Mutual Consent
MUTUAL CONSENT
Gayle Buck
Spring, 1808
The Earl of Chatworth was drunk. He sprawled in his chair, a half-empty wineglass at his elbow and a few cards held loosely in his hand. An untidy mound of chits and gold coins were on the table in front of him. Several of the chits held by the other gentlemen at the table were his. Through the long hours he had both won and lost heavily. At the present, he was down by several thousand pounds.
It was four in the morning. The close air in the gaming room was stale with the smell of spilled wine and greasy smoke from the guttering tallow candles. Through the haze the earl regarded the man seated opposite him. He had disliked the flashy military gentleman upon first meeting, having immediately recognized the rank as dubious and the shady Captain Demont as a professional cardsharp. After observing the gentleman’s style of play for some hours, he was equally certain that the man was an adroit cheat. His dislike of Captain Demont had therefore risen to the level of active contempt.
However, there was little that he could say without proof, especially while Captain Demont represented the house. And what a house it was, thought his lordship with a trace of sardonic humor. He had allowed himself to be persuaded by his friends to plunge into the stews abounding about Covent Garden, where it was not unknown for people to simply vanish.
The gentlemen, out for a lark and bent on deep play and dangerous company, had descended into the pit of this most hellish of dives. The Earl of Chatworth knew himself to be well out of his own ken. With the exception of himself and his friends, the clientele was not at all what one would have found in a more respectable gaming house. The majority were cits and rough characters that he thought were likely escapees from Tyburn Tree.
“Well, my lord? Do you play?”
There was a sneer in the military gentleman’s brusque tone that rubbed the earl’s pride raw. His lordship’s cold gray eyes glittered with sudden recklessness. He shoved the mound of chits and coins into the middle of the table. “That, and ten thousand pounds more,” he said. Through the brandy fumes clouding his mind, he felt a detached sense of outrage at what he had done. It was madness to bet against the house. But even had he wished to do so, it was too late to recall the bet.
Exclamations rose upon every side. Spectators standing behind the gamesters muttered sharp curses as they jostled one another for the best position to view the game.
Captain Demont’s hard face slackened for an instant. Then his jovial expression was fastened firmly into place. “Of course, my lord. I believe that the house can cover that amount,” He made to draw the cards, but the earl’s hand shot out. Captain Demont looked down in astonishment at the steel fingers that imprisoned his wrist.
“I prefer a new deck, one unopened and uncreased,” said the earl softly. He saw the blaze of anger in the other man’s eyes, which was as swiftly banked, and he knew that he had made an enemy. There were sniggerings about the table and amid the spectators. The earl released the man’s wrist, knowing that his point had been taken, and he sat back slowly in his chair.
“Of course, my lord.” The captain snapped his fingers. Without looking around, he took from the waiter a new deck of cards. He tore off the seal and offered the deck with an exaggerated courtesy to his opponent. The earl cut the deck and the captain swiftly shuffled with smooth, unerring skill.
The spectators watched with collective bated breath as the cards were dealt and played. Among them, a heavyset man watched with more than common interest. His mode of dress proclaimed him to be a well-to-do tradesman, and as such, his presence in such an establishment was an anomaly. Members of the rising middle class were conservative and hardworking and as a rule generally eschewed the frivolous pastimes of the higher order.
But Cribbage had chosen to become a regular figure in the haunts that catered to the most hardened gamesters. At first he had been an object of rude curiosity and speculation, but he was now largely ignored. Though for several months he had made a practice of visiting the various gaming hells and dives, he never played. He watched and listened and waited with the patience of the deranged bear that bides its time for the one careless moment that would prove to be its keeper’s last.
And now, as Cribbage watched the reckless young lord sprawled in his chair at the gaming table, he sensed that at last he had found what he had been waiting for. He had found his gentleman.
On the last turn of the cards, the Earl of Chatworth lost.
There was loud reaction from the spectators, some throwing callous taunts and others words of raucous sympathy. The earl’s friends shrugged their elegant shoulders and recommended that his lordship fill up his glass.
The Earl of Chatworth scribbled his initials on some vowels and threw the scraps of paper onto the pile of similar notes and coins that Captain Demont was raking toward himself. “Be damned to you,” said the earl shortly with a twist of his lips.
Captain Demont gave an exaggerated sign of acknowledgment. “I thank your lordship most kindly,” he said, deadpan. Cribbage’s hard eyes gleamed. Previous to this last bet, Cribbage had taken particular note of who held the earl’s earlier vowels of debt. Cribbage glanced contemptuously at the military gentleman. As easily as the earl had done earlier, he formed his opinion of the spurious Captain Demont. He thought there could have been no one he would have preferred to be in possession of that particular handful of paper. Cribbage did not think that the captain would prove to be any great obstacle to his own purposes.
“Perhaps your luck will change for the better with the next game, my lord,” Captain Demont said. His mask of joviality had slipped during the quick counting of his winnings and no longer quite concealed his satisfaction at besting the earl. “I say, not at all the thing to gloat. Lack of breeding, that,” said one of the earl’s friends in a loud aside to his companion.
The captain heard, and though he gave no indication of it while he shuffled the cards, ruddy color stained his hard cheeks.
The earl had also heard, and he allowed a faint smile to flit over his face at the military gentleman’s discomfiture. “Undoubtedly you are right, Captain,” he said. He rose from his chair, the triflest unsteady on his feet. “But that is all for me this night, gentlemen.” He laughed at his friends’ protests that it was still early and they had no desire to quit the table yet. “I am rolled up, gentlemen. But you stay, certainly.” He was let go with no farther urgings, everyone quite losing interest in a man who had nothing more to wager.
As the earl left the gaming hell and stepped into the cobbled alley, he stumbled. He steadied himself on the lamppost. The cold morning air was a stinging slap in the face, which made him shudder. He glanced around and quickly got his bearings. He walked swiftly in the direction of the Strand, which marked the division of the seamier side of London from that of his own familiar West End.
The fog-laced streets were nearly deserted with but a few malingerers like himself making their separate ways home, while half-seen shadows slid slowly by on nefarious business. Through the fumes of brandy that dulled his mind, the earl was aware that his rich clothing marked him as alien to the area and therefore legitimate prey for any who wished to trouble themselves for the acquirement of a few pounds or a watch fob. Even his elegant coat and breeches had value in this neighborhood, he thought muzzily. He had not realized when he had left the gaming hell alone how vulnerable he would feel.
The earl laughed as he stumbled again on the uneven cobbles. It was all too wonderfully funny. That sense of lurking danger had lent a certain spice to his visit to the gaming hell. But now, with his head fair to splitting with the beginnings of a hangover and lack of sleep, his mouth fuzzy, his eyes grainy from the twice-cursed smoke-filled air of the gaming hell, the earl heartily wished that he had not ventured quite so far off the beaten trail in his search of amusement. He could hardly give a proper account of himself in his present condition if a thug or two took it into their heads to roll him in the gutter.
Such were his bleary thoughts, so that when a shadow materialized beside him, he gave an exaggerated start. However, he saw not the thug he expected, but a woman. She was smiling, and as she drew nearer, the stale scent that she wore filled his nostrils. Her hair wisped about her face and tumbled down over her shoulders, as though she had just risen from someone’s bed.
“Fancy meeting you here like this, m’lord. ‘Tis fate, to be sure,” she said. In the half-light her eyes were hard and calculating. As if by accident the front of her cape fell open, revealing a pale bosom completely displayed by the indecent cut of her muslin gown.
The earl regarded her dispassionately. “My pockets are to let, my dear. Just as well. I’m not one for Covent Garden goods.”
With the woman’s obscenities ringing in his ears, the earl crossed the once fashionable piazza of Covent Garden toward the Theater Royal, from whence he was able to hail a hackney cab to carry him home.
A few days later Lord Chatworth left his elegant town house on foot and sauntered to a fashionable hotel where one of his friends had lodgings. Viscount Taredell was in and finishing up his morning’s toilet. As it so chanced, he was already entertaining a visitor, the Honorable Simon Hadwicke when the earl arrived.
“Simon, I am glad to see you as well. This will save me from seeking you out later. I have come to claim my vowels off Taredell and I shall do the same with you,” Lord Chatworth said. To his surprise, both the viscount and Hadwicke said that his vowels had already been redeemed from them.
“A gentleman who introduced himself as your lordship’s representative came around yesterday and laid claim to the vowels,” said Hadwicke.
Lord Chatworth frowned in puzzlement.”But I never commissioned someone to claim my debts. In fact, I have just this minute come into proper funds.”
His friends laughed off the odd circumstance. With a deep shrug, Hadwicke said, “Depend upon it. You were tipsy when you commissioned the man to the errand, and that is why you do not recall the matter.”
“Yes, and what is more, that’s why you haven’t had proper funds until now. You never recalled giving over the blunt to this chap,” said Viscount Taredell, frowning at himself in the glass as he carefully placed a diamond pin into the extravagant folds of his cravat.
“What the devil!” Lord Chatworth was more perturbed than before. For the life of him, he could not recall having made any such commission, but there was no other logical explanation for the fact that his vowels had been honorably redeemed. “I am at worse points than I knew when I discover that I can’t remember my own orders.” He gave a reluctant grin when his two friends laughed at him.
Viscount Taredell turned away from the mirror and mildly requested that Hadwicke toss his coat to him from the back of the chair in which he was seated. Hadwicke did so, and the viscount began the business of shrugging into the tight-fitting garment. Between grunts, he said, “I recommend that you forget the entire matter. That’s the ticket when questions that are bound to prove uncomfortable loom on the horizon.” He looked in the glass and twitched his sleeve with discontent. “Damn that valet of mine for taking the influenza. Dashed inconvenient, and so I told him.”
His complaint was not heeded by the other gentlemen. “Aye, Marcus. What has you in such a pucker? Your honor has been attended to, whether by you or by some poor fool who doesn’t know better than to waste his blunt on a frittering nobleman. Come, there is a pugilist expedition down in Friar’s Field. If your pockets are too heavy, you may waste your blunt on the betting,” Hadwicke said slyly.
Lord Chatworth rose instantly to the bait. He gave it as his opinion that he was not any worse than some others he could mention in judging the sport. “We shall see who lays the greater number of losing bets,” he said.
“A monkey that Simon takes it,” Viscount Taredell said quickly.
“I shall back my lord Chatworth,” said Hadwicke with an elaborate bow. “Marcus has a singular talent for playing on the knife’s edge of risk, as was witnessed the other night when he bet all against the house.”
“That was rather ill-considered, even for you, Marcus,” said Viscount Taredell, ushering his friends out of his lodgings and closing the door. “Anyone could see that Demont was cheating. Though how he managed it with a clean deck, I am not certain.”
“That was a neat trick, was it not? One can only suspect that the deck was not as clean as its unbroken wrapper testified it to be.” Lord Chatworth’s hard eyes gleamed. “I should like to meet our Captain Demont again under similar circumstances and take him down a peg or two.”
“A laudable ambition, though perhaps one better left to someone with greater luck at cards,” Hadwicke said promptly, twirling his cane as he and his companions sauntered out of the hotel.