Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(68)

“No chance of that.” Ned’s voice sounded as sour to his ears as the smell of wine and the underlying stink of vomit in these unwashed gutters. “I spent some time pretending, but I’m not cut out for respectability.”

Any chance he had, he’d pissed away with this latest disappearance. Ned had a sudden image of Lady Kathleen and her bald-headed father. He wondered if she would be secretly pleased when Ned failed to appear. After all, her options were ruination or marriage to the likes of him. She seemed intelligent. After what she’d learned of him, she had to be hoping for ruination.

Ellison interrupted this grim little reverie by laughing. The sound was far louder than the occasion warranted. Ellison was the last man whose company Ned would have sought out at a time like this.

Perhaps that’s why, when the man clouted him on the back once again, Ned forced himself to smile.

“What say you and I go inside?” Ellison gestured at the hell. “You’re buying, eh? There’s good brandy.”

Ned had learned long ago that brandy was no salve for this condition that overtook him. Drunkenness acted only as a magnifier, and if he started drinking while in this listless state, his ennui grew to dangerous proportions.

But he could not bring himself to care.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT TOOK GARETH AN HOUR to postpone—not avert—the Duke of Ware’s wrath at being summarily dismissed without so much as a scrap of foolscap in explanation from Ned. He spent another hour guiltily rousting White from his family dinner, and directing a stream of minions into London’s underbelly. All told, it was eleven in the evening before Gareth received word of his cousin.

Midnight had chimed when Gareth entered a heated room where cloying cigar smoke wafted, and the rattle of ivory markers rose. He had hoped the message was in error, but there, in the corner, sat Ned. Drunk and gambling in this godforsaken gaming hell, when he should have been negotiating with Ware over his future.

Gareth was too baffled to be angry.

He walked up to the table. Gareth had never needed an excuse to feel uncomfortably stiff around others. But now he felt ramrod straight. Ned’s companions lounged, their limbs contorted at odd, unnatural angles. Cravats were, at best, untied; one dark-haired, red-faced fellow had looped his in a disreputable bow around the neck of the large-bosomed woman who sat next to him. Sticky, cracked cups were stacked along the edge of the table.

“What’s the pool again?” The ruddy-faced fellow finished the deal, six piles of three cards each.

Ned stared at the spray of cards dealt on the table without interest. “Damned if I know. Does it matter?”

“Two thousand,” chimed in someone else, and Gareth winced.

A man with a loosened black cravat peered at his cards. “I have something better.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a paper. “It’s a private menagerie. Won it last night. A few lions, apparently. And a herd of striped horses called zebras. And all the way from Africa, an elephant.”

Gareth winced again. Loo was a nasty game, with escalating stakes that ruined many a careless gambler. The odds were even more forbidding when one party was wagering money and the other, elephants.

“Ned,” said Gareth.

No response. Ned’s companions lifted heads and exchanged glances.

“Ned.” Repeated a little louder this time. Ned heard, obviously, because he laid his head to one side. But instead of responding, he reached for his cards and aligned them edge-to-edge in his hand.

Play passed to him, and he let the two of diamonds drop from his hand.

“Ned,” said Gareth, “you’ll have to come with me when you’ve finished the play here. There’s still some chance to patch matters up, even now.”

Ned yawned loudly, covering his mouth with his hand. His friends giggled behind their cards, nervous that Ned defied his powerful cousin. But Ned didn’t glance up. Instead, he played the three of clubs.

“Look here,” Gareth said wildly. “This is madness. You don’t get out of bed for two days straight. And then, on the evening when I need you to stay put, you wander off. I’m not talking to Ware for my own health, you know. The man’s talking murder. And I don’t blame him.”

Ned played his last card. It was his highest card yet—a nine of diamonds. As spades had been trump, he lost once more.

“Looed again, Carhart.” Red-face jabbed Ned in the shoulder.

Ned shut his eyes and—of all strange things—he smiled. It was a strange grimace, not quite one of pain. Gareth didn’t understand. None of Ned’s behaviors made sense. He reached out one hand to touch Ned’s shoulder.

Ned didn’t so much shrug—that would have taken real effort on the boy’s part—as slump. Gareth’s fingers slid off, and he curled his fingers in impotent agony.

You prod and poke and pick. The important things in life cannot be bound like so much paper to form a monograph.

He hadn’t understood what Jenny meant. He hadn’t cared. But he did now.

It was frightening how much he cared, how the sight of this gray and listless Ned squeezed his heart into a frozen fist. She’d made Gareth feel this sympathy. But she’d given him no way to help. And Gareth had nothing to offer of his own—nothing but papers and proof.

Ned listed away from Gareth. Then he rolled his neck until their eyes met. “Oh. You still here, then?”