Page 46 of Habibi: Always and Forever
THE HELLION ALWAYS WINS
"O utrageous!" Freddie Langston Pearce slapped the newspaper she'd been reading onto the table so violently that her breakfast plate wobbled.
Her husband, Conrad, regarded her over the rim of his coffee cup, one eyebrow cocked in inquiry.
"What is it now, my love? Have the Commons issued yet another warrant for a popular radical?
One would think they would have learned their lesson after the reaction to Burdett's imprisonment last month. "
The arrest in March of Sir Francis Burdett, MP for the borough of Westminster and a vocal proponent of universal male suffrage, had resulted in widespread protests in London.
As a member of the House of Lords, her husband had argued for the MP's release, but to no avail, as both houses were currently in the hands of Tory majorities.
Thus, Burdett continued to cool his heels in the Tower.
Freddie shook her head. "Nothing so consequential," she admitted sourly. "But thank you for making me feel small and mean for objecting to this malicious rumor about us!" Picking up the paper, she handed it across the table to him.
She and Conrad had become accustomed to appearing in the London gossip columns.
From the beginning, their union had been fraught with incidents that caused society's tongues to wag, from the haste with which they had wed to her insistence upon driving a phaeton and speculation that she might have accompanied her husband to Tattersall's dressed as a boy on more than one occasion.
(The latter was true; Conrad would never have considered purchasing a horse that his wife had not subjected to a thorough inspection.) But this.
.. this was a different matter entirely.
His brow furrowing, her husband scanned the page before locating the offending passage, which he proceeded to read aloud.
I t is with no small disappointment that this Reporter must inform her Gentle Reader that Lady O, formerly the source of many an outrageous and entertaining tale, appears to have become just another conventional society matron.
In fact, since Lord O assumed his title several years past, not a whiff of scandal has attended the lady.
Perhaps the gentleman has, at long last, tamed the shrew?
This, at least, is the dominant opinion of the members at White's, whose penchant for wagering upon almost every possible aspect of society life is well-known.
For more than a decade, betting upon the timing of Lady O's next public escapade was a regular practice, with the gentleman whose wager fell closest to the date of the actual event winning the sum of all previous bets.
But it has been so long since anyone has been able to claim the pot that such wagers have ceased altogether and it seems that the last of these wagers now never be collected.
' Tis pity she's a bore.
Conrad lowered the broadsheet. The corners of his lips twitched with the effort to repress a smile. Or possibly laughter. "You realize this is bait."
At the observation, Freddie did smile, baring her teeth. "I do. And I mean to rise to it. Spectacularly."
"I would expect nothing less." His stormy gray eyes glittered with mischief, and he leaned toward her. "How can I aid and abet you?"
She told him. When she finished, his shoulders were shaking with mirth and his head with admiration.
"My darling, are the most?—"
She patted the back of his hand. "I know."
* * *
C onrad hadn't set foot in White's for at least twenty years; not since he'd broken with his father politically and joined the Whigs. But membership in the club was not dependent on regular attendance, and so he had a perfect right to expect admittance, if not welcome, to the sanctum.
The doorman, a stern, thin-faced man of middle years and rigid posture, looked Conrad up and down before asking, with studied politeness, "Your name, sir?"
"Lord Ormondy."
The servant's scant eyebrows drew together in patent incredulity. "That gentleman has been deceased lo these three years and more."
Conrad stepped further into the entry hall, blocking the still-open doorway while forcing the other man to back away from it.
"I'm well aware of the timing of my father's demise.
" He waved toward the register of members that rested on a sideboard in the far corner of the space.
"You'll find me under the name Conrad Pearce.
I joined in the late 1780s, before I came into the title, though I'm not precisely certain of the month and year. "
"Oh, no, my lord, that won't be nec?—"
Conrad cut the man off mid-sentence. "On the contrary, I insist you verify my credentials. We can't have any old riff-raff claiming membership to this hallowed establishment."
The doorman swallowed convulsively and nodded. "Yes, my lord. You're right, of course."
Stifling his amusement, Conrad folded his arms over his chest and loomed in the man's peripheral vision as he scanned the register in search of the confirmatory entry.
"Ah, here it is, my lord," he crowed triumphantly after more than a minute, stabbing his index finger at a line midway down on the page. "February 19, 1787."
"Good man." Conrad clapped the doorman heartily on the shoulder. "Can't be too careful, can we?"
"Indeed. May I take you hat and coat now, my lord?" After Conrad had handed over the aforementioned items, the doorman gestured for him to enter whichever of the two morning rooms he preferred and moved to close the front door.
Conrad opted for the one on the right, where the infamous betting book took pride of place on a round occasional table in the center of space.
Roughly a dozen gentlemen lounged in chairs or on sofas scattered about the room in cozy groupings, drinking coffee--or hair of the dog--and chatting with one another.
At Conrad's appearance in the doorway, the hum of conversation faded until every eye was fixed upon him.
He nodded graciously at the company, as though their intense regard were no less than his due, and marked the identities of those he knew.
The faces familiar to him made up more than half of those assembled, and he might even have termed a few of them as friends, albeit none of the bosom variety.
He felt quite certain, however, that even those he did not recognize were quite aware of who he was and of the reason for his visit.
They awaited his righteous indignation.
They were doomed to disappointment.
"Please, don't allow me to interrupt you, gentlemen," he said amiably and strode toward the betting book.
Naturally, the silence stretched unabated as he opened the volume and began scanning the pages. It took him several minutes to land upon the item he sought, and he could not repress a hum of satisfaction when he identified the signatory to the ultimate wager upon his wife's eventual malfeasance.
Viscount Malcroft had belonged to Conrad's father's set and had never made a secret of his contempt for Conrad's shift toward liberalism or his "inability" to "control" his wife's behavior. (To be fair, Conrad's father had been equally contemptuous on the same counts, along with several others.)
Malcroft was also notorious for being short of readies, and he must be beside himself that he had been unable to collect for more than two years on his last wager.
Upon further perusal of the ledger, Conrad concluded the viscount stood to collect roughly two hundred pounds should Freddie become the subject of a public scandal.
No wonder Malcroft had sunk to insulting her by means of the gossip columnist in the hope of spurring her into action.
Anyone who knew anything about Freddie Langston knew she would never tolerate being labeled "conventional" or "boring" without a response.
With a wicked sense of pleasure, Conrad said to no one in particular and to everyone in the room, "Who would like to bet me thirty guineas that Lord Malcroft will be forced to forfeit his wager on my wife today?"
* * *
T he only trouble with this plan, Conrad reflected as he watched a waiter with thick sideburns and a correspondingly thick waist circle the room, pouring more coffee for those who wished it and removing the cups of those who didn't, was that it required him to spend several hours in the company of a number of men he generally went to some lengths to avoid.
Not all of the members of White's were active in government or politics, but those who were tended to be on the opposite side of most issues from Conrad.
While he had no objection to lively debates, he preferred to have them with people who could hold up their end of the argument without resorting either to lies or invective.
Fortunately, however, speculation as to how Conrad expected to win his wager was of far more interest to the assembled company that questions of law or justice.
They were, all in all, a vacuous and silly lot who spent far more of their time and energy in gossip, gambling, and gluttony than in discussing the important philosophical matters of the day.
He must grin and bear it, however, while Malcroft was fetched, for the outcome of the bet could not be settled unless the man himself were present.
When Malcroft arrived nearly two hours later, he bore all the hallmarks of a man who has been dragged from his bed after a debauch.
Heavy circles sagged beneath bloodshot blue eyes and his complexion had a gray-green tinge.
One side of his graying brown hair refused to lie flat.
His cravat (wilted) and tailcoat (rumpled) attested to the possibility that he had slept in his clothes, and Conrad wondered whether the viscount's fortunes had sunk so low that he was forced to do without the services of a valet.