The Ruin Of A Rogue (2 page)

“I recommend it,” he said.

Taking his leave with a respectful but not deferential bow, he slipped out of the house, to which he had not been invited, by the same back way he’d entered.

Chapter 2

M
arcus was half asleep, but the moment the door opened his mind was alert and his muscles tensed. Not even his late-night indulgence at a local tavern could erase the instincts developed over a lifetime.

“Good morning, my lord.”

He relaxed and groaned. He was in London where no one wanted to kill him. Yet. After several months he should be used to being woken by that odiously cheerful voice, but he’d never had a personal servant before and wasn’t entirely sure why he had one now.

“Lovely day, sir. Not raining at all.”

“Your praise of the English weather is, as always, unfounded in fact. I wish I were back in Italy. Even in November it’s warmer than this hellhole.”

“Now, now, sir. You’re only saying that because you haven’t had your tea.” Marcus heard the tray deposited on the table without so much as a clink of china. He blinked sullenly as Travis swished open the curtain to admit the leaden London light. “Sit up and I’ll bring you a cup.”

As he swallowed the hot drink, his head and his temper improved. Not having to make his own breakfast was the greatest advantage of having acquired such a superior attendant and pretty much the only one. Travis was a nuisance and one Marcus couldn’t shake off. The man clung like a burr. Served him right for saving the valet’s life. Next time he’d know better than to engage in unnecessary acts of altruism.

“And how was Mrs. Weston’s rout?” Travis delivered his question with the disinterested expression of the well-trained servant, but Marcus knew how anxious he was to hear. He swallowed his tea, feeling the warm liquid enliven his chilled sinews, and let Travis wait.

“Another cup,” he requested.

Travis poured the tea and waited some more, his long, lugubrious face not at all the kind of features Marcus preferred to wake up to.

“Did your former employers confide in you about their engagements?”

“Not the marchese, sir. But he was foreign.” Just the first of the nobleman’s heinous faults in the eyes of his valet. “My previous master, Lord Sutton, was sometimes good enough to remark on the events of an evening.”

“That must have been fascinating.”

“Lord Sutton is a gentleman of great propriety.”

“That bad, eh?” Draining his second cup, Marcus put an end to the torture. For the moment. “Your information was correct. Miss Brotherton was there and I made her acquaintance.”

“Ah!”

“She seems an agreeable girl.”

“So I’ve heard.” Travis’s head bobbled eagerly. “It will be a fortunate man who wins Miss Brotherton’s hand.”

“
Very
fortunate.”

Now the conversation was going his way, Travis stopped looking like an anxious French basset hound and busied himself with the clothing Marcus had discarded the night before. He carefully folded the breeches, placing them in a press, while soiled linens and stockings were set aside for laundering. The evening coat in dark blue satin velvet—purchased in Naples after a run of luck—already hung on one of a row of pegs in the small chamber. Travis removed it, shook it out, and made a great play of rearranging it on the peg.

“If you allowed me to wait up for you, I could make sure your clothes were properly put away.” This was an old argument and had resulted in a compromise by which Travis agreed to go to bed at eleven if Marcus hadn’t returned. Knowing he was keeping the man up made Marcus uncomfortable and he preferred to come and go as he pleased, without reference to the convenience of another. Explaining that he was quite accustomed to taking care of his own wardrobe, that he’d acted as valet for his father from the age of seven, had failed to impress.

“It’s bad enough seeing your sorry face in the morning. Spare me at night.”

Travis accepted Marcus’s needling with his customary serenity. “It’s the duty of a valet to see to his gentleman at all times.”

“But I’m no gentleman.”

“Of course you are, sir,” Travis said in his most annoyingly indulgent tones. “And one any young lady would be lucky to have as a husband.”

“You do realize that it’s in the highest degree unlikely that Miss Brotherton’s guardians would approve such a match?”

“Then they will have to be persuaded otherwise, sir.”

“I suppose you’d prefer to serve a man of fortune. One who actually paid wages.”

“I’m quite content in my situation.”

Marcus gave up. Travis was wrong. Morrissey would never be “persuaded” to allow the heiress’s marriage to Marcus, unless the girl was compromised. Even then he might still dig in his heels and refuse his consent. This didn’t bother Marcus. Either way was fine but he’d prefer the latter. Matrimony lasted for life and he’d always been leery of encumbrances. A wife would be even more tedious than a servant. If he played his cards correctly, the trustees would buy him off with a fat settlement. The fifteen-year-old daughter of a Genoese nobleman had been mad for his eighteen-year-old self. Her father, on discovering that Marcus hadn’t actually ruined the girl, paid him a handsome sum to absent himself from the city, forever. Marcus, a man of honor when there was no reason not to be, had never set foot in Genoa since. With a richer pigeon in Miss Brotherton, he intended to pull off that trick again. Unless . . .

“Hand me my dressing gown and bring a pack of cards.”

“Please, my lord, no.” The valet put his hands behind his back.

“Yes, and stop the my-lording.
Sir
is good enough.” He stepped down from the bed and found his own banyan. “Come on.” Travis trailed him into the dismal sitting room, which, together with the bedchamber and the tiny servant’s room, comprised the whole of their cheap lodging. “Sit down. We’ll try Beggar-My-Neighbor.”

He chose the children’s game because there wasn’t an ounce of skill in it. It was the perfect test of luck. Travis sat stiffly at the coarse gateleg table and accepted half the cards.

Marcus had once spent an idle evening trying to work out the mathematics of Beggar-My-Neighbor, to see if it was possible for the cards to fall so the game would never end. Certainly it always felt endless. Not today. He watched in detached amazement as Travis won pile after pile of cards, until Marcus was down to two. Travis turned up a king and Marcus produced a knave. He held his breath as his opponent revealed the next card in his hand. Another knave. Marcus’s last card was a worthless five and the game was over. It had taken less than five minutes, surely a record.

“Damnation, Travis. I swear you bring me ill luck.”

“Sir!” The man’s indignation managed to be both comical and pathetic.

“Don’t worry. I don’t blame you. I’ve never held with the superstitions that rule many of my fraternity. It’s all in the odds, and for some reason they’ve been against me for a while. I’ll recover eventually.”

Brave words! There seemed no end in sight to the longest losing streak in his long career as a gamester. There was no help for it: It would have to be the heiress.

“I need to know Miss Brotherton’s plans. Will you see her maid today?”

Travis cracked a smile, always a distressing sight. “If I take Your Lordship’s shirts to the laundress now, I believe I shall meet her going about her business.”

“Exercise your charms then.” The girl must be desperate to find Travis’s mug appealing.

“Ahem. I regret to say that the establishment does not care to extend Your Lordship credit.”

Marcus produced a coin from his dwindling purse. He’d left Italy in a sound financial state but he’d never dreamed of the ill luck that had haunted him since he crossed the Alps. He could only trust his strategy with Anne Brotherton would be more successful than his effort to cheat her cousin. No, not quite cheat, but close enough. And he regretted it. Caro’s late husband, Robert Townsend, had been his best friend, and he and Caro had been close. The Townsends’ house had been a welcoming haven during his visits to London. Now Robert was dead and Caro, the new Duchess of Castleton, refused to speak to him. He missed them far more than he missed cards. Gaming was his profession, not his passion.

When Travis left, Marcus took up the volume on Roman antiquities of Bath. The author was no stylist, and he found the work hard going. He’d barely taken in enough to convince Miss Brotherton of his familiarity with its contents when he was gratefully interrupted by a knock at the door. Marcus opened it to find a man carrying a small trunk that he recognized at once.

“Mr. Lithgow?” Evidently the fellow was unaware of his acquisition of a peerage. “Had the devil’s own time finding you. Delivery from foreign parts.”

During his childhood, the box had been a familiar sight, accompanying him and his father between shabby lodgings and angry victims. It hadn’t been among Lewis Lithgow’s effects when Marcus arrived in Naples to find his father dead and buried. He had no key, but picking a simple lock was a skill he’d acquired along life’s way. The lid opened with a creak. Laid on top of some folded cloth was a letter addressed to Mr. Marcus Lithgow, England, in a hand he guessed was German. No, Austrian. From Vienna
.

Dear Mr. Lithgow. Perhaps you know my name
, he translated
. Your father has perhaps mentioned the Countess von Hoffenburg. We became acquainted in 1784.
The year after his father left England for good, leaving the eleven-year-old Marcus to the care of his mother’s uncle.

The countess explained that Lewis was forced to leave Vienna in a hurry. Not the first time he’d found a city too hot for him.
I always looked for his return but it was not to be.
Some poor deluded female who didn’t realize how lucky she was that her lover had abandoned her before he took her for all she was worth.
When he was cruelly torn from me, he left this trunk. He intended to return but made me promise that if I heard of his death I would send it to you in England. I lately heard the sad news of dear Lewis’s demise. So I keep my promise and send this to London, hoping it will find you there. The son of so distinguished a man must be well-known in the English capital.

Distinguished? Distinguished only as a scoundrel.

Marcus was sure the contents would be worthless. It wasn’t like Lewis to leave behind anything of value. Still, he couldn’t help hoping there would be something. Even a small coin or two. He pulled out a black silk domino. His father always enjoyed a masquerade.

As expected, his inheritance proved sadly meager.

A velvet mask. A pair of dice.

Marcus tossed them. Double sixes. And again. Loaded.

A pack of cards. These he knew well. A barely perceptible and intricate system of pinpricks identified each card in the deck. Lewis had made the young Marcus learn those marks by heart, over and over until he could recognize each card by a glance at its back. His father’s idea of education. He drew one and examined the back. Queen of hearts. Correct. Ten of spades. Right again.

He’d always had an excellent memory. Much later he studied the odds and learned to win honestly—unlike his father. Under Lewis’s approving gaze, he’d cut his winning teeth by cheating stable boys and bootblacks out of their wages.

He returned to the trunk. A single shoe buckle, a pair of white gloves, soiled, and another letter. This time he knew the writing.

Dear Marcus,

If you are reading this it means I am dead. Thanks to a little trouble with some angry Russians I have to leave Vienna in a hurry. My intention is to return soon and complete my plans, but if I surrender to force majeure in the form of the prince’s unreasonably brutal servants, I want you to know that I left handsome insurance when I departed England last year. Your uncle Hooke has it in his care, though he knows not what a treasure I left in his hands. I doubt he would approve. Find it, and you will be set up for life. Never say that I haven’t been a good father to you. I close in haste.

Yrs affectionately,

L. Lithgow

A year or so earlier, Marcus had unwillingly traveled by ship from Lisbon to Naples at Lewis’s urgent behest. He liked Lisbon, finding the Portuguese poor cardplayers and amiable losers. Why he allowed his sire to exercise any pull over him, he didn’t know. Reluctant fascination at what the old man was up to, he supposed, along with a battered remnant of filial deference. He arrived to find Lewis had been dead a week, and buried too—they didn’t keep bodies lying around in southern Italy—and that he, Marcus, by a twist of genealogy, had inherited an obscure viscountcy from his father’s distant cousin. The letter informing his father reached Naples after his death. As usual, Lewis had the last laugh. Not only was there nothing of value among his possessions, but Marcus had to pay for his funeral.

Now, it seemed, he had a legacy beyond his thorough education in villainy. But what?

Sitting at the table, mindlessly throwing the loaded dice, he tried to guess what the
insurance
was. Hard to credit Lewis had left anything that was both valuable and easily carried behind him when he left England. And supposing he had, it was by no means certain he hadn’t returned to retrieve it. As far as he knew, Lewis had never again set foot in his native land. Whatever brouhaha drove him abroad, it was bad enough to send him into permanent exile. But Marcus had too much respect for his father’s cunning to eliminate the possibility he had crept back sometime in fifteen years.