Fortune's Son (25 page)

Lord Hastings entered White's Chocolate House with the sole purpose of dampening the furor before rumor became a raging inferno of ruin. He paused at the entrance, languidly surveying the room and nodding here or there to an acquaintance, noting that no one in this celebrated gentlemen's abode presented a more elegant or composed picture.

Determined that nothing in his demeanor, dress, or bearing could suggest the slightest disquiet about his circumstances, he wore an impeccably tailored coat of the finest velvet, cut to expose the rich crimson and gold silk brocade of the waistcoat beneath. French lace cascaded abundantly from his cravat and cuff, nearly concealing the hands that held his gold-laced hat and elaborately enameled snuffbox.

Nevertheless, upon his appearance, an astounding domino effect prevailed. The low drone of conversation virtually ceased. One by one, every pair of eyes peeked quizzically above the newsprint, or surreptitiously sneaked up from their cards, as if he was suddenly an apparition within their midst. Precisely as he had supposed, within four-and-twenty hours all of London was buzzing with his infamous defeat on the Rowley Mile.

The reigning silence was broken at last by Lord March who, seated at cards with George Selwyn, exclaimed, “Is it he, by God? Damn your eyes, Hastings! Unspeakably thoughtless to show your face after I laid a hundred guineas that by noon you'd have splattered your brains on the carpet!

“Capot,” Lord March declared upon taking the final trick. “Selwyn, however, gave you until tomorrow forenoon to commit the unforgivable. By means of a rope, wasn't it, dear boy?” March asked his partner.

“Devil take you, March!” Selwyn cursed his defeat in the game.

“That's fifty-two guineas by my account,” Lord March remarked.

“I trust you've no later engagement with a pistol?” George queried of the new arrival with affected hopefulness.

Philip's brow rose in a decidedly aristocratic fashion. “I so hate to disappoint you, George, but the tales of my misfortune appear greatly embellished.”

“But my sources are most reliable,” Lord March protested. “I seldom lose a prophetic wager.”

“You are a veritable oracle, March,” George Selwyn remarked dryly.

“You would gainsay me after the wager about old man Pigot?”

“
That
was nothing more than a freak of happenstance, March. I only pray you don't rain curses upon your head by continuing these morbid bets with the grim reaper.”

March laughed. “The odds were decidedly in my favor, though I would never have guessed the gouty old worthy to be so very obliging as to die.”

Lord Hastings looked his question.

“You may as well join us.” George indicated a vacant chair at the baize-covered table. “It's a long story and I have tired of piquet.”

Philip took the proffered seat and March continued his aborted narrative.

“George and I were congregated with a number of fine sporting fellows at Blackfriars following the match between the retired Broughton and Jack Slack, a Norwich butcher who proved no slacker but one hell of a bruiser.”

“Took Broughton down with a hard right betwixt the eyes,” George volunteered. “Some say Broughton threw the fight, but one don't dare speak of it in front of Cumberland, who lost ten thousand on the match.”

“We digress, George,” March said. “I was speaking of the Pigot wager. Now where was I?”

“At Blackfriars?” Philip prompted.

“Ah, yes. The lot of us had drunk liberally of arrack punch when Sir William Codrington claimed his seventy-year-old father could have fought a better match than Broughton. Then Mr. Pigot proposed to match his own gout-ridden sire against the former champion. Following half a case of Madeira, the match then was revised to pit the elder Pigot against the elder Codrington.

“I laid my money on Codrington the elder and we drank a bumper to these worthies' health. Then, lo and behold, Pigot received a message that Pigot senior had succumbed to gout in his head. Dead that very same day! Thus, I won the wager by default.

“Pigot, of course, protested vociferously, and even filed suit in the courts, but was eventually obliged to pay the five hundred guineas, no doubt heavily denting his inheritance.” March laughed and regarded Philip appraisingly. “Judging by your coolness of manner after your travesty at Newmarket, one might suppose you also have some reasonable expectation? Death of a near kinsman, perhaps?”

George interjected, “I fear March suffers the erroneous belief that all men have such obliging relations as he, who pass from this earth at a precious early age just to leave him a handsome fortune.”

“True enough!” March declared. “After burning through my first inheritance, courtesy of the Earldom of March, I was at
point
non-plus
following an insufferable losing streak. I have since renounced basset for faro. Better odds,” he added in an aside. “I was thought undone until my dear and sympathetic mother passed on and conferred my secondary Earldom of Ruglen, with a fortune of twenty thousand pounds.”

“Confess, March. You never feared dunning for a moment,” Selwyn protested. “Your inheritance prospects alone keep creditors at bay, though if ever there was a more undeserving sod, I know him not.”

Lord March chuckled. “You don't know the half of it, my friend! I may live the most prodigal life without fear, now I have been counted among the possible heirs to the Earldom of Casellis and the Dukedom of Queensberry.”

“Do you mean to say Lady Casellis is another relation of yours?” Selwyn asked. “Wasn't she involved with Lady Mordington in that fashionable gaming house in Covent Garden? As I recall, the Baroness of Mordington even had the audacity to claim a peeress's privilege to remain in operation, contrary to Parliament's Gaming Act. No doubt you remember the place, Drake.”

“How could I ever forget?” Although he and Sukey agreed never to speak of it, choosing instead to bury all the mistakes of the past, the very mention of it brought the entire fateful night back to vivid life. He'd risked his life for her, and yet they'd parted. Sukey had never placed another wager after that, and he'd joined the King's Horse. They had come so very far since those early days, and over the years their mutual passion had seasoned and matured into what was now a profound and abiding love.

Lord March chuckled, snapping Philip abruptly out of his reverie. “My relations are quite an irreverent breed, are they not?”

“Are you heir to half the peers of the realm?” George asked.

March chuckled. “Not quite, though my connections are close enough to place me in several lines of succession, though a disobliging invalid cousin yet stands between me and the Dukedom of Queensberry. Happily, the fact does not keep the tradesmen from tripping over one another to offer me credit.”

“If only we were all so blessed,” said Selwyn.

Philip was no stranger, either, to getting by on credit. The existence of the considerable Hastings trust had allowed him to negotiate more than one loan to repair his tenants' properties and to sow the fallow fields of his Sussex estate.

The source of his greatest fear at present was that his loans would be called in once news of the lost wager reached his creditors' ears. That way lay absolute devastation. His only hope of holding his creditors at bay would be continued and timely interest payments until such time as he came about.

Although he'd eschewed the tables long ago, he saw no choice but returning in order to produce ready money to shore up his chief creditor's confidence. As chance would have it, the flush-pocketed Lord March had fallen neatly into his lap.

“If you have tired of piquet, shall it be hazard?” Philip asked, retrieving his dice box with a sly smile.

“With you? God no!” George retorted. “Hang me if I didn't learn better than that a decade ago at the Rose of Normandy.”

“The Rose at Marylebone?” Lord March looked his astonishment. “What cause would either of you have to frequent that den of blacklegs, thieves, and cutthroats?”

George replied, “It was different in those days, March. Quite a fashionable place, frequented by a higher class of sharpers. Wouldn't you say, Hastings? Although I thought you and your bloody dice box would ultimately prove the death of us both. Remember that bruiser Knight?”

Philip chuckled. “Those were adventurous days, were they not, George?”

“I'd rather say infamous, and I daresay your life was much safer when you joined the army than when you frequented the gaming hells.”

Lord March looked to his companion. “Selwyn, you don't possibly mean to imply…”

“Uphill throws? Nothing of the sort. Indeed, 'twas proven more than once with a hammer, but I warn you, March, never to engage in dice with this man. He is a magician, a veritable bone-setter with the ivories.”

Lord March was intrigued. “Is he indeed? Then I proposed instead a rubber of lansquenet. You know the game?” he asked Philip.

“That goes without saying for an officer in His Majesty's army.”

March signaled a lackey for a new pack of cards to replace those he'd swept off the table to join the mounds scattered about the floor.

“Deal or punt?” March offered Philip the cut.

Philip cut high. “Deal,” he said, taking the pack and proceeding to shuffle them.

“Indeed, one can do very well on credit,” March continued. “By way of example, I have no fewer than three carriage makers and four cartwrights currently engineering a contraption for my upcoming wager with Taaffe and Sprowle.”

“Are you still about that madness, March?” Selwyn asked.

“What madness is this?” Philip asked, laying down fifty guineas and hoping his careless manner belied the near-emptiness of his pockets. March and Selwyn matched his stakes, and he absently dealt the first two cards face-up to his immediate left.

“A bloody chariot race,” said George. “As a fellow turf man, you'll doubtless find the fellow's scheme most diverting.”

Philip thoughtfully dealt a third card, placing it in front of him. Finally the fourth, the
rejouissance
card, the queen of hearts, he placed in the middle of the table.

“I daresay Hastings has had his fill of racing wagers.” Lord March's jibe hit home.

“Not at all, my lord,” Philip replied coolly. “When one plays, one must expect eventually to pay.”

Lord March regarded Philip speculatively. “I never begrudge a man who wins from me fairly.”

“Then I remind you 'tis now past noon, and our friend Hastings is alive, hale, and in present company,” said George.

Lord March carelessly unfolded a fifty-pound bank note from a wad of bills in his pocket and handed it to George, whilst continuing his narrative.

“The chariot wager was made some six months past when Count Taaffe, that damnable upstart Irishman, boasted of having the fastest chaise and four in the country. When challenged to prove the claim, he asserted he'd clocked them at twelve miles in an hour. ‘Twelve miles?' says I. ‘Why, I'll lay you a thousand guineas I can produce a chaise and team half again as fast.' Believing me out of my head, Taaffe readily accepted my wager.”

Philip replied with a chuckle, “You
are
out of your head, March! Eighteen miles in an hour? An impossible feat. The fastest coach pulled by a team of six doesn't exceed ten miles per hour.”

“Nevertheless, I fully expect to achieve the so-called impossible, and break every chariot record known to man.”

“How?” Philip asked, his interest piqued.

March broke into a slow, sly smile. “The wager was accepted without setting any particular restrictions on the vehicle, only that the vehicle has four wheels and the ability to carry a man. Thus, I have designed one to meet only those minimal specifications.”

Philip turned over the next card from the deck. Good. A five to match the first hand card. No winner, but now fives were out of play.

“And finally,” March continued, “after six different vehicles, Wright of Long Acre has produced such a chariot. It meets every letter of the law and its total weight does not exceed two-and-a-half hundredweight.”

“For a carriage? How is this possible?” Philip asked in genuine amazement while turning over the next card, and matching the queen at last.

“I see the devil's luck is still with you,” Selwyn remarked, doleful at his lost couch stakes.

Philip hoped it was true. The stakes were now three hundred pounds, and the pot would grow exponentially with each successive rubber.

Lord March frowned at his loss, and then with a shrug waived for a new deck. A lackey immediately appeared. The cards were shuffled. Play continued.

“A carriage is quite an ambiguous thing, is it not?” March said. “Since the terms of the wager did not specify a body be fitted to the carriage, our passenger will be slung on leather straps between the two hind wheels. While uniting the back carriage to the fore in the usual manner, to reduce weight we used cords and springs, and the pole and bars are of thin wood reinforced with supporting wire.

“As to the harness, an optimal lightness was achieved by constructing the traces from silk and the breechings of whalebone.”

“Silk and whalebone? Do you wish to harness your horses or to corset them?” Philip chuckled. “And you think to drive this deathtrap at eighteen miles per hour?”

“A ridiculous notion, Hastings! You think
I'd
take such a risk when I employ any number of competent grooms to drive the contraption?”

“Dare I ask how many have perished in the trials?”

“Why, none have suffered worse than a few broken limbs,” March replied indignantly, but then confessed that he had lost half a dozen horses, explaining, “They were only second-rate runners. For the true trials I require nothing less than four plate winners.”