Chapter Seven #2
Wearing a slight frown, he drummed his long fingers on the edge of the baize-wrapped table.
They were strong fingers with carefully clipped nails.
Nail health said a lot about a person—bitten nails pointed to an anxious or easily irritable personality, nail texture and color indicated healthy body functions or vitamin deficiencies, and nail length pointed to other traits like practicality, diligence, or indolence.
They weren’t always an accurate measure, but his nails were short, clean, and square. He had beautiful hands.
“Sir?” the dealer said loudly, just as St. Clair bumped me with his elbow, jolting me out of my woolgathering. Heat singed my neck as I tore my gaze away, and I was deeply and profoundly grateful that my idle thoughts were private.
“Stand,” I blurted without even looking at my cards.
“Are you certain about that, Lord Ansel?” St. Clair asked. Frowning, I glanced down and flushed as I realized my count was a measly eleven. I opened my mouth to ask for another card but was silenced by a glare from the dealer.
He cleared his throat with a stern look at me and then moved to the next player. “The gent has already spoken, sir. Play is to you.”
While my mind had been wandering, St. Clair’s pile of money had steadily increased.
Mine had waxed and waned, mostly out of sheer luck and no actual skill on my part.
Other gentlemen had been replaced by new players, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Apart from my last silly blunder, over the subsequent rounds, I’d done surprisingly well, due to the dealer having a run of terrible luck.
I peered at St. Clair, whose concentration remained sharp, his gaze fixed on the cards on the table.
For a second, I was sure that I could see his lips moving as though he was tallying something.
While I’d had the same thought earlier about keeping track of the high and low cards, I’d never presumed one could do it by a counting system.
Was St. Clair using mathematics to gain an advantage in this game?
If he was, it was impressive, to say the least.
“Bloody cheater!” the man at the end of the table shouted, standing so quickly that his chair tumbled backward as he slammed his fist down onto the baize.
He wasn’t as well dressed as some of the other patrons, which meant he was likely gentry or a merchant.
It took me a second to realize that he was glaring at St. Clair, who had won the last round and accumulated a large pile of money. “You marked the cards, you thief!”
St. Clair’s eyes flashed with rancor, though his face remained neutral. “I beg your pardon, sir. My cards are the same as yours.”
“Then you did something,” the man snarled. “Memorized and cheated.”
“Memorization isn’t illegal,” St. Clair replied calmly, as if being accused wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. “In fact, anyone with half a brain could do it.” His lip curled. “Though I suppose you are likely in the minority.”
“Think you’re so smart, do you? Bloody pencil sniffer.” The man clenched his fists, ready to do bodily harm even as the dealer urgently signaled for the factotum, who managed the floor, and was already on his way over with two burly men.
Good, that was good.
But my relief was short-lived, when the player to my right suddenly pushed to his feet as well, pointing at the first accuser’s sleeve, where the edge of a card—an ace of hearts—was clearly visible beneath his cuff. “You’re the cheat! What’s that hanging from your shirt?”
The first man blanched, but then went red. “Mind your own deuced business!”
“Fraud!” the second roared.
A vein popped in the first man’s head when he lunged and swung at the second.
Cards flew everywhere while more chairs toppled over, the shouting so loud that my ears started ringing.
It was suddenly a free-for-all as hands and limbs flew and bodies crashed into each other.
Coins clinked as desperate fingers grabbed for piles of money on surrounding tables in the melee.
A wave of panic hit me. If this went south and the proctors arrived, I could not be involved or caught in the middle of a brawl.
“Roz!” I heard a panicked voice yelling.
My head whipped around. Searching through the mass of colliding bodies, I spied Will’s pale face on the other side of the room.
The twins were near him, but those two buffoons were grinning and throwing punches left and right.
My heart sank. We were all going to go to prison and my woefully brief stint as an independent university student would be over.
My life would be over.
“Roz…here! We…leave…,” Will shouted again, but his words were jumbled and broken apart by other shouts in the rapidly worsening scuffle. I blinked, peering through the throng as he struggled to keep someone up at his side. Gracious, was that poor Harold slumped over?
It would be impossible to get to them. My best chance was to stick with St. Clair, who I imagined would not want to be caught either. We both had a lot to lose—a potential fellowship for him and, well, my whole future for me.
“Go!” I yelled back. “I’ll find my way out!”
My stomach dropped as I felt a strong hand yank me out of the way of a spray of blood.
I almost gagged as the splotch of scarlet bled into the pretty green baize of the card table.
Fear tangled with horror as the man who had started it all threw a vicious elbow at the second man, who ended up in a heap on the floor.
His bloodshot gaze swung to my left just as St. Clair made a sound like a growl and braced his shoulders, fists flying up at the ready.
“Try it,” he said to the man, whose nostrils flared like an angry bull.
My heart hammered behind my ribs. Was he going to fight? That pigheaded man was nearly double as wide as we were combined. “St. Clair, no. He’s a beast.”
Shockingly, my tutor grinned. “Worried for me, Roz?”
I couldn’t fully register my glee at the fact that he had finally called me by my nickname, though standing shoulder to shoulder in a scuffle that could cost the two of us everything probably made us the best of mates. “Worried for us, yes.”
I barely swallowed my high-pitched scream before the man was lurching toward us.
Mimicking St. Clair, though I had no idea what I was doing, I threw my fists up to chin level and squared my weight over my feet.
But I needn’t have worried. With a confident two-punch combination, the boy next to me ducked out of harm’s way and then walloped his adversary in the right temple with his left fist and followed with an uppercut to the man’s jaw that made his eyes roll back in his head and sent him crashing backward.
My mouth slackened, but I didn’t have time to congratulate St. Clair before I noticed a figure looming from the back of us, knuckles raised and heading right for my tutor. Oh, good gracious, he’s going to hit him in the head!
“Watch out!” I yelled. But when he didn’t move, possibly because my warning was lost in the kerfuffle, I had to act. I didn’t think—I shoved him sideways, so he wasn’t in the direct path of the assailant, rammed my fist up and out, and hoped for the best.
“What the hell?” St. Clair shouted as he stumbled and gripped the edge of a table for balance.
When my balled fingers connected with a fleshly thud into the oncoming attacker, I didn’t expect it to hurt so much.
A shriek bubbled up as I wrenched my injured hand back to cradle it, belatedly registering the man dropping to his knees, coughing, and clutching his throat where I must have made contact. I did that!
I only hoped my poor aching fingers weren’t fractured, because they bloody hurt!
“You got him,” St. Clair said with surprise. “Nice one. Thanks for looking out. I didn’t even see him behind me.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied, feeling as though my heartbeat were pounding in each of my sore knuckles.
“Duck!” he shouted suddenly, and I obeyed on instinct just before the legs of a splintered chair—and was that a dratted tooth?
—flew over our heads. I yelped as my feet slipped out from under me, and I scrabbled with my fingers to catch my fall on the edge of the table.
I managed to save myself from tumbling down, but heat exploded over the back of my hand when a piece of shattered glass caught the skin.
Blood welled and dripped as I stared blurrily at my split skin.
“Christ, you’re bleeding!” St. Clair said before unknotting his cravat and holding it out to me. “Here, take this and wrap it.”
Feeling slightly woozy, I took the offering and glanced down at the stripe of crimson. I looped the fabric around my palm, the pristine white soaking up the blood in an instant, and then fought against the ensuing rush of nausea. I didn’t do well with blood…mine or anyone else’s.
“We should get out of here before it gets worse,” St. Clair yelled over the noise. The sound of whistles blew through the air—a warning of some sort—and panic ensued. Were those the proctors?
Whirling, I winced and cursed as he unwittingly grabbed my other arm to yank me through a doorway that led to a darkened staircase. I recognized some of the attendants who had been passing around drinks. This had to be a servant’s entrance. “Where does this go?” I asked.
“Kitchens, I think,” he shot back. “Try to keep up!”
Ignoring the pain in both hands, I pumped my shaky legs faster, taking the narrow stairs three at a time even though I knew in the back of my head that a fall would be the end of me.
The kitchens, thankfully, were empty. The servants had likely either disappeared to safety or run upstairs to keep the place from being absolutely destroyed.
St. Clair led me through a maze of smaller storage rooms that had bags of grains and then a cramped cellar that was filled with casks.
He seemed to know where he was going, though, so I followed, hoping I would not regret it.
Finally, he crashed into a small wooden door, and the scent of the outdoors—a rank alley, in fact—reached my nostrils.
I had never been happier to smell such putrid air, and even the sight of a dozen rats scampering down the grease-blackened cobbles didn’t dampen my relief.
We were out of danger! Now we only needed to get back to the college.
I moved toward the alley mouth when St. Clair’s soft whisper made me halt. “Wait.”
“For what?” I whispered back. “We need to leave this whole area. The proctors—”
“Are exactly why,” he interrupted, pointing and crouching down.
Sure enough, I saw three shadows block the light on the street I’d been seconds from running toward. “Is that them?” I asked, dropping to my haunches beside him.
“Or constables.”
I blanched. Those were infinitely worse. The proctors were university officials who could only send us back to the college and threaten us with fines or a period of rustication. Neither of those punishments were as bad as being thrown into the local jail. My stomach roiled with dread.
“How are your legs?” St. Clair asked.
“My legs?” With a frown, I blinked.
A gentleman didn’t ask a lady about her legs, especially when they were alone and unchaperoned in an alley.
Outrage and something else I couldn’t name jumped hotly in my veins as I peered at him through the glimmering darkness.
I opened my mouth, ready to give him the blistering he deserved before I snapped it shut.
Deuce it, I wasn’t a lady…I was a young man.
In the chaos, I had almost made an unforgivable error and outed myself.
“Well? Can you run, my lord?” St. Clair asked again, sounding irritated. Clearly, he was, since he’d reverted to calling me by my honorific. “It’s about two miles back to the college from here. Can you make it?”
“A-all the way back?” I stammered. Two miles was a long way for a girl whose only exercise was the occasional quadrille. “Why can’t we take a hackney?”
“They’ll be watching all the hacks in this whole area,” he said. “Trust me, I know how the proctors work.”
He would, since he’d been at Trinity much longer than I had. I bit my lip, deliberating. I wasn’t athletic by any means, but I would have to do whatever it took to avoid being caught. “I can do it.”
I hoped.
St. Clair rose and inhaled a few deep breaths before spearing me with a look I could only describe as one of challenge. But his next words made me grin.
“Race you! If you win, no reading for a week!”