Chapter Seven
Outside, she was shocked to discover that the day was still suspended between sunset and nightfall. Less than an hour had
elapsed while she was inside, even though it had felt like an eternity. The sky was striped in beige and indigo and the shadows
were long and rapidly getting longer. Lamplighters had already begun their work. Her path was somewhat illuminated as she
jogged along. Please let there be a hack, please let there be a hack.
Unfortunately it was a peculiar hour for anyone to be coming and going, and hack drivers knew it. None came along.
And then—predictably—she heard boot heels on the pavement some distance behind her. She nearly growled in frustration.
She knew exactly who was bearing down on her before she even turned.
She accelerated to a ridiculous trot.
She glanced over her shoulder. The unmistakable silhouette of Mr. Marchand was looming.
He merely needed to lengthen his stride to be upon her in seconds.
And then she passed what looked like—and surely it was kismet, because how else would she have been able to see it in this
light?—a bright stone right there on the pavement. Was it shaped like a . . .
It was!
It was speckled white and gray and shaped like a heart! Exactly when she needed it. She whirled and lunged for it.
Just as Marchand’s foot was about to come down on it.
His reflexes were extraordinary.
He performed a high kick to avoid crushing her hand, hopped backward on his other leg, flailed his arms like windmill blades,
and spent a second or two teetering north and south in a valiant effort not to topple.
He managed to right himself, but not before he lost his hat.
It was now tumbling down the pavement.
When he turned to give chase to it, she snatched up the little stone.
It would be ridiculous if she continued running. So she waited.
Mr. Marchand returned to her, hat in hand. His hair had flopped over his brow. His furiously affronted expression reminded
her of the Woodvilles’ pet goat, William, who was outraged whenever they dragged him away from eating everything in his favorite
flower bed.
A nervous laugh escaped her.
Laughing was a mistake, judging from Mr. Marchand’s expression.
“Help me understand, Miss Woodville. Do you find it funny to lunge at my ankles like a rabid spaniel?”
She was tempted to fan the air, such were the waves of irritation radiating from him.
“No, I swear to you. I’m very sorry. That is, I wasn’t lunging at your feet. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s . . . it’s just you reminded me of William.”
“Who in God’s name is William?”
He was so exasperated that it was nearly impossible not to laugh nervously again.
She decided it was wisest to say “No one you know.”
“Then why did you lunge at my feet?” he persisted.
She was certain the truth would madden him, which she would also enjoy. So she told him.
“I saw a rock that I needed. You were about to step on it.”
“A rock you needed.”
She nodded.
“Was it a diamond?” Dripping with sarcasm, that.
“Oh, God. If only.”
“You do understand that rocks aren’t currency?”
She did not dignify that with an answer.
There was a little pause.
“Why did you need a rock?” He asked it as if he was curious despite himself. As if he resented that she’d made him so curious despite himself.
She contemplated whether she ought to lie or tell him the truth.
“It was a sign from my mother.”
She said this specifically in order to see yet another new expression on his face.
And it was everything she’d hoped for.
“A sign from your mother,” he repeated, in that neutral humor-the-madwoman voice she had come to loathe.
“Yes. A sign that I’m on the right path when I need advice. I ask her. And heart-shaped stones always appear when I need them.”
The quality of the silence, and his mood, palpably changed then.
She retrieved the stone from her reticule and displayed it to him on her palm. He peered down at it without comment.
Then he impatiently pushed his hair off his forehead and fussed a bit with the cant of his hat on his head.
“So by your way of thinking, the right path was under my foot?”
“No, no. Of course not. That’s not how it works. And the very notion of you would, in fact, send her to her grave all over
again. No offense meant.”
Every offense meant, in other words.
Surprisingly, he said nothing more.
The sky was flooding with deepening indigo now. The lamplighters had nearly finished with this particular part of the street.
She asked the question that tantalized her.
“How did you know I’d gone to the Earl of Sydenham’s residence, Mr. Marchand?”
“Your eyes lit up with the zeal of an owl spotting a juicy rat when Bolt mentioned Sydenham’s waistcoat buttons at the dinner
table.”
“The waistcoat buttons are the only thing Hogarth would tell me about that night. And that’s the second time you’ve mentioned my eyes, Mr. Marchand. Careful, or you’ll be writing love poetry about them next.”
This caused a beat of silence.
“It’s the funniest thing,” he mused. “I started writing a poem about them just this morning, but I encountered a hurdle when
I couldn’t find a rhyme for ‘pain in my arse.’ ”
She honored this with the impressed wordless moment it deserved.
“Farce,” she suggested quietly. “Parse.”
His expression was a picture then. Complicated. Perhaps amused. But the predominant emotion seemed to be amazement.
“In truth, it is difficult to miss your eyes, Miss Woodville, because you never take them off me.” His voice had gone dangerously low again.
If she blushed in the near-dark, hopefully he wouldn’t notice. It was true that if a room contained him, there seemed no compelling
reason for anyone to look elsewhere, because for God’s sake.
“Well, that’s only good sense,” she admitted frankly. “You’ve demonstrated an inclination to do the unexpected, Mr. Marchand.
I feel I should at all times be braced.”
He took this in with equanimity. “You should never play five-card loo, Miss Woodville. You’d give yourself away every time.
You’d lose a fortune over and over again.”
“What a terrible pity to hear it. I guess that means I won’t be able to ever again set foot inside your pretty, pretty gaming hell.” She sounded
like a child, and she didn’t care.
“It’s not a hell. It’s a bloody paradise—or it was, until you walked into it.”
“Mr. Marchand. ‘Hell’ is a relative word. Lucifer’s Fall was the location of the third worst thing to happen to my family. And if you’re about to say ‘your birth was clearly the first worst,’ ha, now you can’t, I said it first.”
“Miss Woodville, anything can happen to anyone anywhere. One street over, one can buy a lovely ice or be run over by a carriage.
Though I’m flattered you think I’m capable of such a scathing rejoinder. I wish I’d thought of it,” he added.
“ ‘Rejoinder’ is quite a fancy word for a rogue.”
“After you make your first fifty thousand pounds, they let you use any words you wish.”
That figure dropped on her like an anvil.
He remained quiet and let her marinate in the realization that he was very wealthy. Mr. Marchand was not a gloater, but he
was a dirty, dirty fighter and he knew that had shut her up.
“Do you have any idea what your little visit to the earl could do to my business?”
“I imagine I can’t stop you from enlightening me.”
“Are you familiar with what the black plague did to Europe?”
“Oh, honestly.”
“When word that an earl’s sister has gone rogue, tracked down a member of Lucifer’s Fall at his home, and actually had the temerity to ask him to give back the money he fairly won, news of your little visit will spread from earl to duke to MP to every single member of Lucifer’s
Fall. They will rightly assume the confidentiality that is the cornerstone of their membership at Lucifer’s Fall, which they
absolutely count upon, has been breached.
And just like that, I will have lost their trust, and then their business, and then I will be ruined.
And regardless of your contempt for my livelihood, Lucifer’s Fall is the second best thing to ever happen to me.
Correction: It did not happen to me. I built it. From nothing.”
Damn him, now she was wondering what the first best thing to happen to him was.
“From nothing? Not from the bones of your enemies?”
“Essentially the same thing.” Then with a mildness that made the hair on the back of her neck prickle, he added, “Do you doubt
me?”
Beware the strivers, Mrs. Haddock had said. Perhaps she was a sage.
She shook her head slowly.
“I’m afraid I won’t allow you to ruin me, Miss Woodville.”
He said this evenly, but it was no less unnerving for all of that.
She’d never had a more civil yet terrifying conversation. She was far, far out of her depth. She had swum out into the middle
of the ocean and unsurprisingly, there were sharks.
She did, she realized, she did want someone to tell her what to do. In the absence of that, she would have to figure it out herself.
She cleared her throat. “Mr. Marchand . . . please understand that I’m going to get my family’s inheritance money back no
matter what it takes, because I have no other option. That is a bald fact. Ruining you is not my intent, but if it somehow
seems necessary in order to achieve my goal . . . that will be unfortunate, but it will not stop me.” Her voice shook. “If
all I’m left with is revenge, if all I’m able to do is go from house to house asking every member of Lucifer’s Fall to give
all their money back, then maybe that’s what I’ll do.”
He took this in.
And then, the corner of his mouth actually lifted almost ruefully. “Fair enough. On the whole, I approve of ruthlessness.”
Was that what she’d become? She liked the power of the word even as it made her feel bleak. It was simply love that made you
ruthless. She had promised her mother, and that was love. She took care of her siblings, and that was love.
He’d probably never loved anyone or anything but the reflection in his mirror and his gaming hell.