Page 14 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

J oe hadn’t been at breakfast. Nobody much had been.

Maybe, Ember had reasoned as she carried her plate of fruit and sausage back to her room, he hadn’t wanted to risk the food here after last night. That would be sensible, and he seemed a sensible kind of man.

Ember herself was not sensible. Not much, anyway.

She passed Lord Penrose on her way back, who peered at her plate, broke into a wide smile, and announced, “No scurvy for you, eh, Miss Donnelly?!”

It was the first time he had spoken to her with anything other than dismissal, and that alone gave her a moment of pause, but by the time she turned to reply to him, he was already very far down the hall, skipping along like an eager schoolboy on his way to matins.

Lord Penrose hadn’t gone to a Catholic school, of course, but Ember imagined that if he had, he’d have had a favorite nun. Maybe a few of them. Men like that loved severe old women.

Luckily, when she got back to the room, Merryn was still there, fussing over Hannah’s hair.

“This color ,” she was cooing to the younger woman. “I’d pray for it my whole life and never be given the gift.”

“Ugh, take it and go,” Hannah replied with good cheer. “I’d much rather have your flax than my fox fur.”

“Perish the word,” chided Merryn.

Ember hesitated at the door, looking guiltily down at her own breakfast. “I should have brought you a plate,” she realized, blinking up at Hannah.

“Oh, no, I’m going to go check on Papa,” Hannah said with a wave of her pale hand. “He seemed well enough when I saw him last night, but he’s never had the strongest stomach, you know. He’d live on broth if we let him.”

Merryn frowned at that. “Well, don’t let him, miss.”

“I won’t,” assured Hannah.

Ember sat and picked at her breakfast, waiting for Hannah to be off before she scribbled out a note for Joe and sent it off with Merryn, who had, thus far, been an invaluable agent of both information and discretion.

She thought, with a little jolt of joy, that it would be fun to begin their tutelage in the conservatory where he’d taken her yesterday after her little scare.

Perhaps the pirate spirit of the first Lord Penrose would assist them in their dishonest endeavors, or at the very least offer them some insights on elevating their fashion choices.

She smiled to herself, checking her reflection twice before departing the room. She went first to the gaming hall, where she was able to borrow a couple of sets of dice, then made a direct path to the conservatory.

Even if she arrived before Joe, she thought she could practice a little.

She hadn’t played hazard for over a year, and even then it was her own variation.

In the brief window of normal play that had happened last night, she’d heard at least one games master shout “No chickens!” to a lordling who’d attempted to play with rule variance.

She chuckled to herself. She would have to tell her own masters to abandon all eloquence when the same happened at the Forge. It would improve her nights considerably to hear them shouting “No chickens!” at the guests.

She was laughing to herself, a wide smile stretching her cheeks, when she rounded the corner into the conservatory. Her smile immediately fell to the floor and shattered.

There in all his unwanted glory was Thaddeus Beck.

His hair glinted in the morning sunlight streaming in from the glass panes above.

He was standing near the first Lord Penrose, admiring a bloom of lilies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had played interloper and day-ruiner with instinctive precision.

And unfortunately, he turned around before she could beat an escape.

He looked surprised but not displeased. “Oh,” he said, “good morning, Mrs. Withers.”

Her heart gave a thump, sickening and dry against her ribs. “Miss Donnelly,” she corrected. “I don’t use Withers anymore.”

“Good morning, Miss Donnelly,” he corrected immediately, like he respected her.

She frowned.

“I like this room,” he continued, sinking down onto the bench at his knees, her bench, the one she’d sat on with Joe Cresson just yesterday. “I like the smells even more. What are these flowers called, do you know?”

“Callas,” she said automatically. “Calla lilies.”

“They’re lovely,” he said with a deep inhale. “They remind me of Covent Garden in the summer. My mum sold flowers there, you know.”

She felt her own roots growing, anchoring her to the flagstones in the entryway. What in the blue eye of God was this man trying to do right now? Covent Garden? Flowers?

“I never got to offer you my sympathies,” he said, blinking at her as though her frigid posture and silence were not unusual at all. “About Mr. Withers. Your husband was a good man. Decent. I liked him very much.”

“I did too,” she said warily. “Thank you.”

She wasn’t going to stand there like a clay pigeon, she decided. She forced her feet into motion, breaking and shaking away those invisible roots that had started to form, and marched over to the bench, her bench , to sit next to him.

She hadn’t had a plan for this, of course. If given the option, she might just scratch those black eyes out of his face right now and save everyone the trouble, but she’d hate for Joe to find her like that, picking blood out from under her fingernails.

“How did you know my husband?” she said instead, meeting Mr. Beck’s gaze and folding her hands into the soft velvet of her plum-colored skirt so that they would not act on her impulses.

She had expected him to bristle, to harshly remind her of information he’d already given her in ragged abundance ten years prior.

Instead, he started to chuckle, turning his head away from hers, breaking their eye contact, and shaking it as though he was just reminded of something fond and nostalgic.

“He caught me breaking into his den, that’s how,” the man confessed, clearly truly charmed by the memory.

“I had been using the tables to run street games for almost a month by that point, sending in my grubby patrons one by one through the broken hatch on the Sparrow’s cellar.

He found me cleaning up one morning, bin in hand and rag tucked under my chin.

We had a long, quiet standoff before I tried to bolt. ”

“What?” she said, distracted from everything by this image. “When was this?”

“Oh, about two months before he died,” he said with another little dry chuckle. “He was fast for an old man, if you didn’t know. He cut me off without even trying.”

“Did he?”

Beck nodded and sighed. “He took the dusty rag out of my shirt, threw it in the bin I’d dropped, and offered to buy me breakfast. He never even mentioned punishment. Not once. He just wanted to know what I’d been doing and how it was going. I think he was impressed.”

Ember grimaced, remembering how her husband had delighted in her ability to cheat, in giving her puzzles and watching her solve them. “He probably was,” she allowed, discomfort prickling at her bones.

“He asked me how much I was making, night to night, then laughed when I told him, this big, booming laugh. It scared the hell out of me. I offered him half of my takings and he just kept laughing.”

“Yes,” Ember said again, nausea rising in her throat. “That sounds right.”

Beck rubbed his thumb and forefinger over his eyes, as though he was brushing away the sight of his memory, like for a moment he had been back at that breakfast, sitting across from Mr. Withers.

“I think about that all the time,” he confessed to her with half a smile, like they were friends. Like they were friendly. “He changed how I thought about life that morning. I can’t imagine how many people he did that to.”

“Well,” said Ember, drawn to this, drawn to what it meant despite every instinct in her screaming that she ought to resist it and say nothing. “At least two.”

And bizarrely, they shared it for a moment, that thin little tether, delicate as a spider’s silk.

“At least two,” he agreed thoughtfully.

Joe arrived at that minute, hesitating in the doorway to the conservatory, his eyes falling on the odd, held moment of connection with what must have been deep confusion.

Beck noticed him, turning and raising his brows. “Ah, hello.” He rose to his feet and extended his large, scarred hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met yet. I’m Thaddeus Beck.”

“Joseph Cresson,” Joe said, stepping forward and accepting the handshake, a look of consideration glinting in his silver eyes. “I’m one of Miss Donnelly’s barristers.”

“Are you?” said Beck with what sounded like genuine surprise as he looked from Joe to Ember and back again.

Did he realize now? Did he know that she knew what he was planning? Was he realizing why she was here?

If so, he gave no indication of it.

“Well, pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cresson,” he said politely. “I’ll leave you two to converse. Perhaps we’ll meet again soon.”

“Perhaps,” said Joe as the other man ended the handshake and stepped away.

They watched him leave the conservatory, Ember stuck in her bench and Joe turning to observe the retreat, his posture upright and unreadable.

It only took a moment. Then, by the miracle of polite decorum, they were alone again.

Joe wasted no time crossing the room and coming to sit beside her again.

He did not wait for her to ask, to know what she needed, and instead took her hands gently in his, letting her wrap her fingers around his thumbs and hold on to him.

He let it happen in silence, as though he were not owed an explanation of what he’d just seen, what he’d just walked into.

And it made Ember want to weep. Or shout. Or demand he act the way she thought all men always did.

Why was he like this? Why?

Was it only to torment her? Was it a gift or a curse? Was it punishment for all she’d broken and all the things she’d gotten wrong?

It felt like a punishment sometimes, knowing that he was possible. That he was real.

Horrifyingly, she began to cry. Her eyes got hot and wet, and she could feel the redness baking into her face. She was furious and she was broken too.

“Take me away from here,” she managed to say, a plea, pathetic and barely audible.

He did. He helped her to her feet. He shouldered her weight. He offered her his warmth. And he took her to safety.

He did it all without saying a word.