Chapter Eighteen #2
‘Unless one feels certain to draw less than a five,’ someone farther down the table mused. ‘And it seems to me that there’s been a lot of queens out lately. Time for some low cards.’ That set off a flurry of energetic side bets around the table.
‘I feel required to draw now,’ Alistair announced to the table at large.
‘And to place my own wager. I don’t dare bet against myself.
Two ducats says I’ll draw low.’ He slid the coins to the centre of the table.
Someone gave a quiet whistle. Two ducats would buy a few months’ worth of food for a less fortunate family.
He would likely lose this wager, but if it helped gain his freedom and Ismay’s, he would consider it well-spent.
The dealer flipped a card, the four of spades, bringing his total to twenty.
The table applauded, and people whooped in celebration while a few others groaned.
He could hear the clink of coins exchange hands behind him.
Ismay grinned, but down the table he caught Sir Thomas’s frown of warning that said he’d been lucky this time.
Luck never lasted, especially stupid luck spent on stupid wagers.
The odds should not have favoured him. But they did. And they continued to defy those odds.
That was the funny thing about cards, in Alistair’s experience.
The cards seemed to know when a man needed to win or lose and were intent on being contrary.
Tonight, when Alistair had hoped to lose spectacularly and shrug it off as inconsequential, he could not.
Every turn of the cards favoured him. He moved on to hazard with Ismay beside him, his pockets full.
‘You have the devil’s own luck!’ she whispered gleefully.
‘I am hoping to get luckier still, later tonight in the library,’ he replied wickedly.
‘We should be able to lose at hazard.’ Alistair stepped up to the hazard table and took his turn as the caster, Ismay blowing on the dice for luck, making a show of being at his side and encouraging him to lay brash wagers.
He could not lose, unless one counted losing Sir Thomas Rose’s good opinion.
As the night wore on, Ismay’s father’s countenance grew sterner as the wagers increased.
Alistair was not only being reckless, he was also flouting fatherly authority after being specifically instructed to play moderately.
The last bit hurt him, or at least his pride.
He liked Sir Thomas Rose. He did not like lying to a man who’d treated him as a son.
He liked even less having that man think he was heedless.
When it became clear he was not going to lose spectacularly, Alistair tugged the sapphire ring off his finger and threw it on the pile.
‘One last bet,’ he called out to the crowd gathered about the table.
‘This ring against rolling a seven, to make it interesting.’ It was an unnecessary, purposeless wager designed to underscore his recklessness.
‘Your son-in-law is bold,’ Eddington remarked to Sir Thomas in a manner that suggested neither condemnation nor exaltation of the behaviour. ‘He’s certainly enlivened my humble gambling night.’
‘It’s certainly been enlightening,’ Alistair heard Sir Thomas reply. ‘Fate does not always deal kindly with those who live capriciously.’
But not tonight. The dice came up seven with a five and a two.
Alistair departed the table a hero. There were many who did not wish him to leave.
Their own winnings had risen when he’d won.
He supposed one could count that as a type of good work.
But there would be a reckoning for this.
Doubtless, Sir Thomas would want to speak with him, perhaps even write a letter home to his father.
And he would have to face both Sir Thomas and his father in their disappointment.
He was all too glad to slip away to the library and wait in the dark for Ismay to join him.
Not for the first time, he was embarrassed in his behaviour—but as always, too late to alter anything.
But this time the embarrassment ran deeper.
He was too old for this. He was not a child or a wild twenty-year-old tasting all the world had to offer.
But he’d acted like that twenty-year-old tonight.
He poured himself a consolation drink from a decanter on the sideboard.
In acting as he had, he’d shamed himself and two people who cared for him, who’d tried their best for him.
But it had been for the cause of Ismay, and perhaps that made the price bearable. He loved her.
Alistair took a swallow, tasting the words on his tongue along with the brandy.
He loved Ismay. Was that true? At times it felt true.
When they were in bed together, the rest of the world melted away, and he knew in the deep places of his soul he would do anything for her.
And tonight he had. Tomorrow at the horse race he would do it again, and the next day he would do it one last time so that she could be free, so she could have the life she wanted.
Alistair swirled his brandy. Perhaps she’d been right when she’d said love was sacrifice.
The door to the library cracked open a slim fraction, and Ismay slipped in. He turned up the light. ‘Iz, I’m over here.’ He raised his glass. ‘There’s brandy.’
‘No, thanks. I’ll just drink yours.’ She smiled and took his tumbler. ‘I’ve had more glasses of champagne than I can count.’
‘But you didn’t finish them,’ Alistair amended.
She’d played her role well tonight: the doting fiancée, the eccentric daughter of Sir Thomas Rose who’d met her match in a man just as heedless, just as unconcerned with convention.
Such things were tolerated much more openly in Naples than in London, but even here in the British community there were limits, and they’d surpassed them.
She returned his glass. ‘I think the evening was a success.’
‘Was it?’ He took a seat on a gold-and-ivory-striped settee. ‘Why is it that all I feel is remorse? Your father thinks to despise me. He thinks I’m reckless.’ He was coming to hate that last word. It had defined too much of his evening, too much of his life. He did not like it.
Ismay was quick to his side. Perhaps she sensed where this was going and wanted to divert it.
‘You are reckless, Alistair. It’s what I like about you.
You are too full of life to live like everyone else.
’ She took his hand. ‘Sometimes I think the world isn’t big enough for you and all of your enthusiasm.
You could not be any other way and still be yourself. ’
‘Is that a nice way of saying I’m a bull in a china shop? Everywhere I turn, I run into something, knock something over, leave nothing whole behind?’
‘You do not ruin things,’ she protested.
‘Just this evening when I was trying to get away, Mrs Hoffman, the artist’s wife, stopped me.
She was pressing my hand and nearly in tears—she was that grateful for what you did tonight.
’ Ismay smiled, trying to make him feel better.
In her haste, she was not careful with her argument.
She was not thinking about his cream cartel, and she should have been.
He certainly was. ‘You restored their fortunes. Her husband had accumulated some debt between commissions, but now they can repay their creditors.’
Alistair glared. ‘Then, Hoffman was the last person who should have been betting tonight. He had nothing he could afford to lose. That’s my point exactly.
I meant to lose tonight. I took on careless wagers purposely.
Hoffman could have made his situation so much worse had I been successful.
An innocent bystander could have been ruined.
’ Just like the farmers could have been ruined when the cartel failed.
‘Unintentionally,’ she countered. ‘You cannot control what others do.’