Page 20 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

H e had expected to feel either rage or relief after his conversation with Freddy. Now that he’d done it, now that he’d heard what the other man had to say, he felt neither of those things. He only felt sick. And he felt sad.

And now he had an albatross ’round his neck, a literal cross to bear. Now he had far more than he’d set out to excavate.

There had been a man like Freddy back home in Shropshire. Not dice. Quakers didn’t gamble. It was rye.

Quakers didn’t drink either, he reminded himself.

But the old man, a new member by the name of Peter Cophenagen, hadn’t been able to stop.

When they’d tried to sit with him and force him through the craving, it had almost killed him.

The doctor had been furious, kicking everyone out of the home where he’d attempted to find his recovery.

“Expelling a demon is not a simple thing,” he had told them later, at Meeting. “If it were, no one would hold it in such fear. Our Friend Peter is fighting his demon, but we cannot rip away the core of what he’s become in its company, or we will lose him too.”

Joe’s father had said, once they got home that night, that compassion was more righteous than rigidity and that none of them were safe from the mundane demons of this world, should they ever have the misfortune to stumble onto the ones built to fit their own weaknesses.

Freddy had met his demon. He had fallen to it. And without a community or a priest or a doctor, he had clawed his way free of it.

Joe thought that was miraculous. He thought it was, perhaps, the most monumental human achievement he’d ever borne witness to.

More humbling than the spark and flame of revolution in Portugal, more harrowing than the passage of the law, and so completely, openly human that it hurt to bear witness to it.

He took the cross, brittle now from years of drying, crumbling a little where a thin layer of lacquer had worn from the tips, and he placed it where the dice had sat in the middle of the little table by his bedroom window.

He didn’t know how he was going to return it to her, how to frame what he’d learned in a way that would not reopen wounds that were finally healing and healing well.

He’d been watching them, of course, Freddy and Ember. He’d been seeing a broken bone knit back together, through exchanged glances and shared amusement and sometimes a quick barb or an assumption of understanding, unnecessary to articulate when one knew another so well.

He did not want to break that bone again. He did not want to take it from either of them.

But she needed this thing back, didn’t she? She needed to know it wasn’t lost, whatever it was to her. She needed to know that he hadn’t thrown it into the sea, even at his worst, at his lowest, because even when the demon was at its strongest, Freddy Hightower still loved his dearest friend.

He still loved his wife too, Joe thought. That surprised him.

Didn’t it?

He frowned, rolling back on his pillows.

Didn’t it?

He’d met Freddy Hightower the day his wife, Claire, had given birth. Silas Cain’s wedding day. He’d been tasked to sit in a carriage with this errant lord he’d been tracking all over Europe and to keep him from bursting out of that feeble prison and disrupting the festivities.

Freddy had stared at him like he wanted to kill him. He had demanded to know who Joe was and what right he had to keep him there. Joe had answered, and then, because it seemed the right thing to do and because he truly wanted some answers, he had asked what had happened.

Where had Freddy been? How had he gotten there? And how had he come to return to London?

Sometimes, letting a person speak was all you needed to keep them still. It was the way he’d been taught to manage young children when they were under his care, back before he’d left home. Children were people just like anyone else. Sometimes, all anyone wanted in all the world was to be heard.

Now Joe had heard Freddy, and despite the silence of the night and the peaceful embrace of the winter outside, he couldn’t stop hearing him. The weight of knowledge was so very loud. Cacophonous. Deafening.

It was just another in a line of sleepless nights, he told himself. It did not have to be torture too.

He pulled the pillow over his face. He groaned.

Any fool knew that the worst way to fall asleep was to think about falling asleep.

And then, a divine mercy: someone knocked on his door.

He threw himself off the mattress. It didn’t matter who it was. Some sick gambler, lost in the halls? That vomit-speckled doctor who’d been haunting the rooms for the last week? Freddy, using the front of the room instead of the connection? One of the piskies come alive and calling?

All would work.

He flung the door open with zeal.

It was Ember Donnelly, looking shocked at the strength of his answer, then squeaking in surprise when he grabbed her wrist and pulled her inside, kicking the door shut behind her.

“Thank goodness for you,” he muttered, drinking in the effect of her silhouette in the low light as his eyes adjusted. She looked like an angel, come specifically to ease his suffering. “How did you know I needed you?”

She gave a startled laugh, staring at him, her eyes raking down over his pajamas—a set he’d bought from a street vendor in Lisbon who imported Moroccan silks. Her eyes floated over the sea-green fabric, the dark blue piping, the flowers woven into the cuffs, and then stopped at his open collar.

He felt himself flush. She was still dressed for the evening of gambling, her gown a flashing scarlet, a pile of pearls and crystals falling down the curve of her throat. The scent of her perfume twisted through the air, spicing the previously flat and cool note with the warmth of anise.

And here he was, rumpled from a double embrace of pillows and with nothing on his feet.

As though she could read his mind, she looked down, noting his bare toes sunk into the plush carpet, and she smiled, reaching up to press her fingertips to her lips.

“I didn’t think you’d be asleep,” she said, her voice low, like there were people around them that she was at risk of waking up. “I wasn’t sure where you’d run off to. You vanished before the first bell tonight.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he insisted, and turned to find the tinderbox. There were coals burning in the corner of the room to stave off the winter chill, but they weren’t much in the way of illumination. “I haven’t been able to sleep much at all for the last few nights.”

“Because of the games?” Ember asked curiously. “I didn’t think they had captured you that way.”

He scoffed, shaking his head. “No, the games are more like a chore than an obsession, at least for me. I hate risking money like that.”

“Good,” she said with what sounded like approval. “You should hate it. I do too.”

He found the spark, watching the flame catch on the edge of his match and waiting for it to soothe itself into a manageable size before he poked it into the lantern. “You hate it?” he asked as he withdrew the light and blew it out, turning with his lantern. “But it’s your livelihood.”

She shook her head, that gentle smile still on her face as she beheld his pajamas in better lighting, her hands folded in front of her. The gems sparkled against the new light from the flame. “When you’re running the games, there’s no true gamble,” she said. “Playing them is another matter.”

He walked back toward her, leaning against the end of the bed frame. “But you’re not truly gambling here, are you? You said you were going to cheat.”

“I am cheating,” she replied, raising her brows. “I keep track of the cards that have already been played, so I know which hands are possible for the other players.”

He frowned. “How much have you won?”

“Nothing yet,” she answered, letting her hands unclasp and fall at her sides.

“But I still have to lose money to not draw attention to myself. I’m trying to keep it close to even for now, while I figure out the people here and what they’re after.

Unfortunately, I can’t keep Beck in my orbit, and God knows what he’s done with my debt slips.

No one has mentioned them to me either as bet or collateral. ”

She said Beck’s name with a little wrinkle of her freckled nose. She didn’t like that she had to watch him, Joe realized. She didn’t like that he had to be important to her without her say in the matter.

“Maybe he knows,” Joe suggested with no small discomfort.

“That I’m cheating? He doesn’t.”

“No.” He shook his head, reaching up to shove the fall of dark hair from his eyes. “No, that you want your slips back.”

“Oh.” She blew out a breath and shrugged, making her necklace flash and glitter. “Maybe. He might also still think I’m ignorant to what he’s doing. If Dot hadn’t come to tell me, I would be, and he has no way of knowing I’m an intimate of the Cains.”

She trailed off, her brow wrinkling as she considered the possibilities. “Although,” she said after a moment, meeting his eye, “you did tell him you are one of my barristers. That probably lit a little beacon of concern in him. Saints above, I hope it did.”

“I hope it did too,” Joe replied, a little thump of conquest thrumming in his chest.

Joe imagined a man like Beck would never expect to be overpowered, and if ever it were to happen, it would needs be by brawn. That was the problem with rich men and physically powerful ones. They never saw the real danger until it was already upon them.

Perhaps it was unworthy to take pleasure in that, but Joe always had. Maybe that was his demon, he thought.

“I don’t suppose there’s any wine left?” Ember asked with a sigh, reaching up to stretch her arms over her head, closing her eyes and indulging in a deep yawn that colored the words that followed. “I ought not to, but I wouldn’t mind something sweet to end the night.”

He stared. Gawked, really. Ogled?

He cleared his throat and averted his eyes. “There’s half a bottle. I’ll get you some.”