The Last Hellion (Scoundrels 4)

“Be careful, Lyddy.”

“Yes, yes.” Lydia turned and threw her a cocky grin. “Deuce take it, wench. Must you be forever pesterin’ and plaguin’ a fellow?”

Then she swaggered out, Helena’s uneasy laughter trailing behind her.

This Wednesday night, the publishing hacks’ gathering at the Blue Owl was a dull affair, for Grenville of the Argus was absent.

Joe Purvis was there, though, and returning from the privy when Vere met up with him in the hall.

It should have taken more than one glass of gin to loosen Joe’s tongue regarding his co-worker’s whereabouts. But the Argus’s illustrator was already the worse for drink, which exacerbated his sense of injury.

In the first place, he complained to Vere, the fellows had taken to calling him “Squeaky” ever since last week, when Grenville had pretended to mistake his voice for a mouse’s. In the second, she’d as usual managed to hog a plum assignment all to herself.

“I should be at Jerrimer’s with her,” Joe grumbled, “seeing as it’s to be the lead story next issue and wants a cover picture. But Her Majesty says there isn’t a gambling hell in London doesn’t know my face and I’ll give the game away. Like anyone was likely to overlook a Long Meg like her in a poky little hole like that.”

Small as Jerrimer’s turned out to be, Vere very nearly did overlook her.

It was the cigar that caught his attention.

Otherwise, he would have walked by the young man with little more than a glance, noting only that he was dressed in the style young clerks aspiring to dandyism customarily affected, and seemed to be doing well at roulette. But as he passed behind the fellow, Vere caught a whiff of the cigar, and it stopped him in his tracks.

Only one tobacconist in London sold those particular cheroots. As Vere had pointed out to Mistress Thespian a week ago, they were unusually long and thin. He also could have told her that the tobacco was a special blend, and the limited stock was reserved exclusively for him. At certain social gatherings, among a select group of men who could appreciate them, Vere was more than happy to share.

He had not joined such a gathering in months.

And Joe Purvis had said she’d be here.

Swallowing a smile, Vere moved closer.

Roulette—or roly-poly, as it was commonly known—was all the rage in England.

It was certainly popular in Jerrimer’s, Lydia discovered. The roulette room was thick with bodies, not all of them recently washed. Still, the air of the Marshalsea prison had been fouler, like that of many other places she’d known, and the cheroot clamped between her teeth helped mask the worst of the odors. Chewing on it also helped relieve her gnawing frustration while she pretended to watch the wheel.

While she was aware of the heap of counters growing in front of her, they hardly signified, compared to the prize dangling a table’s length away.

Coralie Brees stood at the end of that distance.

Ruby drops hung from her ears. A ruby necklace circled her throat and a matching bracelet her wrist.

The set matched Tamsin’s description and sketch perfectly.

The small room was packed to suffocation. Amid the general jostling and elbowing, Madam Brees was unlikely to notice the few deft moves that would strip her of her stolen valuables.

The problem was, those particular moves were not within Lydia’s range of skills but Helena’s, and she was miles away in Kensington.

While knocking the bawd down and ripping the jewelry violently from her poxy body was well within Lydia’s repertoire, she knew this was neither the time nor the place for such methods.

Even if she hadn’t been wearing a corset that severely hampered movement, she could list several excellent reasons for exercising self-restraint: dark, cramped quarters; no potential allies; a great many potential foes—especially if she were unmasked, which was bound to happen in a brawl—and the unmasking itself, which at best would result in humiliation and at worst severe, possibly fatal, injury.

Yes, it was infuriating to see Tamsin’s jewelry adorning London’s most villainous bawd. Yes, it made one wild to think of the girl, and her beloved aunt, and what the jewelry represented.

But no, Lydia was not going to let her temper get the better of her again. She most certainly would not let “thwarted desire” for the woman-despising Ainswood turn her into a temperamental eight-year-old.

Thrusting away his image, she made herself focus coolly and calmly on the problem at hand.

The wheel stopped at red, twenty-one.

The croupier, stone-faced, pushed Lydia’s winnings toward her. At the same moment, she heard Coralie’s shrill stream of oaths.

The procuress had been losing steadily for the last hour. Now, finally, she moved away from the roulette table.

If she was out of money, she might trade in her jewelry as others had done their valuables, Lydia thought. She’d already discovered where those transactions took place.

Swiftly she counted her winnings. Two hundred. Not much by the standards of some clubs—Crockford’s, for instance, where thousands were lost in the space of minutes—but perhaps enough to purchase a set of ruby jewelry from a trull with gaming fever.

Lydia started pushing through the crowd.

Intent on keeping her quarry in sight, she reflexively dodged a red-haired trollop who’d tried to attract her notice before, and elbowed aside a pickpocket. What Lydia failed to notice, in her haste to close the distance between her and Coralie, was the boot in the way.

Lydia tripped over it.

A hand clamped on her arm and jerked her upright. It was a large hand with a grasp like a vise.

Lydia looked up…into glinting green eyes.

Vere wondered what it would take to crack her polished veneer of composure.

She only blinked once, then coolly withdrew the cigar from her mouth. “By gad, is that you, Ainswood? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. How’s the gout? Still troubling you?”

Since he’d already spotted Coralie Brees—along with a pair of burly bodyguards—Vere dared not unmask Miss Sarah Siddons Grenville in the gambling hell.

She kept up the act, and he played along with it while he swiftly escorted her from the premises. Even after they were clear of the place, he kept a firm grip on her arm, and marched her up St. James’s Street toward Piccadilly.

She continued to swagger along, the stub of the cheroot—his cheroot—clamped between her white teeth, the walking stick swinging from her free hand.

“This is getting to be a habit with you, Ainswood,” she said. “Whenever matters are moving along smoothly, you come along to muck them up. I was on a winning streak, in case you didn’t notice. Moreover, I was working. Since gainful employment is not within your range of experience, let me explain a bit about basic economics. If magazine writers fail to perform their assignments, there are no articles for the magazine. If there are no articles, the customers won’t buy it, because, you see, when they pay for a magazine, they expect it to have writing in it. And when the customers won’t pay, the writers don’t get paid.” She looked up at him. “Am I going too fast for you?”

“You’d stopped playing roulette before I interrupted,” he said. “Because you’d decided on a different game. While you were watching the bawd, I was watching you. I’ve seen that look in your eyes before and know what it bodes: mayhem.”

While he spoke, she coolly puffed on the cigar, to all appearances the unflappable young Cit-about-town her costume declared her. He fought an irrational urge to laugh.

“Let me point out something you apparently failed to notice,” he went on. “The bawd had a pair of bully boys in attendance. If you’d followed her outside, those brutes would have dragged you into the nearest dark alley and carved you up into very small pieces.”

By this time they’d reached Piccadilly.

She tossed away the remains of the cheroot. “You refer to Josiah and Bill, I collect,” she said. “I should like to know how anyone

who wasn’t blind could overlook that pair of gargoyles.”

“Your eyesight is hardly reliable. You overlooked me.” He signaled to a hackney leaving the water stand down the street.

“I trust you’re summoning that carriage for yourself,” she said. “Because I have an assignment to complete.”

“You’ll have to assign yourself someplace other than Jerrimer’s,” he said. “Because you’re not going back there. If I found you out, others might. If, as you suspect, any illegal activities are going on there, those conducting them will make sure Grenville of the Argus not only doesn’t complete her assignment, but is never heard from again.”

“How did you know I was looking for illegal activities?” she demanded. “This assignment was supposed to be a secret.”

The hackney pulled up. It was not one of Mr. David Davies’s compact new hackney cabriolets but a cumbersome vehicle which had evidently done service as a gentleman’s town coach about a century ago. The coachman sat in front, not in back as in the modern cabs. At the back was a narrow platform upon which a pair of footmen—long dead and buried by now—would have stood.

“Where to, gentlemen?” the driver asked.

“Soho Square,” Vere said.

“Are you mad?” she cried. “I can’t go there in this costume.”

“Why not?” He eyed her up and down. “Will you scare your sweet-tempered puppy?”