Page 6 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

“ S hould I even bother unpacking?” Joe said with a sigh, staring down at his pack, still salt-caked and rumpled from a week at sea, leaning weakly against the sofa he’d slept on like all it wanted in the world was a break.

“Probably not,” said Freddy, slumping onto the sofa in question with a groan and a frown toward the pack in question. “What is that, anyway? Don’t you have a valise?”

Joe laughed, more from exhaustion than amusement at such a question. “No.”

“Well, why not?” Freddy demanded.

“Because it isn’t practical,” Joe replied with a faint impression of a smile. “Besides, I’ve had that pack since I was a student. It’s sealskin. Sturdy. I trust it. Do you trust your valise?”

Freddy looked stunned by the question, though he did take a moment to consider it. “I probably don’t,” he admitted with a shrug. “But I don’t ask terribly much of the thing one way or the other. Why? Should I pop out and get one of those … what is that, anyway?”

“A knapsack,” Joe responded, his amusement beginning to blossom in earnest now at the way Freddy was worrying at the inside of his cheek, considering such a mundane thing like it was threatening his very perception of a world. “Or just a pack, if you’re talking to a merchant.”

“Knapsack,” Freddy repeated warily. “What the hell’s a knap?”

The outcome of their meeting at Bow Street today had been beyond anything Joe might have anticipated at the outset. And even the outset had challenged his own powers of anticipation quite a lot.

If he’d been a gambling man, and he wasn’t, there was no wager on the planet that would have had him guessing the arrival of Ember Donnelly at his front door mere hours after he set foot in London again.

As for the content of her demands, that would have challenged even the most talented oracle.

“You want to take Freddy to the gambling event of the year?” Abe Murphy had marveled, as though Ember had just suggested bringing a fawn to an annual gathering of hungry lions. “Are you planning to keep an eye on him the whole time?”

“Of course not,” Ember had snapped. “He’s a grown man.”

And of all the people gathered at that table, it had been Freddy himself who scoffed at that.

“It brings me no joy to say I need a chaperone,” he’d said with a shrug and a yawn, “but we all know I do. So, how about it, Murphy? Got plans for Christmas?”

“I just got married, you oaf,” Abe had snapped back. “Of course I have plans.”

“Unfortunately, I do as well,” Silas Cain had added. “Dot and I are taking the family to Stow-on-the-Wold, to Christmas with my mother.”

And then everyone had slowly and expectantly turned their eyes onto Joe, who froze in the light of their regard like a thief caught in the swing of a lantern.

“If you’re willing, Mr. Cresson, I will compensate you for the trouble,” Silas Cain had immediately offered, looking genuinely apologetic about the spontaneous burden. “We are all here committed to supporting my brother’s disengagement from his vices, and it would be sincerely appreciated.”

So of course he had agreed. He’d never said a single no to Silas Cain since the day the man had offered him a job, and he didn’t intend to start any time soon. He’d gone to Portugal for Cain, so what were a couple of weeks in Cornwall?

Besides, this was a country party. Surely, compared to a city in the midst of revolution, it would feel like a respite.

Ember Donnelly had reacted with a quiet shifting in her chair and a raise of her russet brows, as though the outcome were better than she could’ve possibly hoped for. Her presence, as well, would have been enough for Joe to agree on the spot without requesting a single word of further elaboration.

He sighed, giving up on the idea of unpacking and joining Freddy on the sofa for a moment of silent contemplation before they would have to start preparing in earnest.

There wasn’t much time, after all.

They were departing tomorrow.

It hadn’t started well.

They arrived at Brigid’s Forge half an hour early.

On Bow Street, a host of covered markets were already open, with plenty of workaday Londoners bustling this way and that as the sun began to crest over the skyline.

But here in St. James? It might as well have still been the dead of night.

The cobbles were unseemly clean, unscuffed by the morning’s boots or carriage wheels.

There was a single fruit stand wedged on a corner between a bespoke umbrella shop and a modiste whose door spotted a heavy cream parchment sign hanging from a gold ribbon. It read: Wake me in Spring …

The best Joe could guess, that fruit stand was only there to stock the surrounding clubs with garnishes for their fancier drinks. Certainly no one here needed to buy their own fruit otherwise.

He realized he had never really spent any time in this part of the city, short of courier errands he’d been sent on years ago, when he was new in Cain’s employ.

Cresson had been raised to believe the quiet was sacred. And yet, for all its serenity and silence, this place did not feel sacred. This particular flavor of silence felt somehow hedonistic.

Unsurprisingly, there was no carriage waiting for them outside of the Forge.

What driver would be brave enough to sully this block first?

It was all too easy to imagine half a dozen hackneymen and drivers huddled at an invisible line on the sand this side of Hyde Park, waiting for someone, anyone, to go first.

“It’s just here,” Freddy had said unnecessarily, thunking his brand-new knapsack on the ground at the door of Brigid’s Forge and holding out one hand for Joe’s while ringing the bell with the other. “Oh, unlocked!”

“Lord Bentley!” he attempted to hiss, but the other man was already swinging open the heavy wooden door, striding into the business like he belonged there. Joe had no choice but to follow behind.

He noted, with a small strain of baffled panic, that they were just leaving their things outside, stacked on the curb like a glowing invitation for anyone who might wish to spirit them away, but then he was overtaken by a second wave of uncertain realization, because he had not seen a single urchin or shambling man in half a mile.

“Oh!” said Freddy with delight, “they’ve redone the carpets!”

There was a gigantic man standing behind a brass and mahogany bar, scrubbing a bunch of sharp little implements with the smallest wire brush Joe had ever seen. When the man’s eyes fell on Freddy, they brightened as though his very own son had just returned from the war.

“Freddy Hightower!” the man cried, in a voice just as shocking as the rest of him, soft and homey. “Where have you been?!”

“Jones!” Freddy cried back, bouncing around the bar to throw his arms around the giant. “Oh, look at you. You’ve lost weight!”

Cresson blinked. Twice.

“Get off my barman, Freddy,” came Ember Donnelly’s voice from a mezzanine above, sending Cresson’s heart directly into his jaw. “He’s busy.”

“He’s not too busy for me,” Freddy called back, grinning with perhaps the first genuine joy Joe had seen on his face since he’d met him, some three years prior. “Here, give me one of those brushes, I’ll assist!”

Jones looked skeptical but shuffled off to do just that.

“The coach is late,” Joe offered, probably too quietly for anyone to hear him.

Freddy shouted, “I love the new floors!” before he could finish the final word anyway.

“D’you want coffee, Mr. Cresson?” Ember called down, leaning over the brass railing of the mezzanine balcony above. “I’ve a pot up here! Jones! Grab some more crumpets, please!”

“Oh, I …” Joe managed, craning his neck back to look up at her with an odd anxiety tugging at his fingers and toes.

She smiled down at him and he crumpled, feeling his body floating toward the stairs before he’d made any sort of conscious decision to ascend them.

“That’s a good man,” she said when he reached the top, handing him an already-prepared cup. “Sorry about the coach. Everyone is always late around here.”

Mr. Jones appeared so suddenly behind him that Joe felt his soul briefly flee his body, fling itself around the whole of Europe, and return with a slam. He cleared his throat in an attempt to cover it and chose a surface to throw himself upon so that he could not humiliate himself further.

A plate of hot crumpets was deposited in front of him, the pat of butter on the side already melting into the porous embrace of the bread. Three strips of bacon also had found their way onto the plate, beckoning him closer.

Belowstairs, Freddy had apparently already taken up his tiny wire brush with the gusto of a tourney knight, chattering at Jones with all his new housekeeping skills with questions like “But have you tried orange peel in the wood oil?” and “Cold water is better for rinsing, anyhow. Fewer spots!”

Oddly, even with Ember Donnelly settling alarmingly near him on the chaise, smelling of anise and wearing a devastatingly well-cut riding kit, he felt a thrum of relief.

He should be burning at the ears, stammering, and looking to escape, he knew, but instead he felt … reassured? The clanging below, the overlapping conversation, and the scents of brass polish and hot bread and coffee were stroking his concerns away with the invisible fingers of familiarity.

This place, he realized, this gambling hell … it felt like being back in Lisbon.

“You’re smiling,” observed Ember, looking delighted by it. “Are you smiling for me?”

He released a self-conscious little gust of breath, lifting the gold-rimmed teacup to his lips to cloak his bashfulness with coffee. “I was just realizing how different the inside of this place is to the outside,” he said. “Everything out there is so …”

“Haunted?” she offered with a chuckle. “It’s damned eerie. I hated it at first too. My own flat is only a few streets down, but close enough to Soho that I can escape to sanity when I need to.”

“That fruit stand on the corner…”

“Ah,” she laughed in earnest. “My mam would burn the whole block down if she saw that place. I hear what you’re saying, Mr. Cresson. You don’t even need to say it.”

He considered her, wondering why it surprised him that she might have a mother who hated this luxury and pomp. She had been wealthy the whole time he’d known her, a powerful businesswoman in a world that didn’t quite want her.

It was what made him weak for her. That and the freckles.

“My mother wouldn’t allow herself the satisfaction of arson,” he offered, surprised at how steady he sounded.

“But she’d find a donkey, drag it through the muddiest riverbank she could find, and then trot it through the avenues until she’d upset as many of the locals as possible. I know because I saw her do it once.”

Ember looked shocked.

“Twice,” he amended, with a little chuckle of remembrance. “Twice, actually.”

“We ought to ensure our mothers never meet,” she returned with a sparkle of surprised pleasure, “for the safety of poor St. James.”

“Perhaps that’s all the more reason they should be acquainted,” he answered, winning from her a tittering laugh that felt like a cache of gold coins.

“Mr. Cresson!” she chided, clearly enjoying this exchange.

They looked at one another for a sustained, taut little moment, both holding those dainty teacups, both softly smiling over the prospect.

“Coach is here!” called Freddy from below them, oblivious to the violence his loud, disruptive call had just done to Joe Cresson’s soul. “Shall I load us up?”

“Ah, well,” Ember sighed, slapping her palms over her knees through the gold and brown fabric of her riding kit. “The crumpets will have to come with us, I suppose. Cornwall awaits, Mr. Cresson!”

Jones was already bustling back up to the mezzanine to fetch his mistress’s bags. She followed him around, giving him last-minute instructions on the management of the Forge while she was away, the two of them tossing back asks and answers like rapid swats of a birdie.

Joe grabbed one of the crumpets, sighed, and returned back to the ground floor.

He could only hope that wouldn’t be their only conversation on this adventure.

Freddy had already thrown the doors wide and was making a big, provincial show of heaving their knapsacks into the carriage like some strapping farmboy just arrived for his conscription to France.

He seemed to be enjoying himself, so Joe did not interfere.

Instead, he waited, assisting with Ember’s luggage, talking logistics and timeframes with the driver, and looking around one more time in mild awe at the strange reality of it all.

At the end, he was rewarded with a soft gloved hand in his as he helped the lady into the embrace of the coach and clambered in after her.

Her face split into an eager smile as she beheld the two men sitting across from her, and she reached up to bang her fist on the top of the carriage once the doors had clicked into place. “Grand!” she announced between beats. “Blackcove ho!”