Chapter Nine #2
The faro table was crowded with punters, and for the first time, Olivia was truly at her ease facing them.
She hadn’t realized how much anxiety she’d felt on every other occasion until she experienced the absence of it.
Griffin, too, was less often at her side, though not by any means less attentive.
He did not pass through her gaming room without taking surreptitious measure of the gentlemen surrounding her table and judging their potential threat to her.
The arrival of a half dozen students not long after midnight caused her some concern, but when their manner toward her hovered between respect and reverence she comprehended that Griffin had taken them in hand before they ever reached her table.
She hardly knew whether to be offended or grateful for his interference and concluded that she was a bit of both.
“I would have dealt with them, you know,” she told him after Mason had been sent in to spell her at the table.
Griffin slipped his arm in hers and led her toward the unoccupied stairs leading up to their private rooms. It was quieter here, just off the hallway where patrons mingled, drank, and laughed until they settled on another game of chance.
At a halfway point, he drew her down on the step so they were neatly tucked between the wall and the banister.
“I prefer you only deal with the cards,” he said, releasing her so that he might rest his elbows on the stair behind him. He stretched his legs casually at an incline and glanced sideways at her, giving her benefit of a charmingly sheepish grin. “If you’ll forgive the wordplay.”
“I suppose it is your experience to be forgiven all manner of things. It is your smile that puts others at a disadvantage.”
“Really? And I’d so hoped it was my wit and the soundness of my arguments.”
“Let us say you are not altogether foolish.”
His grin actually deepened. “Pray, you must stop thinking so highly of me, else I am bound to disappoint you.”
Olivia had an urge to poke him with her elbow. She restrained herself, but only just. “What nonsense you speak. What are we doing here?”
“Stealing a moment for ourselves.”
“Oh.” Olivia thought he might kiss her, and she wondered if she wanted him to, but he remained exactly as he was. She worried her bottom lip, trying to unravel his meaning as if he’d spoken in code. Did he expect that she would kiss him? “What does one do with a stolen moment?”
“Sometimes nothing at all.”
She approved of that. To mimic his posture, as it seemed pertinent to doing nothing at all, Olivia set her elbows behind her and reclined at an angle parallel to Griffin’s. “It’s a fine idea.”
“A fishing pole and a swiftly running stream would improve it.”
She nodded, though she wasn’t as convinced. “Do you have many opportunities to fish?”
“I did. Not so often now.”
She waited, content with his silence, sensing that he might be moved to reflect if she did not speak too soon.
“The park at Wright Hall has such a stream. The water is clear and cool, and runs so quickly there is always a pleasant roar in one’s ears.
Sunlight slips through the trees overhead and turns every spray into a translucent rainbow and every droplet into a diamond.
The trout leap like acrobats and tease like coquettes.
The most experienced anglers are patient and appreciate the performance. Some find it spiritual.”
“Did you?”
“There were times, yes.”
“And now you are in London.”
“I am.”
This time her silence did not prompt him to speak. “I have never fished,” she said. “Although I like smoked trout well enough, but perhaps that is not spiritual.”
“It can be.” He winked at her. “It is all in the preparation.”
Olivia’s smile was rather winsome. “I think I will try fishing someday.”
“Then you will want to know that using feathers from a lady’s bonnet to make your own flies is ill-advised.”
“I imagine it depends on the lady’s affection for the bonnet. Did it belong to one of your sisters?”
“My mother, and she had, in my opinion, an unnatural attachment to the thing.”
“By ‘an unnatural attachment,’ I take it to mean she was actually wearing the bonnet when you plucked the feathers.”
“You are clearly too clever for your own good.” He rose to his feet, then took her hand in his and helped her up. He kissed her once, briefly, warmly, and released her before it became something more. With no parting word, he tripped lightly down the steps and turned the corner into the hall.
Olivia pressed the back of her fingers to her lips and stared after him. Not so very clever, she thought, not when she hadn’t the least notion of how to maintain her balance in his presence.
She slept alone that night and for a full sennight after that. It occurred to her to return to his room without invitation, but she remained in her own because except for the occasional kiss at oddly chosen moments, Griffin Wright-Jones hardly seemed to know she was still under his roof.
He was a curiosity. Olivia found herself studying him, rather more intrigued that he had set her from him since their night of intimacy than simply relieved by it.
In her presence he often seemed mildly distracted so that she was never quite certain he was listening.
It emboldened her at times, and she tested him, allowing small pieces of herself to drop like crumbs to see if he would sweep them up.
He didn’t. Such things as she told him were never commented upon; indeed, he often chose some other conversational thread to pull and let such bits as she gave him simply lie there.
In spite of Olivia approaching him several times in regard to his requirements, he had never shared them.
Relying on trial and error and her own sense of what would be helpful, she became more involved in the nightly activities of the hell.
She examined the cards for wear and recommended when decks should be discarded.
She collected fallen chips and coins and passed them on to Beetle and Wick, who became her devotees because of it.
When she asked Mason if she might propose some changes to the distribution of liquor and wine, he suffered her suggestions without comment, but implemented the whole of it the next evening.
They all came to her after that. It was as flattering as it was unexpected, although the part of her that retained a survivor’s skepticism suspected Griffin’s encouragement, if not outright manipulation of his staff.
While she had no access to the financial ledgers, she never doubted that Griffin was scrupulously fair in his dealings with her.
It required little effort on her part to estimate her table’s winnings and calculate her share based on the percentage they’d agreed upon.
She was never wrong by more than a few pounds as Griffin’s more detailed calculations proved night after night.
He’d wanted to know how she was able to do it, but she had no explanation for it, nor any explanation for how she kept an account of the cards she’d dealt.
Griffin had pointed out, quite correctly, that she could make even more money at faro as a punter rather than a dealer, but she had no interest in gaming as a participant.
It had not escaped her notice that he did not make any wagers in his own establishment and as far as she was able to discover, made none anywhere else.
The former, she understood. It was the latter that gave her pause, and when she asked him about it, his answer was a terse, “If I wish to give my money away, I will choose a charity.”
In spite of the late hours she was keeping, she woke most mornings before many of the staff.
It was her habit to go to the servants’ hall to carry back her breakfast tray, though either Beetle or Wick would have been pleased to deliver it.
She would have preferred to eat with the staff, but comprehended very well they would have been made uncomfortable by her presence.
It would have been that way whether or not they knew she’d been a visitor to their employer’s bed.
They simply accorded her a certain respect because of how they perceived her station relative to their own.
She often thought she should direct them to inquire of her father. Sir Hadrien would have been delighted to inform them she was no better than she ought to be. He’d made certain of it.
Olivia had removed her wig and was attending to her hair with punishing brushstrokes when she heard a staccato rap at her door.
Her heartbeat tripped over itself as she set down the brush, and she felt a tightening in her chest. She could not imagine that it was anyone save Griffin expecting entry at this late hour, and above all things, she did not want it to be him.
She picked up a damp flannel and began removing the rouge, powder, and beauty mark she had lightly applied before she went below stairs to meet patrons at the faro table.
The rapping at the door began again, this time a bit more insistently.
She sighed. He would not be moved until she answered and perhaps not even then.
Olivia put aside the flannel and carried the candlestick with her into the bedroom. “Who is it?” she asked.
Griffin supposed it was a sensible enough question, but in his present mood it irritated him. “Breckenridge.”
Olivia opened the door a few inches. “My lord?”
He scowled at her. “Will you not invite me in?”
“I’d rather not, unless you insist, then of course you may come in.” She leaned into the opening and sniffed. “Are you foxed?”
He fiddled with the intricate knot of his cravat and impatiently removed it. “Fletcher was foxed. I was his victim.” Dangling the offending article of clothing between his thumb and forefinger, he took a step back and indicated she should join him in the hall.
Olivia was on firmer footing where she was, but she did not want him to know that. She slipped out, holding the candlestick in front of her. “What is it?”
“I cannot find my error.”