Chapter 78

"The square there. Queen to F7. Are you blind, or does galloping stupidity run in your damned family?"
Splendor jerked up her chin, staring at him through her spectacles. The terrible thing? The sole reason the queen wasn't just to F7, why the queen wasn't in places the sun was unfamiliar with shining on? He actually thought he could play chess. If Splendor hadn't known the privations of the Marshalsea, she'd have taken offense. But she had met far more delusional souls in there. Mrs. Bates, in the neighboring cell, had been convinced she was the queen of England's cat. Then there was Snowdrop-Lord Snowdrop of Havistock Woods, no less-who'd wandered about seeing bulbs everywhere, trying to pull them out too.
Splendor brought her gaze back behind her spectacle lenses. She'd suspected he just meant to catch her out when she'd walked into this place where traps lurked among the avocado-colored walls, stalked the polished floor with talons of ice, the bronze busts of Aristotle and Plato that stood on plinths on either side of the fireplace, the marble statue of Jupiter at the door. Ignoring them, ignoring him pacing about in the otherwise empty room, she reached for the rook. He'd have to do better if he meant to catch her in that trap.
"I'm so very sorry my family's lack of brains offends you, Your Grace. But if you will just be so good, so kind, as to hear me out and let me show you, there is a move I can make that will be a lot better than what you-"
"I don't care what move you think you can damn well make. Chiltren can't take the pressure when you push and push him. Don't you see that? So you need to stop playing like a mouse."
"I don't actually know him, or I might see. But the thing is, when I don't-"
He pushed his fingers through his hair. "The thing is the damn stupid mistakes you made yesterday, you might as well have given him the game. Served it up to him with his beef sandwich on a plate. While it wasn't always so, this competition is now right there for the taking."
"With you gone from it, obviously."
"I'm glad you realize it."
She didn't. I don't actually need your help, was what she'd been about to say there just now before he so rudely interrupted her. She had rejected the depth of that torn place inside her yesterday, that bit a giant hand had reached down into the day her father died and ripped from her. The thought, without Papa she was nothing, that it had been stalemate instead of checkmate against Chiltren, that had sort of undermined her, because she wasn't nothing.
She was sitting here, a woman in a man's club, albeit a woman dressed as a man for one reason only. All right, Stillmore hadn't given her a lot of choice, leaving that message for her to meet him here, with damned Mrs. Hanney, that message she'd like to shove along with the queen. But the reason was clear.
Ten thousand pounds.
She hadn't missed the newly pinned wanted posters on the way here.
"Baxby will be in that final." His eyes darkened. "You can be assured of it. He always is. The others aren't worth a damn between them, which is why I don't just want, I need, you to listen to me."
"Baxby?" Hadn't that name saved poor some Boodles' skivvy from washing too many glasses the other day?
"He is the only one you should worry about. Not Chiltren, or any of the others. But you won't succeed in getting to that final and winning that money if you don't take the others out the way."
"Baxby?"
He paused midstep. "I said the name, didn't I? There is something wrong with your hearing as well as your eyesight?"
"No, Your Grace, I hear just fine."
She swallowed the tiny knot in her throat. That was what this was all about? Baxby? More fool her. Why hadn't she aimed the pistol a bit higher yesterday? Think of the favor she'd have done the world by blasting off his tongue. Well, he wanted that move? He could have it.
She shot out her hand shot and grasped the queen. "Satisfied?"
"I wouldn't say so, but it is better."
She stared hard at the board, a prickle running up her neck. Stillmore needed her, but she needed him to keep quiet. If Baxby and that woman were what his offer of help was really about, it would not pay to lose. It was going to happen with his stupid moves. His belief he was God Almighty.
Then what would he do? Tell everyone she was a woman? Obviously he hated to lose.
She might as well face it. She'd never have made that stupid move there if she'd thought he wanted to help her for some other reason. He liked her, for instance. Her throat tightened. Her feelings for Gabe were rock solid, but last night she'd kept flushing at the thought Stillmore liked her when she didn't even want him to. She didn't even like him. And it was obvious the feeling was mutual. A pawn was all she was. Of course, she was under a lot of pressure seeing these wanted posters.
She squared her shoulders.
"Well, maybe it is, Your Grace. Yes. But you see, I thought this instead. So, the queen goes back there, and I move my bishop instead to this square here. Now, whatever way Chiltren moves, providing, of course, he makes these moves in the first place, because there is no guarantee that he will ... "
"Christ on a coal barge." The pieces rattled on their stands as he thundered across the polished floor. "You don't think that's a move, do you?"
He snatched her rook from beneath her nose and banged it down on the table. "Now, do you want me pointing out what else you've done that's wrong, wrong, wrong?"
She stared fixedly ahead. As she did, she was forced to concede that his coal-black stare had a habit of making her pulse hop for all the wrong reasons. When she wasn't just slipping, she was plunging head over heels down a ravine. She must be to lose the rook. Unless he'd cheated?
The leather-upholstered seat opposite squeaked beneath his lean frame. He tweaked his charcoal coat tails, leaned forward, perused every inch of the board in the burning silence.
Actually, now she also looked long and hard over her spectacles, the move she'd just made was rather good. One of her best. She edged her gaze higher. He must think so too--secretly. Silver pinpricks glinted beneath his cocked brows.
"You know? I'm simply not aware of your reputation," he offered.
"Well, you couldn't be, Your Grace. No. I've not been long in London."
"Where it was you learned to play."
She froze, unable to say prison. He shook his head as if clearing it, then he sat back, a nerve ticking in his sleekly chiseled cheek. "But really ... "
"My ... my uncle taught me to play, Your Grace." If this was the olive branch of friendship, she could take it surely? For Papa? Besides, would Stillmore really be so awful to her if he knew she was a woman? "That is my cousin, Lady Splendor's, father."
"Her father?"
She nodded. She might as well lay it on-especially since his eyes gleamed with utter bemusement that any man could know so much.
"To say he taught me everything I know is an understatement."
"Really?"
"He-he was quite a player in his day. In fact, quite does not begin to cover it. One hell of was much nearer the mark."
"Was? So he's dead then?"
"Yes. Unfortunately." Thinking of Papa always made her throat ache, her chest constrict, but she swallowed the knot. "But during his life, he'd studied the game extensively. You have no idea the hours he spent learning the art. In fact, probably until the day he died ..."
"Good God. You don't say?"
"Yes."
He pushed his hand through his straggling locks of hair. If she said so herself, it was the most enlivened she'd seen him look about anything. "Then it must have been from all the wrong books, the wrong people."
She strove to mask what boiled her veins dry. Wrong? From a cheating blackguard whose wife had found him impossible to live with? And who a certain lady--with whom he was the talk of London--hadn't just spurned, she'd cleared off with someone else? Hadn't his daughter swung from the chandeliers when he disinherited her?
Although, equally, Papa had proved incapable of adding a simple two and two together when it came to money. Suffolk, Bournemouth, Bristol, were but three places they had been forced to leave in a hurry, at dead of night, with no more but the clothes on their backs to their names.
That they had was not the point though. The point was entering into a pact with the devil, to get back at someone she didn't even know. Baxby. The point was showing Papa was clever. She shot out her hand. This time the earl, sitting there with his knitted brows as if she tortured him, would not tell her what to do.
"I said ... Don't you listen, boy? Are you deaf as well as blind?"
Not content with having grabbed her rook, he now grasped her cuff as she reached forward. She could reach the bishop, but she didn't want to have to explain to Gabe his cuff had ripped during an undignified scrimmage with the earl when she'd come in here with the specific intention of hurriedly getting out again unscathed. But it wasn't just that. It was as if his hand was glued by an invisible force, neither wanted, to her wrist and neither could stop it either, as if their hands didn't belong to them, to anybody. And the best thing? The best thing was to ignore it.
"I ... I don't always see, Your Grace. A family deficiency."
"Really. Well, your cousin, the Lady Splendor, doesn't seem to have it."
"No. But that's because she's perfect in every way, Your Grace. Now, if you would be so kind as to release my-"
"Her? Perfect?"
"Yes." She spoke agreeably although it killed her. "It was why her parents christened her Splendor. Now-"
"Their taste in names was as lamentable as your playing?"
How fortuitous to have suffered the sneering cuts of Amber and Jade, to have been called Tatterella. It stopped her giving in to the strangely tempestuous urge that shook her, all the way to her toes, to upend the board and glide from here, telling him this was over. But there was the ten thousand pounds at stake just waiting to be won. Ten thousand pounds. She couldn't leave.
He discarded her cuff as if it were some diseased thing he held with fire tongs. She glanced at the board, edged a breath. Why walk from here when she could pay him back?
"Really? My playing? Lamentable, you said?" She reached across the table. Her cuff was free after all.
"What are you doing?"
"What do you think?" She grasped his silver bishop and set it down with a clink.
Why be so furious she could have set it down his throat? Not when she could curve her lips. "Checkmate."