Virtue

29

"Gregson, when my brother calls you may send him straight up to the yellow drawing room. But I'm not at home to anyone else." Judith crossed the hall to the stairs the following morning, pausing to rearrange a display of bronze chrysanthemums in a copper jug on a marble table.

"Very well, my lady."

"These are past their best," she said, giving up on the flowers. "Have them replaced, please."

"Yes, my lady." Gregson bowed. There was an unusual sharpness in her ladyship's voice this morning, a slight air of irritability about her.

Judith ran up to her own sanctum, where she sat down immediately in front of the chess board. The problem set out was sufficiently complex to occupy her mind for the next hour while she waited for her brother. They would spend the greater part of the day training for the evening's play, separating at the end of the afternoon with time enough to rest and compose themselves before the game began.

It was a pattern they had established long since, on their travels, but it had been many months since they'd used it. Despite her anxiety, the immense value of the stakes, Judith was aware of the old familiar prickle of excitement, the surge of exhilaration.

Sebastian arrived before midmorning. He greeted her briefly, then shrugged out of his coat and sat down in his shirt-sleeves, breaking the pack of cards on the table. "Let's go over the code for aces. The movement you make for the spade is very similar to the one for the heart. I want to see if we can sharpen the difference." Judith nodded and picked up her fan.

They worked steadily until noon, making minor adjustments to the code of signals, then they played a game of chess until Gregson announced nuncheon. Marcus walked into the dining room to find his wife and her brother eating scalloped oysters and cold chicken in absorbed silence.

"If I didn't know you both better, I'd think I was interrupting a quarrel," he observed, helping himself to oysters.

"No," Judith said, managing a smile. "We were just absorbed in our own thoughts. How was your morning?"

Marcus began to regale them with a tale he'd heard at Brooks's, and then realized that they weren't listening to him. He paused, waited for one of them to notice that he hadn't finished the story, and when neither of them did, shrugged and turned his attention to his plate.

"Are you dining at home this evening, Ju?" Sebastian asked abruptly.

"No, at the Henleys'," she answered. "Isobels giving a dinner party before the ball."

"Oh, good." Marcus refilled his glass, smiling across the table at her. "I didn't like to think of you dining alone, lynx."

"Oh, I can usually avoid such a fate, if I wish to," she said with a lift of her eyebrows. "I'm not dependent upon my husband's company, my lord."

Ordinarily, the remark would have been bantering, but for some reason Marcus sensed a strain in the words, and her smile seemed effortful. Perhaps she had quarreled with Sebastian.

"Do you have something important to do this afternoon, Judith, or would you like to ride with me in Richmond Park? It's a beautiful afternoon," he asked at the end of the meal.

She shook her head. "Another day I'd come with pleasure, but this afternoon Sebastian and I have plans that can't be put off."

"Oh." He tossed his napkin on the table, concealing his hurt and puzzlement. "Then I'll leave you to them."

"Oh, dear," Judith whispered as the door closed softly behind him. "I didn't mean to sound so dismissive, but I couldn't think what other excuse to make."

"After tonight, you won't have to make excuses." Sebastian pushed back his chair. "Let's get back to work."

By five o'clock, they knew they had covered every eventuality, every combination of hands that skill and experience could come up with. They knew how Grace-mere played when he played straight, and Sebastian knew what tricks he favored when he played crooked. They now had in place their own system that would defeat the earl's marked cards.

"We've done the best we can," Sebastian pronounced finally. "There's an element of chance, of course, but there always is."

"He's a gamester who's scented blood," Judith said. "We know what that madness is like. Once in the grip of it, he'll not stop until he's at point non plus … or you are."

"It will not be I," her brother said with quiet confidence.

"No." Judith held out her hand. They clasped hands in silent communion that held both promise and resolve. Then Sebastian bent and kissed her cheek and left. She listened to his feet receding on the stairs, before going up to her room to lie down with pads soaked in witch hazel on her eyes, and a swirling cloud of playing cards in her internal vision.

Gracemere escorted Agnes Barret to Devonshire House some time after ten o'clock. They were early, but not unfashionably so, and spent an hour circulating the salons. They danced twice and then Agnes was claimed by a bewhiskered acquaintance of her ailing husband's. "I shall enjoy watching you pluck your pigeon later," she said softly as they parted. Her lips curved in a smile of malicious anticipation, and her little white teeth glimmered for a minute. Gracemere bowed over her hand.

"Such an audience can only add spice to an already delicious prospect, madam."

"I trust you'll have another audience also," she murmured.

The earl's pale eyes narrowed vindictively. "The sister as well? Yes, ma'am. I trust so. It will add savor to the spice.

"It's to be hoped she doesn't vomit over you again." Agnes's soft laugh was as malicious as her earlier smile, and she went off on the arm of her partner.

Gracemere looked around the rapidly filling salon.

There was no sign as yet of Sebastian Davenport, but he saw Judith enter with Isobel Henley and her party and his lips tightened. Since the debacle at Jermyn Street, he had continued to cultivate her as assiduously as ever, although always out of sight of Marcus. His motive now was simple. A beloved sister would watch her brother's downfall. Judith would suffer in impotent horror as she witnessed her brother's destruction, and the earl would have some small satisfaction for the mortification she had caused him. Marcus's pride would be humbled at the public humiliation of his brother-in-law, and Gracemere and Agnes would have Harriet Moreton and her fortune.

The earl made his way over to Judith. "Magnificent," he murmured, raising her hand to his lips. His admiration was genuine. Emeralds blazed in her copper hair and around the white throat. Her gown of gold spider gauze over bronze satin was startlingly unusual, and a perfect foil for her hair.

"Flatterer," she declared, tapping his wrist with her fan. "But, indeed, my lord, I am not immune to flattery, so pray don't stop."

He laughed and escorted her to the dance floor. "Your husband doesn't accompany you?"

"Alas, no," she said with a mock sigh. "A regimental dinner claimed his attention."

"How fortunate." A smile touched his lips and Judith felt clammy. "I don't see your brother here either."

"Oh, I daresay he'll be along later," she said. "He was to dine with friends."

"We have an agreement to meet at the card table," the earl told her, still smiling. "We're engaged in battle."

"Oh, yes, Sebastian told me. A duel of piquet." She laughed. "Sebastian is determined to win tonight, Bernard, I should warn you. He says he lost out of hand last night and must recoup his losses if he's not to be completely rolled up." She laughed, as if at the absurdity of such an idea, and Gracemere allowed an answering chuckle to escape him.

"I'm most eager to give him his revenge. Dare I hope that his lovely sister will stand at my side?"

"Well, as to that, sir, it might seem disloyal in me to appear to favor my brother's adversary," she said archly. "But I shall maintain an impartial interest. I confess I derive much pleasure from watching two such accomplished players in combat." She leaned forward and said almost guiltily, "But I do believe, Bernard, that you have the edge."

"Now it's you who are guilty of flattery, ma'am," Gracemere said in barely concealed mockery. Fortunately, Judith appeared not to hear the mockery.

"But you did win last night," she pointed out very seriously. "However, perhaps the cards weren't running in Sebastian's favor. It does make a difference, after all."

"Oh, of course it does," he agreed. "All the difference in the world, my dear Judith. Let's hope luck smiles upon your brother tonight… just to even things up, you understand."

"Yes, of course." The music stopped and the earl was obliged to relinquish her to a new partner… but not without reminding her of her promise to be in the card room later. Judith agreed, all smiles, and then took her place in the set. So far so good.

When Sebastian arrived, he was all smiling good humor, greeting friends and acquaintances, obliging his hostess by dancing with several unfortunate ladies who were without partners, imbibing liberally of champagne, and generally behaving like any other young blood.

To his relief and Harriet's not-so-secret chagrin, Harriet had not received an invitation to the ball. It was her first Season and she was too young and unknown to move invariably in the first circles. Once Sebastian declared his suit and her engagement to the Marquis of Carrington's brother-in-law was known, that would change, as Letitia told her, but this was small comfort to Harriet, spending the evening in dutiful attendance upon her mama.

It was after midnight when Sebastian and Gracemere met in the card room. Judith was watching for the moment when they both disappeared from the dance floor. It had been agreed that she wouldn't make her own appearance at the table until after they'd been playing for a while, by which time Sebastian would have established a winning pattern and they assumed that Gracemere would be ready to resort to marked cards.

For nearly an hour she continued to dance, to smile, to talk. She ate supper, sipped champagne, and forced herself not to think of what was happening in the card room. If it was going according to plan, Bernard Melville would by now be wondering what was happening to him.

At one o'clock she made her way to the gaming room. Immediately it was dear that something unusual was happening. Although there were people playing at the hazard, faro, macao, and basset tables, there was a distracted air in the room. Eyes were flickering to a small table in an alcove, where two men played piquet.

Judith crossed the room. "I've come to keep my promise, my lord," she said gaily.

Gracemere looked up from his cards and she recognized the look in his eye. It was the haunted feverishness of a man in captivity to the cards. "Your brother's luck has turned, it would seem," he said, clearing his throat.

Judith saw the pile of rouleaux at her brother's elbow. The earl was not yet resorting to vowels, then. She took up her place, casually, behind the earl's chair.

Gracemere was confusedly aware that the man he was playing with was not the man he thought he knew. Davenport's face was utterly impassive, he was silent most of the time, and when he spoke it was with staccato precision. The only part of his body he seemed to move were his long white hands on the cards.

Initially, the earl put his losses down to an uneven fall of the cards. When first he thought there must be more to it than that, he dismissed the idea. He'd played often enough with Sebastian Davenport to know what quality of player he was. True, occasionally he had won, sometimes puzzlingly, but even poor gamesters had occasional successes. As Gracemere's losses mounted, the ridiculousness of it all struck him powerfully. He increased the stakes, knowing that everything would go back to normal in a minute-it always did. All he needed was to win one game when the stakes were really high, and he would recoup his losses in one fell swoop. With that knowledge in mind, he played his first marked card. His sleight-of-hand was so expert that Judith missed it the first time and he won heavily.

Sebastian was unmoved, merely pushing across a substantial pile of rouleaux. Judith gave an excited little cry, saying in an exaggerated whisper, "Oh, well done, sir."

Gracemere didn't seem to hear her. He increased the stakes yet again. By now people were drifting toward the table, attracted by the tension. It was warm and Judith opened her fan.

Gracemere began to have a dreadful sense of topsyturvy familiarity. This scene had happened before but there was an essential difference. He was not winning. He played with a dogged concentration, writing vowels now much as his adversary had done the previous evening. He played his marked cards, and yet he still didn't win. At one point, he looked wildly across the small table at his opponent as he played a heart that would spoil a repique. But Davenport seemed prepared and played his own ten, keeping his point advantage. How could it be happening? There was no explanation, except that his adversary had changed from a conceited greenhorn to a card player of awesome skill. And not just skill-it would take a magician to withstand the earl's special cards.

He glanced up at the woman, gently fanning herself at his shoulder. She smiled reassuringly at him, as if she didn't understand what was happening to him… as if she simply thought her brother was having a run of good luck for once.

He was a gamester. He knew he needed only one win. If he staked everything he had left, then he could recoup everything and bring his opponent to the ground.

George Devereux had at the last wagered the family estates in Yorkshire. Bernard Melville drew another sheet of paper and wrote his stake, the estate he had won from George Devereux, pushing it across the table to his adversary. Sebastian glanced at it, then swept his own winnings, rouleaux and vowels, together with his own IOU to match his opponent's extraordinary stake, into a pile at the side of the table. He put his hand in his pocket and deliberately drew out an elaborately carved signet ring. This last game he played for his father. His eyes flicked upward to his sister, who nodded infinitesimally in acknowledgment, before he slipped the ring onto his finger, shook back the ruffles on his shirt-sleeves, and broke a new pack of cards, beginning to deal.

Agnes Barret stared at the ring on Sebastian Davenport's finger. Her world seemed to turn on its axis, a slow roll into a nightmare of disbelief. She wanted to scream some kind of a warning to Bernard, so powerful was her sense of the danger embodied in that ring, but no sound would emerge from her throat. Her eyes were riveted on it: the Devereux family ring. She tore her eyes from Sebastian's long slender fingers and gazed at his sister. For a second Judith's golden brown eyes met Agnes's gaze, and the shock of her own recognition stunned Agnes with its primitive, vital force. And she wondered with a horrified desperation why she hadn't known it before… why some instinctive maternal essence had failed to recognize the children she hadn't seen since their babyhood.

Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington, stood in the open doorway of the card room. The buzz of the attentive crowd around the players was so low as to be almost subliminal. He could see across the throng. He could see his wife, the steady, purposeful movement of her fen. He knew what she was doing. She and her brother were defrauding the Earl of Gracemere under the eyes of fashionable London. He couldn't imagine why, he knew only that he could do nothing about it. Only by exposing them could he stop it.

Distantly, in abject cowardice, he wished his evening had not ended when it had, or that he had gone straight home from Horseguard's Parade instead of following temptation and coming to find his wife. Wretchedly he wished he could have been spared this knowledge, because it was a knowledge he didn't know what to do with. It was a knowledge that destroyed love… that made impossible any kind of trust and confidence on which love and marriage could be based.

The moment when the Devereux estate passed back into the hands of its rightful heir, Agnes Barret understood everything. Bernard Melville had been beaten at his own game by the children of the man he had destroyed twenty years earlier. She didn't know how they'd done it, but she knew both brother and sister were partners. The nincompoops, the greenhorns, the simpletons, had been working toward this moment from the day they'd set foot in London.

A sick, impotent rage filled her throat as she saw Bernard's blank incomprehension as he lost the final hand. Agnes's eyes rose again to the race of her daughter standing behind him. Judith's gaze met hers-met and read the wild fury, the depths of a vindictive rage. And Judith's eyes carried a cold triumph that met and matched that vindictive rage. Agnes dropped her wineglass. It fell from suddenly nerveless fingers to smash on the parquet at her feet, splattering ruby red drops.

The low buzz increased in volume. Desperately Gracemere struggled to control his disordered thoughts. There was one chance to salvage everything. Twenty years ago he had placed a marked card in the hand of his opponent. And George Devereux had been dishonored and destroyed. If he could do the same now, at this moment publicly expose his adversary, he would recoup his losses. A cheat would not be permitted to keep his dishonorable winnings.

Hope soared and his confusion died as his thoughts became icily clear. "Well played, Davenport," he said into the tense hush. Lightly he shook down his sleeve, palming a card.

Judith's fan snapped shut.

"You won't mind if I take a look at-"

Before he could finish the sentence, before his hand could reach to caress his opponent's cards on the table- to remove and substitute-Sebastian Davenport suddenly spoke, and the words sent a wave of nausea through the earl, bile filling his mouth.

"Permit me," George Devereux's son said, grasping his adversary's stretched wrist. "Permit me, my lord."

It was at this moment that Marcus moved. He pushed through the crowd, reaching his wife's side. He said nothing, but he grasped her elbow and the knuckles of his other hand punched into the small of her back, compelling her forward, away from the table.

She hadn't known he was there, and when she looked up at him, at the rigid set of his jaw, the fine line of his mouth, the black, adamantine eyes, she knew that he had seen it all. In that moment she fully understood what she was about to lose.

Marcus saw the dazed look in her eyes… the look of someone who has been inhabiting another world, a world of acute, single-minded concentration. He continued to compel her toward the door, oblivious of the scene still at the table.

"No…" Judith said, her voice thick. "Please, wait, just one minute… It must be completed."

The intensity in the low voice caught him off balance, and he stopped. Sebastian's voice was cold and steady in the now totally hushed room.

"May I see the card in your hand, my lord."

Sebastian's long fingers were bloodless as they gripped Gracemere's wrist, forcing his hand over to reveal the card lying snug in the palm.

Marcus turned his head slowly, although he maintained his hold on Judith. He watched in amazement as his brother-in-law slid the card from the earl's now-slack grasp. He heard his brother-in-law say, "Such an interesting pip on the corner, Gracemere. I don't think I've seen its like before. Harry, do you care to look at this card?"

Judith sighed, her entire body seeming to lose its rigidity as Harry Middleton took the card from his friend. Marcus wondered if he would ever understand anything again. And then with cold ferocity he decided that he would understand this if he had to put his wife on the rack to do so.

"March!" he spat out, and the pressure of his knuckles in the small of her back increased.

Judith made no further protest. She had now to face the one thing she'd feared more than anything.

They left Devonshire House without so much as a polite farewell and journeyed home in a silence weighted with dread. When the chaise drew up, Marcus sprang to the pavement, lifted Judith down before she had a chance to put a foot on the step, and swung her in front of him, propelling her up the steps and into the hall with his knuckles still pressed deeply into her back so she began to imagine she would always bear their imprint.

Inside, she glanced bleakly up at him. "Book room?"

"Just so." But he still didn't allow her to make unhindered progress and drove her ahead of him down the passage.

He pushed her into the room and flung the door shut with similar roughness. Judith shivered, afraid not so much of what he would do to her but of what she had done to him. He let her go as the door slammed and went to the fireplace, leaning his shoulders against the mantelshelf, his expression black as he stared at her standing silently in front of him.

"You are now going to tell me the truth," he said flatly. "It's possible you have never told the whole truth in your life before, but now you are going to do so. Everything. You will dot every "i and cross every 't,' because, so help me, if you leave anything out-if you obfuscate in any way whatsoever-I will not answer for the consequences. Now, begin."

It was the only chance to salvage anything out of the ruins. But it was a desperate chance at best. Judith took a deep breath and began at the beginning-twenty years earlier.

Marcus listened, unmoving, unspeaking, until she fell silent and the room seemed to close around them, the weight of her words a leaden pall to smother trust.

"I now understand why your brother was so anxious to make peace between us," he said, speaking slowly and carefully, articulating every word as if formulating the thought as he spoke. "Estranged from your husband, you wouldn't be much use to him, would you?"

"No," Judith agreed bleakly. What defense was there?

"So you were both looking for the perfect gull… that is the right word, isn't it? The perfect gull who would facilitate your long-planned vengeance."

Judith shook her head. "No, that's not true. I can see why you would think that, but it's not true. I didn't plot to marry you. Sebastian told the truth."

Marcus raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Deny if you can that I have been very useful to you."

"I can't deny that," she said miserably. "Any more than I can't fail to understand your anger and hurt. I ask only that you believe there was no deliberate intention to use you."

"But you didn't feel able to confide in me," he stated. "Even after matters were going smoothly between us. What have I done in these last weeks, Judith, that would deny me your trust?"

She shook her head again. "Nothing… nothing… but if I'd told you what we intended to do you would have prevented me, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes," he said savagely. "I would have locked you up and thrown away the key if it was the only way to prevent my wife from disgracing my honor in such despicable fashion."

Judith flushed and for the first time a note of vibrancy returned to her voice. "Gracemere got what he deserved. He's been robbing Sebastian blind for weeks now. Just as he defrauded our father… defrauded him and then accused him of cheating. Would you be so poor-spirited as to allow a man who did that to your father to go scot free? Can't you understand the need for vengeance, for justice, Marcus? The driving power that closes one's mind to all else but the need to avenge… to take back what has been stolen?"

Marcus didn't respond to this impassioned plea. Instead, he inquired in a tone of distant curiosity, "Tell me, was it pure coincidence that I received an invitation from Morcby for tonight?"

Judith's color deepened and the fight went out of her again as she saw the hopelessness of her position. "No," she confessed dismally. "Charlie-"

"Charlie? Are you telling me that you have involved my cousin in this deception… this betrayal?" His eyes were great black holes in his white face.

"Not exactly… I mean, I did ask him to procure the invitation but I didn't tell him why." She stared at him, her hands pressed to her burning cheeks, devastated by what she had said, by what he was entitled to feel.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Get out of my sight! I can't trust myself in the same room with you."

"Marcus, please-" She took a step toward him.

He flung out his hands as if to ward her off. "Go!"

"Please… please try to understand, to see it just a little through my eyes," she pleaded, unable to accept her dismissal, terrified that if she obeyed him, the vast gulf yawning between them would become infinite.

He took her by the upper arms and shook her until her head whipped back and forth and she felt sick. Then his hands fell from her as if she were a burning brand, or something disgusting that he couldn't endure to touch any longer. While she stood dazed in the middle of the room, rubbing her bruised arms, he stormed out, leaving the door swinging open.

Judith crept into a deep chair by the fire and huddled into it, curling in on herself, racked with deep shuddering spasms of devastation.

She didn't know how long she'd been crouching there like some small wounded animal in emeralds and spider gauze and satin before Marcus returned.

He stood over her and spoke with a distant politeness. "I'm sorry if I hurt you. I didn't intend to. Come upstairs now, you need your bed."

"I think I'd rather stay here, thank you." She heard her voice, as stiffly polite as his.

Marcus bent and scooped her out of the chair. He set her on her feet. "Must I carry you?"

She shook her head and started out of the room. Neither of them could endure such physical contact tonight-not with all the rich, sensual memories embedded in such a touching.

She walked ahead of him up the stairs and into her own room. Marcus turned aside through his own door.