Chapter 20
“The rules,” William said, “do not work that way.”
“They work exactly that way,” Letitia countered. “I explained them at the beginning.”
“You explained different rules at the beginning.”
“I explained the foundation. The foundation allows for interpretation.”
“Letitia, you cannot simply—”
“William, do you want to play, or do you want to be correct?”
“I want to play correctly.”
“Then you need to decide which of those two things matters more to you.” She arranged her cards with great serenity. “Cecily, it is your turn.”
“I know it is my turn,” Cecily said. “I am waiting for the rules to stabilize before I commit to a move.”
“The rules are perfectly stable.”
“The rules have changed four times since we sat down.”
“They have evolved,” Letitia quipped. “Keep up.”
James looked at the card in his hand. Then he looked at Isadora. Isadora kept her expression entirely neutral, which was a skill she had been developing and which was being tested by the combination of Letitia’s rules and the card she was currently holding.
“What is the current value of a seven?” James asked the table.
“Seven,” William answered.
“Twelve,” Letitia said simultaneously.
A pause.
“When did it become twelve?” William asked.
“After the second round.”
“You said nothing about it becoming twelve after the second round.”
“I said the numerical values would adjust dynamically. That was in the foundation.”
“That was not in the foundation. There was no foundation. You said the game was simple and that we would understand it as we went.”
“And you are understanding it as you go. It is working exactly as described.”
William looked at James.
James looked back.
“Play the card,” he said.
“Which card?”
“The one that seems most likely to survive the next rule change.”
William looked at his hand. “That is not a strategy.”
“It is tonight’s strategy,” James sighed. “Adapt.”
It was the next day after dinner, and they were in the drawing room with the card table pulled to the center and the fire built high and the remnants of dinner still warm in the memory of the evening.
Briggs produced a second decanter and promptly withdrew, and the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn against the windy night.
William made a sound of profound reluctance and played a card.
Letitia immediately brightened, which was either good or terrible depending on one’s position at the table, and no one was entirely sure which.
“Partners consult,” she announced.
William looked up. “That was not a rule.”
“It is now.”
“You cannot simply—”
“William.” Cecily put her hand on his arm. “Let it happen.”
“She keeps—”
“William.”
“Partners consult,” Letitia repeated, with satisfaction. “Two minutes. James and Isadora, you are together. Cecily and I—” She looked at Cecily.
“I am not partnering with you,” Cecily declared. “You change the rules.”
“I evolve the rules. There is a—”
“I will partner with William,” she said serenely.
Letitia looked briefly betrayed. “That is a terrible partnership. They will communicate without speaking, and it will be deeply unfair.”
“We do not communicate without speaking,” William said.
Cecily looked at him.
He had just proven Letitia’s point, Isadora thought with an inward smile.
“Fine,” Letitia muttered, with the dignity of someone accepting terms they intend to immediately find a workaround for. “Fine. Two minutes. Consult.”
James turned slightly toward Isadora. She turned toward him.
The two minutes had the immediate effect of making her aware that their chairs were very close, close enough that when he leaned toward her to speak quietly, his voice brushed her ear.
“What do you have?” he whispered.
“A seven… which is apparently twelve and two face cards and something Letitia is calling a shadow card, which I do not entirely understand.” She struggled to look away from his jawline.
“The shadow card doubles the value of whatever is played after it,” he said. “She introduced it in the third round while William was arguing about the seven.”
She turned her head slightly to look at him. “You have been paying attention.”
“I have been waiting for the moment it became useful.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Play the shadow card before the face card. I’ll follow with the highest value I have”
“That assumes the shadow card rule survives until our next turn.”
“It will not,” he said. “Which is exactly why we play it now.”
She looked at him.
He looked back.
“Now?” she whispered.
“Now,” he said.
“If the rule changes—”
“Then we adapt,” he finished. “We are good at that.”
She held his gaze for one moment. Then she looked at her cards, which was the correct thing to do and which was considerably easier than looking at him at this proximity, where his voice had been perhaps two inches from her ear, and his shoulder was warm against hers, and she was extremely, inconveniently aware of both of these facts.
Practical, she reminded herself. Contained.
Her shoulder remained where it was.
“Ready,” she said to the table.
“Look at them,” Letita drawled after a while. “They’ve gone quiet. People who are actually concentrating on cards make noise—they sigh, they mutter, they accuse others of cheating. These two have gone silent, which is far more suspicious.”
“We are concentrating,” Isadora corrected.
“You are not concentrating when you keep looking at each other with answers in your eyes.”
“That is an excessive amount of meaning to assign to a glance.”
“Is it?” Letitia did not look convinced, but she was already dealing the next hand, momentarily distracted by the more pressing business of trying to win one.
The game went on. Outside, the wind had picked up, and the fire had settled into the low, steady burn of late evening.
Isadora was still aware of exactly how close James was sitting.
The warmth of his shoulder against hers.
The clean, faint smell of him—soap and woodsmoke and something uniquely him.
The way his hand, resting near the edge of the table, was close enough to hers that the smallest shift would close the distance entirely, and the way some traitorous part of her kept calculating that distance instead of attending to her cards.
He leaned in, closer than the hand strictly required, his mouth near her ear.
“Play the ten,” he murmured. “Letitia’s holding the king. She will not be able to resist taking it, and the moment she does, you’ll have the trick.”
His breath stirred the loose hair at her temple.
She felt it everywhere at once in the sudden, complete blankness of her thoughts, in the warmth that climbed up her neck and had nothing to do with the fire, in the way the hand holding the ten had gone very still as though movement might give something away.
“The ten,” she repeated faintly, as though the word required translation from a language she’d only just learned.
“Unless you’d rather lose.”
“I would rather not lose.”
She set the card down.
Letitia, predictably, could not resist the king. James took the trick a moment later with quiet satisfaction and sat back. The warmth of his shoulder left hers, and Isadora discovered that she missed it immediately.
The strategy worked so well that Letitia sat back in her chair and looked at them both with narrowed eyes. She set her cards down with great deliberation.
“That’s it,” she huffed. “I am officially accusing you both of cheating.”
“It is not cheating,” James said. “It is called playing the hand correctly.”
“That’s three tricks running,” Cecily observed, mild as anything, refilling her tea without looking up.
“Luck,” William uttered, examining his own hand with the particular grimness of a man losing and unwilling to admit it.
“It is not luck. How did you know I was going to play that?” Letitia’s eyes narrowed on them both.
“I anticipated there was a distinction,” James replied. “You are very predictable, you know.”
“You have been spending time with Isadora,” Letitia said, with the air of someone identifying a cause. “She says that. The distinction thing.”
“I say it because it is accurate.” Isadora shrugged.
“You both say it because you have been in the same house for a while, and apparently”—Letitia gestured vaguely at the space between them—“this has happened.”
“What has happened?” James asked.
“You know what the other one is going to do without being told,” Letitia explained. “Which is—William, are you watching this?”
“I am watching the game,” William said.
“Watch them instead.”
“I am not going to—”
“Look at their chairs.”
William looked and said nothing.
“Our chairs are where we put them,” James muttered under his breath.
“Nobody put them there,” Letitia countered. “They migrated. Over the course of the game, they simply moved there.” She looked at Cecily. “Did you notice?”
“I did.” Cecily nodded slowly.
“When?” Letitia demanded.
“Approximately the third round.”
“I did not notice until the fifth,” Letitia said, with the expression of someone taking a brief personal inventory. “I am usually more observant. The rules were distracting me.”
“You were distracted by your own rules,” William snorted. “That is—”
“Not the point,” Letitia cut in. “The point is…” She pointed at James and Isadora with one card, which was rude and also entirely characteristic. “You two are cheating.”
“We are not cheating,” James said.
“You are communicating without speaking.”
“We consulted,” James corrected. “You introduced the consulting rule.”
“I introduced two minutes of consulting. I did not introduce”—she gestured again—“whatever this is. The understanding. The—” She turned to Cecily. “Help me.”
“I am not helping you,” Cecily said pleasantly. “I am not your partner; besides, I am already losing.”
“You are losing because William keeps—”
“I have done nothing,” William protested.
“You keep looking at my cards.”
“I am looking at the table.”
“The table where my cards are.”
“Letitia,” he chuckled nervously.
“The point is,” Letitia said, “they are suspiciously in tune for two people who are supposed to be in a practical arrangement.” She set her cards face down on the table.