Chapter 12
The Ouroboros
The interior is dark. That is a deliberate aesthetic choice.
The club's founders understood that gambling is an activity best conducted in shadow, where the light does not expose the pallor of a losing player's face or the tremor of a hand that has bet beyond its means.
The walls are panelled in mahogany so dark it is nearly black.
The curtains are drawn against the street.
The lamps are low, burning oil rather than gas, and their light pools on the green baize of the card tables like amber honey.
The air smells of tobacco smoke, brandy, and the particular metallic tang of coins changing hands.
I arrived at half past nine on the evening of the fifteenth of January and was shown to my usual table in the faro room by a waiter named Griffiths who had learned, over the course of several visits, that I preferred still water to wine and that I did not wish to be disturbed unless I signalled.
The table was occupied by three men I knew by sight: Sir William Hartwell, who played faro with the cautious precision of a man who could not afford to lose and found the losing distasteful; Lord March, who played with reckless abandon and could afford every pound of it; and a young diplomat named Carstairs whose bets were too large for his salary and whose face, when he lost, displayed the particular anguish of a man who was gambling with money he did not have.
I took my seat and arranged my chips with the mechanical precision of a woman who has performed this action hundreds of times.
The dealer, a taciturn Scot named Macready who had been with the club since its founding, shuffled the cards and began the deal.
I played conservatively at first, feeling the rhythm of the table, reading the other players, observing the patterns that emerged in any group of men who are betting money they value.
Sir William folded early, as he always did.
Lord March bet aggressively, as he always did.
Carstairs bet and lost and bet again, his jaw tightening with each successive loss, and I could see in the set of his shoulders the mathematics of ruin being calculated in real time.
I won steadily. Not dramatically, not in the way that draws attention.
Steadily, the way water wears stone. By eleven o'clock I had increased my stake by forty pounds, which was the amount I had determined, before arriving, was sufficient to justify the evening without appearing either unlucky or greedy.
Forty pounds was enough to establish competence.
More than forty would invite scrutiny. Less would suggest weakness.
The arithmetic of social perception is no different from the arithmetic of cards: one calculates the optimal position and occupies it.
I was halfway through a hand when I felt the familiar sensation of being observed.
It was not a physical feeling, not the prickle on the back of the neck that lesser minds experience when they are being watched.
It was a cognitive recognition, a shift in the ambient attention of the room, and I identified its source before I turned my head.
Sebastian Aldric was standing in the doorway of the faro room.
He had found the club. This did not surprise me.
A man of his profession has contacts in every layer of London society, and the Ouroboros, while exclusive, is not invisible.
He would have learned of my membership through the same network of informants and professional acquaintances that provided him with the false leads I had so carefully planted.
He was not, I noted with approval, wearing his usual dark suit.
He had made an effort: a slightly better cut of jacket, a cravat that was not quite dowdy, boots that had been polished with more than usual care.
He was attempting to blend, and the attempt was almost successful.
He looked like what he was: a professional man of substance who had dressed for an occasion that exceeded his customary social station.
I turned back to the table and played my hand. I won. I collected my chips and arranged them with deliberate casualness, and then I looked up again, and this time I allowed my gaze to meet his, and I held it for precisely three seconds before returning to the cards.
Three seconds. Long enough to acknowledge.
Short enough to suggest indifference. The timing was calculated to produce a specific effect: it would tell him that I had seen him, that his presence was noted, and that I was choosing not to respond.
This would irritate him. Irritation produces impatience, and impatience produces mistakes, and mistakes produce opportunities.
I played two more hands. Sir William retired to the smoking room.
Lord March doubled his bet on a whim and lost, and laughed about it, because Lord March could afford to lose and had never understood, in his life of effortless privilege, why losing should cause anyone distress.
Carstairs folded and sat back in his chair with the blank expression of a man who has lost track of how much he has lost and is afraid to calculate.
I laid my cards face-down and stood. "If you will excuse me, gentlemen."
No one objected. I crossed the room, weaving between the tables with the unhurried grace that my mother had drilled into me as a girl.
One walks as though the floor belongs to you.
One moves through a room as though every person in it has been waiting for one's arrival.
These were Vivienne's lessons, delivered in the same clinical tone she applied to everything, and they had served me well.
Sebastian had moved from the doorway to the bar. He was standing with a glass of something in his hand, not drinking it, watching me approach with the particular intensity of a man who has spent three weeks chasing false leads and has finally understood that he has been chasing his own shadow.
"Inspector." I stopped before him at a distance that was social but not intimate. Close enough for conversation. Far enough to suggest that the conversation was not welcome. "This is an unexpected pleasure."
"Lady Ashworth." He did not smile. His voice was clipped, professional, the voice of a man who had rehearsed this encounter and was determined to maintain its formal character. "I was not aware you were a member."
"Among other things, Inspector. I contain multitudes, as Mr. Whitman would say, though I suspect you did not come here to discuss American poetry."
"I came here to talk to you."
"Then you might have called. I receive callers on Thursdays." I allowed a faint smile, the smile of a woman who is amused rather than threatened. "Though I suppose calling requires a certain candour that your position may not permit."
His jaw tightened. I could see the frustration in the small muscles around his mouth, the way they pressed together and released, pressed together and released, as though he were chewing on words he was not yet ready to say.
He was angry. He had every right to be angry.
He had spent three weeks following trails that I had laid, and the realisation of that fact sat behind his eyes like a coal.
"May we sit?" he said.
"There is a private room upstairs. I sometimes use it when the main floor becomes tedious.
" I did not wait for his response. I turned and walked toward the narrow corridor at the rear of the faro room, where a staircase led to the club's upper storey.
I heard his footsteps behind me, and I did not look back.
The private room was small and furnished with the same dark mahogany as the rest of the club.
A single lamp burned on a side table. There were two chairs, a small writing desk, and a window that overlooked the rear courtyard and was covered by a heavy velvet curtain.
The room was used, primarily, for private conversations that members did not wish to be overheard: business negotiations, extramarital assignations, the occasional act of blackmail.
The walls were thick. The door locked from the inside.
I had chosen this room before, for other purposes, and I chose it now for the same reason: privacy.
I closed the door. I did not lock it. That would come later, if it came at all.
Sebastian stood in the centre of the room with his hands at his sides.
He looked out of place in the Ouroboros, the way a church looks out of place in a brothel: not wrong, precisely, but incongruous, a reminder that there exist spaces in the world where his particular kind of authority carries no weight.
"You have been busy," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Candover shipping offices. The Viscount's gambling debts at White's. Crutchley, in Limehouse." He spoke the names like accusations, each one a separate indictment. "Three leads, Lady Ashworth. Three dead ends. Each one traced back to information you provided during our interviews."
I settled into one of the chairs and crossed my ankles.
My dress tonight was navy blue, half-mourning, with a modest neckline and sleeves that reached the wrist. I had chosen it specifically for its ordinariness.
A woman in navy blue at a gambling club is less remarkable than a woman in black or, worse, a woman in something that draws the eye. Ordinariness is a form of camouflage.
"That is a serious allegation, Inspector."
"It is not an allegation. It is an observation."
"Observations are not evidence. You, of all people, should know the difference."