Rake's Wager. Miranda Jarrett
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now.” Amariah sat in a muted rush of bombazine. “I cannot tell if Father has left us a prize, or only a puzzle.”
“A prize—a great prize!” Cassia paced back and forth across the carpet, unable to keep the enthusiasm from her voice. “He has given us not only a way to support ourselves, but also a way to continue his work! And think of living in London, the greatest city in the world!”
“What I’m thinking, Cassia, is how very much we must learn.” Amariah held up her hand, ticking off each ignorance on a new finger. “We have only visited London a few times, and know nothing of the city or its workings. We have no friends there, no one to turn to for advice or answers. We wouldn’t even know where to find a butcher or mantua maker. And we haven’t the faintest notion of how a gaming club such as this Whitaker’s operates, or how it generates its money.”
“We could learn, Amariah.” Bethany smiled eagerly. “We are not fools.”
Amariah glared at her for interrupting. “But we could turn into the greatest fools imaginable with this, Bethany. We don’t know the managers of this club, or whether Father’s trust in their abilities is well-founded. Even Mr. Grosse admitted that the club was no longer as profitable as it had been.”
Cassia swept her hand through the air as if to sweep away her sister’s objections, too. “Then we shall hire people who can improve it!”
“Where would we find such people, Cassia?” Amariah raised her hands. “Why, we don’t even know how to play the wicked games that would be supporting us and Father’s charities!”
“We can learn,” Cassia insisted. “Think of all the things that Father taught us, Latin and Greek and geography and mathematics and all the rest that girls weren’t supposed to be able to understand. We thought he was teasing when he’d said that knowledge would be our dowries, but perhaps he wasn’t teasing at all.”
Amariah looked back at the paper in her hands and frowned. “This would be vastly different from translating The Iliad for Father.”
“It would, and it wouldn’t,” Cassia said. “Consider how quick you are at ciphering and figuring numbers in your head. I’m certain you could learn the games and oversee the accounts.”
Bethany nodded, tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair with excitement. “From what I have read in the London papers, much of the success of catering to gentlemen is to give them a grand and comfortable place for their mischief. They can gamble anywhere, but they would return to our club if the food and drink are better than anywhere else.”
“Which it would be, Bethany, if you were overseeing the kitchen,” Cassia said, giving an excited little clap of her hands. “None of those fou-fou Frenchmen in Elverston’s kitchen can hold a candle to your cooking, and you know it.”
Amariah sighed—not exactly with resignation, not yet, but close. “And what role have you cut out for yourself, Cassia?”
Cassia raised her chin and smiled. She wasn’t nearly as useless as she’d feared at first. She’d only had to find her place.
“I would make the club beyond fashion,” she declared. “I would make it so original a place that everyone who wasn’t there would give their eyeteeth to be able to say they were. It wouldn’t be a hell once we’d done with it. “
“Cassia.” Amariah groaned. “And who knows more about setting the London fashion than three vicars’ daughters from Woodbury?”
“Three handsome daughters,” Cassia said, and as if on cue the three of them glanced across the room to the round looking glass over the fireplace. Even in mourning, with their eyes red from weeping and their copper-colored hair drawn severely back from their faces, they were a striking trio: Amariah the eldest and tallest, with the bearing of a duchess; sweet-faced Bethany in the middle; and Cassia herself, Father’s little popinjay, with her round cheeks and startled blue eyes.
“You can’t pretend we’re not handsome,” Cassia continued, “because we are, or at least handsome enough, thanks to us all having Father’s red hair with Mama’s face. Everyone says so. Wouldn’t we make you curious if you were a bored London beau?”
“Flirting with the squire’s sons at the Havertown Assembly isn’t the same as matching wits with London rakes,” Amariah said. “We could be terribly at sea, Cassia, and not in a good way, either.”
“Then the more proper we are, Amariah,” Cassia said, dipping her skirts in an excruciatingly correct curtsey, “the more mysterious and exotic we’ll seem to them, on account of being proper in a wicked world. And we could change the name, too, to make it our own. We could call it Penny House.”
“Penny House!” Bethany exclaimed with relish. “Oh, Cassia, I do like that!”
Amariah set the picture of the club back down on the desk, and pressed her palms to her cheeks.
“I cannot believe we are having such a conversation with poor Father scarcely gone,” she said softly. “London, and a gaming house named after ourselves, and whether to flirt or not with wicked men—oh, what would Father say to that?”
“He—he would call us his flock of silly geese,” Cassia said, her voice squeaking with a fresh rush of emotion. “And then he would tell us to go do what we believed was right and just, the way he would do for himself. The way he always did.”
Bethany came and stood between them, slipping her hands into theirs. Together they stared solemnly down at the picture of Whitaker’s, sitting on Father’s desk.
“We would be together in London,” Cassia said. “We wouldn’t have to go different ways. Father would have liked that, too.”
Bethany nodded. “If we go there and find that London doesn’t suit us, then we can still sell, as Mr. Grosse wishes.”
“But it will suit us,” Cassia said quickly. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll make it suit us.”
“Of course we will, Cassia, just like that. All London will bow at the feet of the Penny sisters.” Amariah sighed. “You know, I never did want to look after those dreadful Whiteside girls.”
Bethany looked up, her eyes bright with triumph. “And I do believe Lady Elverson will survive without hearing me play for her each night.”
Cassia gasped, not quite believing her sisters had agreed. “Then we will go? We’ll take Father’s legacy, and make it our own?”
“To London.” Finally Amariah smiled, and nodded. “It seems that, in his way, that is what Father wished us to do.”
“To London!” Cassia crowed, and raised their joined hands together. “To London, and to Penny House!”
Chapter Two
Four months later
London
R ichard Blackley leaned closer to the painting, inspecting the surface for cracks to better judge its age. He didn’t give a fig whether the painting was two hundred years old, or two weeks, nor would he recognize the difference, except for how high the auctioneer might try to run the bidding. He glanced back at the listing in the exhibition catalog: The Fortune Teller, Italian, Sixteenth Century.
That made him smile. The smirking old woman was a bawd if ever he’d seen one, taking the last coin that poor sot in the foreground had in his pocket, while he was busy gaping at the strumpet in the scarlet turban at the window. It was the strumpet he liked best, with her sloe-eyed, sleepy glance and creamy bare breasts. He knew just the place for her, in his dressing room at Greenwood, where she’d amuse him while he was shaved.
He drew a small star before the picture’s number in the catalog. Generally he didn’t care one way or the other about pictures, but this was one he didn’t want to let slip away. What was the use of being a rich man if he couldn’t buy himself a painting that made him smile?
“Excuse