The Duke's Gamble

“Shallots,” Amariah said wistfully as she looked down at her plate. “They’re a special breed of onions called shallots.”

Deborah beamed. “See now, miss, isn’t that just like Mrs. Todd, knowing the difference, and knowing you’d know, too?”

Amariah smiled in return, but without any joy. Mrs. Todd, Bethany’s assistant in the kitchen and a master cook in her own right, had made an exact copy of one of her sister’s best breakfasts, but it wasn’t the same. It never could be, not without Cassia and Bethany to share it. Breakfast had always been the one meal the sisters had together, sitting in their nightclothes before the fire to laugh and gossip and plan their day before their work began in earnest.

Now Bethany and Cassia must be taking breakfast with their husbands, pouring their tea and buttering their toast, while she would be here at Penny House, with only—

“Miss Penny, miss?” The scullery maid standing before her was very young and very new, her hands twisting knots in her skirts and her face so pinched with anxiety that Amariah feared she might cry. “Miss?”

“What are you doing here, Sally?” Deborah scolded. “You’ve no business coming upstairs and bothering Miss Penny! Go, away with you, back where you belong!”

The girl’s eyes instantly filled with terrified tears. “But Mr. Pratt said—”

“What did Mr. Pratt say, lass?” Amariah asked gently, preferring to earn her staff’s loyalty through kindness, not threats. “Is something wrong?”

“No, Miss Penny. That is, it be this, Miss Penny.” Sally made a stiff-legged curtsy before she darted forward, a folded letter in her hand. “I was sweepin’ th’ front steps, Miss Penny, an’ found this there, up against th’ door, an’ Mr. Pratt said I must bring it to you at once.”

“Thank you for your promptness. You did exactly the right thing.” Amariah took the letter from the girl, her heart making a small, irrational flutter of hope.

Why would Guilford leave her a letter by the door, instead of handing it to a servant? Why, really, would he write to her at all?

“You’re new, aren’t you?” she said. “What is your name?”

“Yes, miss,” she said with another curtsy. “I’m Sally, miss.”

“Then thank you, Sally,” Amariah said, forcing herself to pause, and keep her curiosity about the letter at bay. “Continue to be so obedient, and you’re sure to prosper here. You may go.”

“Yes, Miss Penny.” The girl fled with obvious relief, leaving Amariah alone with the letter in her hands. Though the stock was thick and creamy, the highest quality made for the wealthiest custom, there was no watermark or seal to reveal the sender. That alone was proof enough that it hadn’t come from the duke, and enough to silence her foolish expectations; Guilford loved his title far too much ever to be anonymous by choice.

Still, the letter itself remained a puzzle. Only her name was printed across the front, in large, blockish letters written with an intentional crudeness to disguise the writer’s true hand.

“That’s a curious sort o’ thing, isn’t it, miss?” Deborah asked, purposefully lingering near the bed to watch. “Should I fetch one o’ the footmen before you open it, miss, just to be safe?”

“Whatever for, Deborah?” Amariah scoffed. “In case some sort of villainy should puff fright from the paper? I’ll grant that the writer must be a strange sort of coward to toil so hard at hiding his face and name, but I’m hardly afraid of his letter.”

With a flourish, Amariah slipped her finger beneath the blob of candle wax that served as the letter’s seal and cracked it open.

Mistress Penny,

Be Advised that you have a Great Cheat at your Hazard Table & that I will Unmask him to Public Shame & Disgrace if you do not Do so First.

A Friend of Truth & Honor

“I hope it’s not bad news, Miss Penny,” Deborah said as she began laying out Amariah’s clothes for the day.

“Not bad,” Amariah said, briskly refolding the letter. The message had been written in the elegant hand of a gentleman and a coward, and she intended to discover his identity as soon as possible. “Merely provoking. Please tell Mr. Pratt to send for Mr. Walthrip directly, as well as all the footmen and guards who have served in the hazard room within the last fortnight. I should like to address them all as soon as they have arrived. I will not have a gaming scandal at Penny House, especially not based on the whispers of some knave too timid to show his face.”

Two hours later, Amariah stood at the head of the large oval table, made of the most solid mahogany, normally used for the playing of hazard. While the tall windows were thrown open as they were each day to freshen the stale air left from the night before, the room never could quite shake its nocturnal cast, like some dandy caught after dawn in the harsh glare of morning. One by one, Amariah glanced at each of the faces gathered around the green-covered table: some old and wizened, some fresh and young, some she’d inherited along with the club itself, and all still dazed and rumpled from being called into work so early.

“I’m sorry to have roused you from your beds,” she began, “but my reason is a serious one. I received a letter this morning accusing us of harboring a cheat at our hazard table.”

“But Miss Penny, that is not possible!” Mr. Walthrip cried, his bony jaw jutting out with indignation over his tightly wrapped stock. He was the hazard table’s director and had been for at least twenty-five years, and he took his job so solemnly that Amariah was not surprised he was the first to object. “There is a precision, a nicety, to hazard that does not favor cheating!”

“Are you saying it’s impossible to cheat at hazard?” Amariah asked. “Or that it’s impossible to cheat at hazard at Penny House?”

Walthrip sniffed. “There is not a single game devised by man that another man has not found a way to fox,” he said, as stern as any judge. “But it would be difficult to cheat at hazard here at Penny House, miss, very difficult indeed.”

“That is true, Miss Penny,” Pratt said, nodding in agreement with the manager. “As you know, we have our dice made to our own specifications, as are our throwing-boxes, and no gentleman is ever permitted to introduce his own dice or box into the play.”

“Yes, yes,” Walthrip said, opening and closing his hands as if testing the dice even now. “The dice and the boxes are changed without warning throughout the night, especially if luck is favoring one gentleman more than others. We are open about everything, miss, as stated in the house laws. Nothing is ever done in secret or behind the hand.”

Amariah leaned forward and ran her palm lightly across the green woolen cloth, marked with yellow lines, that covered the table. The room with the hazard table was the most popular in the club, and night after night, the game generated the most income. “Is there any way the table could be altered in some fashion to control the fall of the dice?”

“No, miss,” said Talbot, the most senior of the footmen. “Each afternoon the cloth is swept and secured fresh, and Mr. Walthrip tests it himself. There’s no bumps or lumps to favor anyone.”

“I would ask you to consider the very nature of the game, too, Miss Penny,” Walthrip said, leaning forward. “While one man throws, there are any number of others who lay their wagers on his effort. They are watching him like so many cats around a mouse, and if he were to attempt anything out of the ordinary—anything at all, miss—why, they would tear him apart for his trouble.”

“Then none of you have seen anything to catch your eye this last week or so?” Amariah asked. Once again she glanced around the room, and was gratified to see that none of the men looked uncomfortable with her question as they shook their heads in unison. “Nothing strange, or peculiar in any way?”

“Nothing,” Walthrip said with relish, also pleased by the emphatic response of those around him. “It’s the nicety of the game, miss, the veriest nicety.”

Amariah listened, and nodded. Because she herself knew little of the games that supported the club, she had to depend on the experience and wisdom of those in her hire to advise her. Everything Walthrip and the others had said made perfect sense to her, for which she was glad and grateful, too. Still, she could not put aside her uneasiness. Scandal of the sort the letter-writer threatened could ruin Penny House, where the members counted on her discretion as they amused themselves. If that trust were gone, then they’d go elsewhere, just as they’d come to her earlier in the year.

Pratt coughed delicately. “Might I ask if you’re at liberty to share the name of the accuser, Miss Penny?”

“I would if I knew it.” Amariah tossed the letter onto the green-covered table, and the men crowded closer to see it. “He signs only as a ‘Friend of Truth and Honor,’ though by doing so, he is neither.”

“He’s a gentleman,” declared Pratt, whose instincts in discerning true gentlemen from false were impeccable. “The paper betrays him.”

“I had thought that myself,” said Amariah. “All we can do now is to wait, and watch to see if any of the guests seems particularly unhappy with us, and then—what is it, Boyd?”

The crowd around the table parted to let the footman come through to Amariah.

“This just came for you, Miss Penny,” he said as he handed her a narrow package. “Mr. Pratt said to bring you any such at once.”

One glance at the package told her this had nothing to do with hazard. With an impatient little sigh, she undid the wrappings and flipped open the leather-covered jeweler’s box only long enough to pluck the note from inside. The card was thick, the coronet embossed so deeply that a blind man could have made it out. This was one correspondent who wasn’t the least bit shy.

My dearest Lady,

Odds being what they are at Penny House, I knew I’d need to sweeten my stakes before I begged your forgiveness for last night’s indiscretion.

G.

Guilford. She sighed, more with dismay than anything else. Did he truly believe that she’d change her mind for the sake of a piece of gimcrack jewelry? Had he that little regard for who and what she was? How could he so completely disregard what she’d said to him last night?

Without even looking at the bracelet nestled in the dark red plush, she shoved the card back inside the box, closed the lid and returned it to the footman.

“Have Deborah take that to my rooms for now,” she said. “Tell her that as soon as I’m done here, I’ll write the usual note, and send it back.”