Page 2 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)
TEN YEARS LATER
“ H e’s outside again, Miss Donnelly,” came the nervous announcement of her barkeep, a hulking battleship of a man with a voice as soft as the head on a duckling. “Should I …?”
Ember laughed. She ought to have done something else, but it was hard not to simply laugh. She looked up from her ledger, a stack of bills held aloft in her freckled hand, and said with a teasing fondness, “Should you what, Jones? Eject him halfway to Camden?”
“I could,” said Jones. “But he’d just come back again.”
“ Amadán ,” she muttered under her breath, dropping the stack of money and shaking her head.
The barman looked scandalized, but he always did when she spoke Irish.
It made her laugh again. “It’s nothing naughty, Jones. Just means fool .”
“Ah,” said Jones. “Well, that he is.”
“Let him in,” she said, winning a full-scale gasp from her barman. “Just keep him quiet, near the bar. I’ll be down in a tick. Maybe if I acknowledge him, he’ll finally bugger off, hm?”
“Maybe,” said Jones with open skepticism, turning on his heel to obey.
She stood and stretched her legs, the heavy wool of her skirt easing down on her lower back with a helpful bit of pressure. Outside, partially frozen rain was starting to skitter against the windows, the poorly wrapped gifts of early winter.
She’d been expecting this, she reminded herself. She’d expected it as soon as she’d seen that headline in the papers: CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE EXPOSED, WITHERS PATRIARCH JAILED!
Patriarch , she thought with a scoff. As though that little weasel could ever be half the man his father had been.
That paper had arrived a month past, dropping on her doorstep on All Hallow’s like a gift from her late husband, disgusted with his own progeny. She had heard him when she read it, grumbling in her ear from the ether.
What a damned disgrace, he’d said. And she’d nodded in agreement to the empty room.
Of course it was the younger son who’d come to Brigid’s Forge, ranting about fraud and theft and scheming women rather than just knocking at the door like one would think a grown man might default to.
The older one was enjoying the hospitality of Bow Street.
She descended the stairs into the main floor of her gambling hell, the esteemed and well-loved heart of Brigid’s Forge. No longer were these halls of hanging dust clouds and dull wooden tables; instead, they glowed with the care and success of nearly a decade of a house that, indeed, always won.
She’d just had the carpets redone, in fact, a lush burgundy with gold tufts. It glowed, she thought with pride, like the molten center of a forge ought to.
There, in their one and only broken barstool (a detail she would have to tip Jones for later) sat the younger Mr. Withers, looking for all the world like the impotent slushy rain had become a man.
His head cracked up at her approach, narrowing in outrage at the fineness of her gown, the fox-fur trim, the glittering comb sparkling in her coiled cherry-brown hair. “You!” he cried, perhaps attempting to fly to his feet but thinking better of it as the stool teetered precariously under him.
“Me,” she agreed, then, because she was petty, she added, “come now, is that how you speak to your own dear stepmother?”
“Now you listen here!” he started, with a bit less bluster than before. “You conned us out of this place. You left us out to dry with failing businesses while you cleverly stole the golden pot!”
“Did I do that?” she gasped, touching her mouth. “That doesn’t sound right. Jones, does that sound right?”
Jones looked very put upon by this question.
“Jones doesn’t talk much,” she said to her errant stepson. “He mostly communicates with his fists.”
Jones frowned, leaning closer to the tiny glass he was polishing as though it and it alone understood his plight.
Mr. Withers looked a little queasy at this revelation, eyes darting between Ember and Jones with a growing redness around his bulbous nose.
“Was that all you wanted to say, dear?” Ember pressed, leaning against the gleaming wood of the bar with an encouraging smile. “I do have to open soon, if you don’t mind speeding this along.”
“You!” the idiot said again, just as pointlessly. “You will be hearing from our attorney!”
“Looking forward to it!” Ember called as he clambered out of the broken stool, which fell to the floor like it wished for the sweet embrace of death.
She watched with amusement as he scrambled out the door, trying to slam it behind him and not quite managing with the latch not catching, leaving the thing swinging quietly in his wake.
“Ah,” said Ember with a grin at Jones. “That’s always fun, isn’t it?”
“It is not,” said Jones softly.
“Ah, chin up, Mr. Jones,” she tutted. “I know better attorneys than he does. I can promise you that.”
The entire week had been slow for the Forge. Probably because of the slush that kept dribbling from the sky, cold and heavy and morose.
This time of year was always spotty and quiet. A lot of the hells that flanked the Forge would close during these months, but Ember saw that only as a gift for her own commercial interest.
After all, even a single lucky gambler would be buying drinks and cigars. She was like to break even if the tables lost to a meager crowd. Tables always recouped with the gift of time. She’d never seen it unfold any other way.
And besides, there were some Londoners who didn’t flee to the countryside at the first brisk breeze.
Those were her people.
When it was exceptionally slow, she had time to prowl the architecture of the rooms, imagining tables adjusted this way or that, playing with the dart board her mam had sent from Kildare, or forcing Jones to consider color schemes for the card racks and place settings.
He had a keen eye for color, that one, even if he claimed not to. Without Jones, Ember never would have found such a perfect combination of curtains and carpet. The man was a domestic genius wrapped in 15 stone of muscle.
In any event, once the slush had the good sense to be snow, the city would liven up again and all that holiday cheer would trickle right in through her doors. In the meantime, Ember had been experimenting with private events.
And tonight was her favorite. It sat in her ledger, once a month, reading: The Spinsters: Private, WedPM.
Initially, it had been a handful of ladies from a small social group, half a dozen who gambled and drank whiskey in secret here with the windows shut tight and the curtains tied over them.
But, over time, the attendance list had grown enough that Ember couldn’t manage it alone.
The curtains stayed drawn, but these days it felt more like atmosphere than necessity.
It turned out that there were a lot of widows, spinsters, matrons, and mothers in this city who fancied a bit of faro and a stiff drink.
It was also the night of the month when her dearest friends in the city came to her.
Dot Cain and Millie Murphy were not much for cards, nor dice, nor darts, but they came anyhow. Dot, far too reasonable to ever enter a game of chance, often just watched with a sort of quiet fascination in her tiny blonde frame.
Millie, however, was unpredictable. Some nights she sat with Dot, twisting a coil of brown hair over her finger and discussing the finer points of life and luck, and others she went directly for the dice table to win a handful of shillings.
The latter only happened when she had spent whatever she’d won the time before.
Ember didn’t play at all, of course. The numbers sang far too loudly for that to ever be fair. But she watched sometimes, counting cards and calculating odds in her mind in an effort to guess the outcome.
Usually she could, but sometimes the players would surprise her. She liked when that happened.
The bell began to chime in earnest the absolute moment the event began. The church bells of St. James never even made it to the full seven chimes on the hour before feminine voices, crystal clinks, and the percussion of colliding dice and shuffled cards had overtaken the volume inside.
Dot and Millie arrived together, sharing an umbrella coated with the misery of seasonal shift. They found Ember immediately, leaning against the bar while Jones and his new trainee scrambled to figure out how the devil to make a negus for an impatient white-haired woman with half-moon spectacles.
She had been planning to shush them so they could all laugh at the lad Jones was training when he realized he needed to track down some nougat for that particular drink, but Dot’s face gave her pause.
“Ember,” she said, her voice a low hush. “We’ve had a concerning sort of visit today, a man who is very cross indeed with you. Silas will decline to represent him, obviously, but he is only going to go elsewhere.”
“Indeed?” said Ember with a little chuckle. “I believe I had a visit from that same man today.”
That gave Dot a moment of pause. “You did?”
“My darling stepson, I presume?” she said. “He came by to threaten and posture and claim a few things, and Jones and I sent him right back out the door. He’s toothless, Dot, don’t fret over it.”
“Stepson?” Millie echoed, looking absolutely ravenous for this story.
But Dot was shaking her head. “It wasn’t anyone from the Withers clan, Ember. It was the owner of the Tod & Vixen.”
“The Tod & Vixen?” Ember repeated, baffled. “I don’t believe I even know the owner of that hell. What’s his concern with me?”
“Oh, I’ve seen that place,” Millie realized, blinking her big brown eyes.
“So?” pressed Ember. “What’s so concerning, then? Do Mr. Fox and Lady Fox have a suit against me? I haven’t wronged him that I know of, but I certainly will consider it if he’s getting feisty.”
“His name is Beck,” Dot provided with a little jut of her jaw. “Thaddeus Beck. Neither Silas nor I had ever heard of him, but apparently he’s affluent enough to have a corner lot in St. James, so I don’t think we ought to—”