Page 10 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

J oe hadn’t been expecting to sleep half so well as he had. This was a strange place, after all, coming on the end of many days on the frigid road, and their arrival had hardly been a serene welcome into calmer waters.

In cases like this, he was happy to find his instinctive assumptions were incorrect.

Blackcove was unlike anywhere he’d ever laid his head before. Even at Dom Raul’s estate in Lisbon, the restrictions of the urban infrastructure around them would have prevented such a sprawl from ever being imagined, much less made manifest.

The interior, similarly, was a completely different species of luxury than the Portuguese manor had been.

Where Lisbon had offered tile mosaics, gleaming bronze reliefs, and endless warm enclaves for lounging, this place had a distinctively more Renaissance charm, with darkly colored silk wallpapers hugging every room and a bounty of unsettling stone creatures carved into the corners and panels of a maze of twisting hallways and cavernous interior spaces.

Last night, when he had ventured into those halls to find a servant to bring them a small dinner before bed, he’d turned the wrong way on his return and found a trio of grotesques laughing at him from above a large fireplace cut into its own recess.

They weren’t quite masculine or feminine, he had thought, peering closer despite the fireplace and the ugliness attempting to push him away.

He thought with open fascination that they looked like a chorus of beggars, not jealous at all of the opulence but sickeningly amused by it instead. He thought they looked like a child’s story of wicked instincts trapped forever in stone. And worst of all, he liked them very much.

He was no stranger to gargoyles and such, of course. He was a Londoner, after all. He simply didn’t think the similar things he’d seen back in the city ever looked quite so happy with their lot, even if their stone mouths were turned up at the corners. Not like these three.

He’d come back to the room with the word grotesquerie tickling at his tongue, wanting to be said, and so he’d had no choice but to share what he’d found with Freddy and, inevitably, to take him there as well.

They’d ended up having their dinner under the eyes of the cackling tribunal. Freddy had called them a trio of piskies. Imps, he’d rectified later, upon realizing Joe didn’t know the word. Cornish imps.

They were the first thing Joe thought of that morning, blinking away the haze of fatigue and relief against the early rays of the rising sun.

Almost as a reward to him, he immediately saw that his own bedroom had piskies too, cutting the upper corners of all four edges of the room, perched on tilted shields, watching him sleep.

And still, even knowing he ought to be unsettled, he liked them quite a lot.

The shared washroom between his chamber and Freddy’s was already alight with the sound of sloshing water and the faint hum of the other man going about his morning ritual.

Joe knocked, of course, even though he likely didn’t need to, and rather than answering, Freddy leaned back on one of the sideboards and opened the adjoining door with his stockinged foot, still holding a foamy razorblade in one hand.

“Morning!” he said, as though he hadn’t just performed bizarre acrobatics, and immediately went back to removing the stubble that had appeared during their journey.

Joe himself frowned at his reflection and the dark shadow of his own unkempt, road-worn face.

He still very much needed a trim to his hair, he thought, and he’d have to find someone to launder all the clothes he’d brought that still fit him properly.

It was exactly the type of irksome mundane task list that brought him fully back into his body and his reasons for being here.

“We’ll be the first to breakfast,” Freddy told him with cheer, making a show of slapping his own face with the warm, wet towel he’d prepared, twirling and dragging it over his shaven skin. “Which means all the best things will still be for the taking!”

And of course, like he had been since the first mention of Blackcove a week ago, Freddy had been correct.

The staff had put two long tables against the walls of a window-lined breakfast room, leaving plates and utensils in a stack on the ends for guests to graze as necessary as they staggered out of their rooms, seeking repast. Freddy said this would happen over many hours, often until past what would traditionally be considered luncheon, because they had all been at the tables so late into the night.

When Joe wondered if that was true, a pair of gentlemen still clearly dressed for dinner stumbled by, asking for an escort back to their rooms.

“It’s terribly late,” one slurred.

“Terribly early,” the other returned with a sigh.

Joe remembered that feeling, he realized. He remembered it not from nights at tables, but from nights on cobbled streets during the hum of a revolution, sometimes out of dark necessity and sometimes out of indulgent celebration.

If someone had told him just a year ago that he’d witness this scene and recognize it, he would have thought them mad.

The breakfast room itself was a magnificent thing.

The wall facing the cliffside was almost entirely made of glass, each window lined with gleaming wooden frames that slotted into one another like the pieces of a dissected puzzle.

The closer you got to them, the more of the ocean you could see, crashing against the jagged rocks below as though the sea was attempting to knock it all down and claim it for its own.

Joe had intended to only take a quick look, to gaze down and appreciate the wild beauty of it, but he stood there for so long that his fingers started to tingle from the weight of his plate, which he was clutching far tighter than necessary.

“Looks like the water’s trying to climb the cliff, doesn’t it?” Freddy said, coming to stand beside him. “Like it wants its own plate and a shot at tonight’s game of hazard. I’d be jealous too, I think. If I were the sea.”

“Funny,” said Cresson. “I thought it looked like it wanted to pull everything down to the sea floor.”

“Ah!” came the delighted Irish lilt of Ember Donnelly, apparently come to claim her own breakfast. “Good morning, lads! I thought you’d be abed ’til noon.”

Cresson turned, that tingling appearing back in his fingers, though he’d loosened his grip on the plate some minutes prior. “Good morning, Miss Donnelly,” he said softly, watching her swish into the room with the little red-haired girl at her side. “Did you sleep well?”

“Sweet Mr. Cresson,” she said with a grin, “do you know that’s the only time I’ve ever been asked that and felt like the other person genuinely hopes I did?”

Freddy nudged him when her back was turned, giving an eye roll, and nodded toward one of the tables nearest to their view.

“I did, by the way,” she continued after piling her plate with fruit and meat, an unusual combination, Joe thought, as people oft went with one or the other and a bit of bread. Ember had no bread at all. “I slept the sleep of the dead. How did you lot do?”

“The same,” said Joe as a pair of servants appeared with steaming kettles like two very starched red angels. “Better than I expected.”

“Oh, gloat all you want,” Freddy muttered. “I kept waking up sideways.”

“Oh, poor Freddy,” cooed Ember. “You’re always sideways.”

The younger woman seemed to hesitate before sitting down, and then only doing so because Ember herself gestured to the chair beside her. Her own plate was a delicate geometry of greens and cheese with a single boiled egg in the center like the core of a labyrinth.

“Miss Lazarus, isn’t it?” Joe put in, giving what he hoped was a reassuring little smile to the girl. “I’m Joseph Cresson. This is Frederick Hightower, Lord Bentley. We are friends of Miss Donnelly’s.”

Both Ember and Freddy reacted with expressions of mocking disdain at the sound of Frederick but did not otherwise protest.

“Oh,” said the girl. “It is a pleasure. Miss Donnelly has been so kind since her arrival last night. I am so very relieved to see a familiar face here.”

“You can call me Ember, sweeting,” came the reply, gentle but with a clear tone of reminder.

“Yes, we at this table should be using first names,” Freddy agreed with such immediacy that Joe felt the urge to groan. “I am Freddy. This one is Joseph.”

“Oh!” said the girl. “Well, I am Hannah. I confess it would be nice to hear my name from someone other than my papa.”

Freddy turned to Joe and grinned, as though he’d been perfectly aware of his annoyance and had just won anyway.

“Hannah arrived four days ago,” Ember explained. “She is keeping the notary seal for her father and assisting him with the recordkeeping of some of the larger wagers here. He wishes for her to understand the value of a shilling, even amidst the whims of wealth.”

“It’s a little alarming, to be honest,” put in Hannah Lazarus as she lifted a tiny silver spoon and whacked the side of her egg, sending a clean crack down its middle. “I’ve never seen such casual disregard for so very much money.”

“Yes,” said Freddy with a frown, “it seems like this might teach you the very opposite of reverence for gold, doesn’t it? That’s certainly what it taught me when I was your age or roundabouts. You are what? Nineteen? Twenty?”

“I am almost twenty-one,” Hannah confirmed, and it only deepened Freddy’s frown.

“Just stick to the notary seal,” he said with more weight than Joe thought him capable. “Don’t touch the dice.”

There was a beat of silence. Ember held aloft a fork skewered with a bit of bacon and a peeled slice of orange, watching Freddy with an inscrutable little wrinkle between her brows.

“Yes,” she said finally, and took a bite. “Yes, that’s good advice, my dear.”

“Coffee, please,” said Freddy to the servant with the silver urn, apparently already recovered from his moment of gravity. “With quite a bit of cream. More than that, my friend. Oh, yes! Perfect.”

The soft tinkle of liquid hitting porcelain made a fine interlude.

When it was his turn, Joe requested significantly less interruption to his own cup of coffee.

He’d gotten a taste for it as it was, fresh and sharp, still dripping into the pot.

The flavor had seemed significantly stronger in Portugal, he thought, sipping at his cup.

Even without garnish, this cup tasted somehow more of water than of revitalization.

“Tea for me,” Ember put in, lifting her own empty cup like she wanted alms.

“Are you the barrister who works with Mr. Cain?” Hannah asked, blinking politely. “I have heard Mrs. Cain refer to a Mr. Cresson, I believe.”

It took Joe a moment to realize she was speaking to him, and when he did, he immediately colored at his own hesitation. “Yes, I am. How do you know the Cains, Miss Lazarus?”

“Hannah,” she corrected with a small smile, as though she somehow knew Freddy had created this defiance of the social order only to needle Joe specifically. “We are to use first names now, are we not?”

“Good girl,” said Freddy through a mouthful of food.

Ember shook her head but also chuckled. “Dot was Hannah’s chaperone through the last two social Seasons,” she explained. “I believe Millie has escorted her a couple of times as well.”

“Yes, that is right,” Hannah nodded, looking wistful. “I’m ever so grateful for their kindness and their friendship. I hope to someday be as good as they are.”

“Cold milk,” Freddy suddenly said, swallowing with effort. “Why cold milk?”

“Because the tea is very hot, fool,” said Ember Donnelly with casual impatience. “Why else?”