Page 27 of A Game of Scandal

“You?” Horatio P. Peabody’s eyes lit. “But you never deal.”

“For my favourite clients there can always be an exception,” Ash said smoothly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some ham, Mrs Williams? It is very good.”

“Well, well.” Horatio rubbed his hands together. “You shall have to play with us more often, Mrs W, if it means Ash will join us. Perhaps you’ll even tempt him to play.”

“Yes,” Lord Covington said, perking up for the first time. “What do you say, Ash? Get one of the other dealers in and join the game. I’ll advance you a five-hundred-pound stake myself.”

I swallowed. It was an enormous sum, and yet Covington threw the words off easily.

“Kind of you,” Ash said, “but you gentlemen know I never play at my own tables.”

“Wise,” Laing said with a nod. “One must always be careful not to mix business and pleasure.” He slid a chair out for me to sit. Davey wheeled over a silver drinks trolley and then came to stand silently several feet behind me, and I felt comforted by his nearness.

“Oh, I don’t believe that old adage.” Ash shook his head cheerfully, as the rest of the men sat. “What’s the point of denying oneself? Don’t you take pleasure in your business, Mr Laing?”

The man seemed to think about it for a moment, and then he smiled. “You know, I do. I really do.”

“And what line of business are you in, Mr Laing?” I asked quickly, keen to dig out more information. I wondered what he would say. Murderer for hire seemed unlikely.

“I dabble in several areas,” he replied thoughtfully, reaching over to the drinks trolley and picking up a carafe of wine. “I manage money – my own and other people’s.” He poured the wine into a heavy cut-crystal glass, the deep burgundy colour picking up the light from the candles, and it was as if the drink itself flickered with some dark flame, a blood-red deal with the devil.

“Investments?” I accepted the glass from his hand, telling myself not to be so fanciful.

“Certainly, I invest. In companies, in people. And I’m a collector of sorts. When I see something I desire, I can be quite ruthless, Mrs Williams, quite determined.” He smiled above his own glass of wine. “Nothing stands in the way of what I want.”

“I think that’s enough chit-chat, isn’t it?” Ash cut in, sounding bored. He held a pack of cards in his hand and sent them into one of those lightning-fast shuffles, the kind that left the edges of the cards a blur and that drew a murmur of appreciation from Horatio.

Before anyone could answer, four sharp knocks rang through the room. Ash’s eyes raised above my head, and I realized he was looking to Davey, a crease of annoyance between his brows.

Davey lumbered round the table to see who was at the door.

“I thought we weren’t to be disturbed,” Mr Johnson said, his tone peevish.

“We weren’t,” Ash replied shortly.

Davey leaned over Ash’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, before handing him a sheet of paper.

I watched as Ash unfolded the note, his eyes scanning the words. His face gave nothing away; it was utterly still, and that, I thought, was his true tell. Nothing about Ash was still – even when he wasn’t moving, he was so entirely alive that some wild restless energy sparked about him. Now he looked like a book that someone had closed with a thump.

“Not bad news, I hope?” Laing asked lightly.

Ash carefully folded the note and slid it into his pocket. “Not at all,” he said, the words even. “A business matter, but nothing that won’t wait. Shall we play?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As soon as the first hand of cards were dealt, the atmosphere in the room shifted. All humour, all niceties, faded away. Only Horatio seemed unaffected, filling the air with mindless chatter, his drawling American accent undulating musically in the background.

There was no playing with paper tokens in this game. The money on the table was enough to pay for my university education several times over, and the other players seemed barely to register that fact.

When Mrs Finch had handed me the envelope full of bank notes that I was to wager with, I felt all the air temporarily leave my lungs.

“What if I lose?” I managed.

“Don’t,” she said.

Which was wonderful. Because sitting here between the man I couldn’t stop having bizarre pirate-themed romantic fantasies about, and a man who was potentially a murderer, it was also relaxing to know that I was gambling with a small fortune belonging to a woman whom I had come to fiercely admire, and which would in other circumstances probably be used to do something like fund an orphanage.

My life had taken a strange turn of late.