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Neuf nodded, still managing to make his unhappiness clear to Richard. If he’d known Richard long enough for a certain degree of familiarity, he’d also known him long enough to understand the combined temptation that Penny House could offer, and the futility of any warning he might give to his master.
“As you wish, sir,” he said instead. “As you wish.”
“As I damned well please, Neuf,” Richard said cheerfully, his mood improving by the moment. “And may the devil take the man who tries to stop me.”
The man’s face was round and red and very shiny, and he’d had so much to drink that he didn’t notice that the ends of his neckcloth were sticking out on either side of his plump neck like well-starched handles.
But Cassia noticed, and it was hard—very hard—for her not to reach out with both hands to tuck the ends back into the collar of his coat.
“And you say you arranged everything in this house in the very latest taste, Miss Penny?” he marveled, patting the front of his waistcoat. “You’re such a dear young girl that I cannot believe it to be possible!”
“Thank you, Lord Russell,” Cassia said, fluttering her fan as she squeezed back against the wall to let two other gentlemen pass them on the stairs. “Perhaps I did not paint every last baseboard with my own hand, but I did choose the colors, and assemble all the paintings and other little pieces to amuse the eyes of our guests.”
Lord Russell tapped the side of his nose with one finger, narrowing his unfocussed eyes. “That’s what a good English lass is supposed to do with her house, Miss Penny, and so I tell Lady Russell. But she’d rather have an Italian do it for her, fussing with the furnishing until a fellow can’t tell where he’s supposed to sit.”
“Then you shall simply have to return to us, my lord.” Cassia smiled, though her mouth already ached from smiling at gentlemen because she had to. She could not believe how many men had crowded into the house, more men—old and young and in between, handsome and homely, but most of them titled and all of them wealthy—than she’d ever seen together in her entire life in Woodbury. Amariah had been right: this wasn’t like the flirtatious fun at the Havertown Assembly. It was work, hard work, and the tall clock in the hall had yet to chime ten.
Lord Russell leaned closer, swallowing as he glanced along the front of her bodice. “You know, Miss Penny, you are a fine girl, deuced fine, and a good deal easier to talk to than my wife. I’m a generous man, Miss Penny, especially to those I favor, and when you tire of this, we could make an arrangement that would benefit—”
“Have you found our hazard table yet, my lord?” Cassia said brightly, fighting the very real urge to forget her promise to Amariah and shove His Lordship back down the stairs the way he deserved. “It’s in the drawing room at the top of these stairs, just to your right, and we’ve also tables for cribbage and whist, if those are more your pleasure.”
“So you like a man who’s not afraid to play deep, eh?” His Lordship leered, or at least as close to a leer as his baby-round face could manage. “You like a man who’s not afraid of courting danger at the table?”
What Cassia liked was a man who’d play deep and lose badly and make their bank fatter for Father’s charity, which was exactly why Lord Russell had been invited tonight.
Not, of course, that Cassia could say that to him. Instead she deftly twisted away, putting more space between them as she kept smiling over her fan. “I hear the gentlemen have already predicted it will be a lucky table, my lord.”
“Have they now?” He leered again, smoothing his plump, pink hand down the front of his waistcoat. “Up these stairs, you say?”
“To the right of the landing, my lord,” she said with relief. “You cannot miss it.”
“Very well, Miss Penny,” he said with a slight bow. “I shall— What in blazes is that racket down at the door?”
“Doubtless an overeager guest, my lord.” Cassia leaned over the railing, trying to glimpse what was happening below. “I’m sure the staff will sort it out in a moment.”
But Lord Russell was right: it was a racket. Men were shouting at each other, while the house’s servants in livery were pushing and shoving and trying to keep order. Other gentlemen were crowding the doorways, determined to see the source of the excitement. In the very center, Cassia spotted the top of Amariah’s head, her hair bright as a copper coin tossed in the middle of so much dark male evening clothes. For a moment, Cassia thought she glimpsed an arm, gesturing wildly in her direction, and then Amariah looked up and caught her eye.
Pratt appeared magically beside her, his face so purposefully bland that she knew things must be very bad indeed. “Excuse me, Miss Cassia, but Miss Amariah has requested you come to her directly. This way, miss, if you please.”
Cassia nodded, closing her fan with a little click. She gave one last smile to Lord Russell, with what she hoped was sufficient regret, then hurried down the curving staircase after Pratt. The opening was supposed to be genteel, elegant, meant to make gentlemen want to join their club. It was not supposed to degenerate into a brawl.
“What has happened, Pratt?” she whispered. “Tell me! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing that can’t be set to rights in a moment, miss,” Pratt answered discreetly, no real answer at all. “Miss Amariah will explain.”
He cut a path for her through the sea of gentlemen, keeping her moving through the crowd still clustered in the front hall, while newcomers at the door tried to make their way inside. “Excuse me, my lord. This way, miss, if you please, this way.”
He opened the door to the small anteroom reserved for the porter, and held it ajar just long enough for Cassia to squeeze through. Two of the largest of the house orderly men were holding a gentleman tightly by the arms, keeping him from breaking free, his broad-shouldered back to her. His dark hair was mussed, and there was a rip in one sleeve of his jacket, testimony to the scuffle in the front hall that had brought him here now.
“Thank you for joining us, Cassia.” Her sister stood at the end of the tiny room, another orderly man on one side and Pratt on the other. With her hands clasped over the royal-blue gown, Amariah still clung to her usual serenity, though her cheeks were flushed and the fingers of her clasped hands so tightly clenched together that the knuckles were white. “I am sorry to have disturbed you, but this gentleman here has posed quite a quandary for us, and you, it seems, are part of it.”
“Cassia.” The man being held repeated her name with relish, almost as if he could taste the word on his tongue. He tried to twist around to see her, but the two guards jerked him back to face Amariah. “So that’s the young lady’s name? Cassia? She would be called something rare like that.”
Cassia pressed her hand over her mouth so he wouldn’t hear her gasp. She recognized that voice, even without a face to it: he was the man from Christie’s who’d stolen The Fortune Teller away from her.
But why was he here now at Penny House? How had he known where to find her? Or had he followed her here, intent on further humiliating her?
“What the lady is called is of no importance to you, sir,” Pratt ordered, his eyes hooded. “You would do far better to consider your own situation, and how it will be viewed by a judge. Forced entry, trespassing, threats of violence against the people of this house—such charges will not be taken lightly by a court of law.”
“But as they are all lies of your making, they shall not be considered at all.” The man paused, and Cassia knew he must be smiling. “Now what would those selfsame courts make of your treatment of me, I wonder? A respectable gentleman of wealth and position, treated like some sort of thieving scoundrel—but you can vouch for me, can’t you, Cassia? You can tell them what kind of man I am, can’t you?”
She flushed at the intimacy he implied, but before she could speak, Pratt answered for her.
“Do not reply, miss,” he said. “The rascal has no right to address you, let along to ask you to speak on his behalf.”
“Very well, then,” the man said. “Forgive me my rascally ways, my dear Cassia. I shall defend myself.”
Cassia took a step forward, stunned that he’d dare be so presumptuous. He’d no right to say such things, or to shame her this way before the others, and she longed to tell him exactly that. But she’d promised Amariah she’d behave, and as hard as it was to keep quiet, Cassia did, biting back the rebuttal the man deserved.
“Sir, you still do not seem to understand.” Amariah’s smile was tightly polite. “Penny House is a club for the first gentlemen of this country, where they can amuse themselves among their peers. Admission tonight is by invitation only, sir, and regardless of what my sister says of you, you were not invited.”
“But I should have been.” With his arms still restrained, he tossed his dark hair back from his forehead with an impatience that Cassia also recognized all too well. “You should all be on your knees to beg me to stay, instead of tossing me out in St. James Street like yesterday’s rubbish.”
That was more than enough for Pratt. “What is your name, sir?” he demanded. “Your home?”
“I am Richard Blackley, of Greenwood Hall in Hampshire,” the man answered, the pride in his voice unmistakable. “Recently returned from my plantations in the royal colony of Barbados, and presently residing at the Clarendon.”
“You lie, sir.” Pratt’s words were clipped with contempt. “The true owner of Greenwood Hall is not you, but Sir Henry Green. The estate has been in his family for centuries.”
“But no longer.” Again Cassia guessed the man—he had a name now, Mr. Richard Blackley—must be smiling, despite the edge that had crept into his voice. “Shortly before I sailed, Sir Henry and I engaged in an evening of cards in a tavern in Bridgetown. He was drunk, and he lost. I wasn’t, and I won, and now own Greenwood.”
Pratt’s expression didn’t change. “Is there anyone here who can vouch for what you claim, sir?”
Blackley shrugged, or would have, if the other two hadn’t held his arms. “I doubt it, not in this crowd. Best to ask poor Sir Henry himself. If you can find him, that is. Ruin can make a man damned near invisible.”
Cassia listened, shocked. Since coming to London, she’d heard many stories of men who’d played deep and had lost everything, but the stories had always been remote, as distant as a nursery tale. Rich gentlemen lost money they could spare, and Penny House’s bank would profit for the sake of the poor.
But this careless, offhanded description by one man who’d stripped another of his patrimony had such a grim ring of reality that Cassia couldn’t look at Mr. Blackley the same way. At the auction she had called him a pirate and a thief. How could she have known how true that was?
“Cassia.” Her sister’s inflection dragged Cassia back to the little room. “Is this the gentleman you met today at Christie’s?”
She nodded, and the two guards released him. He shook himself free, squaring his shoulders and shooting the cuffs of his black coat. He took another second to smooth back his hair, and then, ready at last, he turned around.
“Miss Cassia Penny,” he said, his bow more an athlete’s than a courtier’s. “How happy I am to make your formal acquaintance. But will you now say the same of me, I wonder? Can I trust you to speak the truth?”
Cassia lifted her chin, determined to meet his eye without flinching. He was even more handsome in his evening clothes than she remembered from this afternoon, and the advantage it gave him was decidedly unfair.
“You can trust me to be truthful, Mr. Blackley,” she said, her voice slow and deliberate, “because this is a square house in every way, you know.”
“So you do know him, Cassia?” Amariah asked. “This is the man?”
“The man who outbid me fairly for the painting?” Cassia forced herself to smile, opening her fan before her in a graceful arc. He was daring her to blush, daring her to look away or stammer, and she would not do it. She would treat him like every other gentleman here tonight, no better nor no worse. “Yes, Amariah, it was Mr. Blackley.”
He bowed again, though not as low, so he could keep watching her. “Your servant, Miss Penny,” he said softly. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Swiftly she looked away, back to her sister. “But that is all, Amariah. Beyond Mr. Blackley’s paying a preposterous amount for a very average painting, I cannot speak for his family, his estate or his honor, and that is the truth.”
Cassia smiled at her sister, hoping she’d just damned Mr. Blackley with the faintest praise possible.
But she hadn’t, not at all.
“I cannot ask you for anything more than the truth, Cassia,” Amariah said. “And I thank you for it.”
While she thought, she patted her palms gently together, the sound muted by her gloves, and Cassia’s heart sank. From the way her sister’s brows had lowered, just short of a frown, Cassia knew she was calculating exactly how much of Mr. Blackley’s money could be pried from his pockets and into their charities. His family and his honor—or their lack—didn’t amount to a pile of garden dirt next to that. Amariah was going to let Mr. Blackley stay, and nothing that Cassia could say now was going to change her mind.
Pratt cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Miss Penny, but we should all be returning to the—”
“And so we shall, Mr. Pratt.” Amariah’s face was once again serene. “Mr. Blackley, you may stay. Dine with us, play at our tables, amuse yourself however you please. But please recall, sir, that Penny House is a respite for gentlemen, and not a Caribbean tavern made for brawling. Even a breath of trouble from you, sir, and you will be banned from here for the rest of your life.”
“Hah,” Blackley said. “There’s nothing like a threat to make for a damned cheerful welcome.”
“As my sister said, Mr. Blackley, you will find only the truth in this house.” Amariah glided past him to return to the others, Pratt and the guards behind her, and Cassia hurried to join them. “Now unless there is anything more you might wish from—”
“Your sister,” he said. “I want her.”
Cassia stopped abruptly. “Mr. Blackley, I am not—”
“As my guide, that is.” His smile was wicked, teasing, knowing she’d misinterpreted exactly as he’d planned. “Since I’m new here tonight.”
“We are all new here tonight, Mr. Blackley.” Amariah nodded back at him, striving now to put him at his ease, as if he were behaving with perfect decorum. “Miss Cassia will be honored to show you the features of Penny House. Won’t you, Cassia?”
Cassia took a deep breath. “I…shall…be…delighted.”
“I’m honored, Miss Cassia.” Even in the tiny room, he was too close to her, too sure of himself, the way he had been when they were examining the painting. He crooked his arm for her to take.
She ignored it, sailing ahead of him and across the black-and-white marble floor of the front hall.
“This is our drawing room, Mr. Blackley,” she said with a perfunctory sweep of her hand when he joined her. “Where gentlemen may gather for conversation, or to read the latest news.”
“You’ve no right to be angry with me,” he said. “They made the scene, not I. None of it was my doing.”
“Oh, no, how could you ever be at fault?” She kept her eyes straight ahead, fighting her own temper. “As you see, Mr. Blackley, we have furnished the drawing room for both comfort and fashion, wishing our gentlemen to feel at their ease.”
“Is this still about the damned painting?” he asked, his voice low so the others around him wouldn’t overhear, though the irritation in his words was unmistakable. “You still believe somehow that I cheated you?”
Cassia stared pointedly at the empty place over the fireplace where the painting should have gone. “You were not honest with me, Mr. Blackley. At the showing before the auction, you let me babble on like a ninny over that picture, not even hinting that you were interested in it for yourself!”
“You weren’t exactly honest with me, either,” he said. “Was the mourning supposed to buy my sympathy?”
“The mourning was in honor of my father.”
“And now that you’ve grieved, you put it aside to bare as much skin as any other actress.”
“We put it aside because it would have seemed too grim for tonight,” she explained defensively, wondering why he should care so much. “Father would have understood.”
He chuckled, scornful. “That may be what you told the gossip sheets, but I ask you, what kind of father would leave his daughters a place like this?”
“A father who wished his daughters to do good in an evil world, no matter what the avenue.” She swallowed back the emotion that knotted in her throat. “My father was a good man, Mr. Blackley, and honorable and kind in ways someone like you could never understand.”
“You don’t know that, lass,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You don’t know anything of me at all.”
“I know enough,” she said quickly, her heart racing for no reason. “And I know more than enough not to trust you.”
She hurried ahead, her expression so fixed that she scarcely noticed how the other gentlemen were stepping aside for her to pass.
“I’m sorry about your father.” His long legs easily kept pace with her. “And I like your gown, much better than I did the mourning. But I didn’t mean that—”
“Of course you did, Mr. Blackley,” she said, her careful facade of gentility slipping. “Why else would you have said it in the first place if you didn’t?”
“Then you have changed my mind,” he said. “Or am I not permitted to apologize?”
“This—this is our dining room, sir,” she said. She did not believe a single letter of his apology, nor could she let herself slip into that kind of trap. She must keep formal and remote; she must not let herself say what she wanted, especially not to this man. “There is my second sister near the table with the cold offerings. She oversees the kitchen, and you will find her offerings rival anything served in London tonight. Do you wish to dine, Mr. Blackley? Shall I summon a waiter to take your request?”
“I’m not hungry,” he whispered over her shoulder, his words coming unsettlingly close to her ear.
With her fan fluttering in her hand like an anxious butterfly, she twisted around to try to put more distance between them. But turning around only made it worse: now they stood face-to-face, her eyes level with his throat and his perfectly knotted dark-crimson neckcloth, his dark hair mussed and curling over his collar.
“Are you thirsty, then? The evening is—is warm, sir.” But it wasn’t the evening that was warm, not with him standing so close, and she worked to keep her words even. “Perhaps you would wish a selection from our excellent cellar? A glass of port, or—or canary?”
He shook his head, just a fraction. “That’s not why I came here, lass.”
“Miss Penny, sir.” She corrected him unthinkingly with the explanation that Amariah had prepared for them all, concentrating instead on the slight sheen of a dark beard along his jaw. A pirate, a pirate from Barbados. “I am sorry, sir, but for the sake of the house’s decorum, I must ask you to call me that, and nothing else.”
“Very well,” he said. “Then that’s not why I came here, Miss Penny, lass.”
“That’s wrong, sir, and no better.” She sighed, a small, breathy exhale, and glanced down at the blades of her fan. How strange to be standing here with him like this, surrounded by an ever shifting crowd of black-clad gentlemen, laughing, calling, swearing, jostling, like a noisy tide around them. “For the decorum of the house, I must ask—”
“Damn the decorum of the house. That’s not the same woman who crossed me today.” He closed his fingers over the top of her fan, stilling its restless motion. “You can do better than that.”
She thought of all the answers she could make, and how not one of them was either decorous or appropriate. “So you did follow me here?”
“I wish that I’d been that clever,” he said. His gaze had shifted from her face to the fashionably low neckline of her gown, lingering there. “I’d no notion you’d be here tonight. But when I saw you, there at the top of the railing—ah, you seemed like an angel high over my head. Can you fault me for wanting to stay?”
She had to stop this now, before anyone noticed. She tugged her fan free of his hand, and turned toward the stairs.
“Of course you must wish to see the gaming rooms, Mr. Blackley.” She raised her voice so others would hear her. “Up these stairs, sir, and you shall find the hazard table. If you wish to play, I shall introduce you myself to Mr. Walthrip, the table’s director, and he can introduce you to the—”
“I’m not playing.” He stopped on the step below her, making her stop as well. “Not tonight.”
