foolish for not realizing it until just now.”

Cressida would never dare shrug in public, but she made an approximation of the gesture with her face. “Six and thirty, if we’re keeping score, Mrs. Rickard.”

“Well, knock me down with a feather,” she breathed, as if it were a curse.

“That, I suppose, is meant as a compliment?”

“Of course it is,” Mrs. Rickard replied haughtily as she turned about. “And you better well take it, for I’m not often in the habit.”

Cressida smiled. Neither was she.