‘It’s wonderful. And I do think it could work. You, uh, don’t mind – prior relations and all that?’
‘Not if you don’t. He may, of course, in which case he can decline. But a valet on our side would make life a deal easier, and once I don’t have to consider Waters, I can move around a great deal more.’
Daizell raised a brow. ‘Going somewhere?’
‘I’d like to travel.Noton the stage,’ he added firmly as though Daizell was likely to argue. ‘Birmingham was fascinating, and I want to spend more time on my own lands without stewards all over me. I think I need to see things directly, without people mediating my view for me. I do realise you’ve been wandering a long time, and I don’t want to drag you around—’
‘You can drag me around.’
‘Not to Staplow,’ Cassian said with deep feeling. ‘Not yet. Myaunts, Daize, you have no idea. I don’t want to dislodge them, but I have one or two other properties that might become more of a home—’
‘One or two?’
‘Or so,’ Cassian said with a look of ridiculous embarrassment. ‘And if things go well in London and you like Wotton House, I thought we could spend quite a lot of time there.’
Daizell pulled him closer, hanging on, and rubbed his face in Cassian’s hair. ‘You are marvellous,’ he said, a little muffled. ‘And I want this to go well, more than I can say, but what if it doesn’t? All Vier has to do is not cheat, and then we’re stuck.’
Cassian caught his hand. ‘Then I will pack Leo and Eliza off to Gretna in my own coach – I think things are going that way, don’t you? – and face down anyone who bothers them or you.’
‘You’d hate that. Leo said his father would have a stroke.’
Leo had entirely forgotten his objections to Daizell once he’d come up with a scheme to help Eliza and scotch Vier. They were all on first-name terms now, except for Kentridge, who Daizell suspected didn’t have a first name. Cassian had offered his new name to his cousins, who both said it sounded very well but they were used to ‘Sev’. He didn’t seem to mind. To be Cassian for Daizell was all he needed, he said, and Daizell had no objection to having Cassian all to himself.
‘Uncle Hugo wouldn’t be pleased,’ Cassian agreed. ‘He fought at least one duel in his youth, and sowed plenty of wild oats, so why he is quite so insistent I ought to be respectable, I can’t say.’
‘It sounds exactly right for your family,’ Daizell pointed out. ‘The terribly respectable veneer cracks at the slightest opportunity. Look at Louisa suggesting we kidnap Vier. Thank the Lord Kentridge stepped in.’
‘That may be true, actually,’ Cassian admitted. ‘But UncleHugo would hate more than anything to see Leo accused of mercenary motives if he and Eliza make a match of it: he worked so hard not to be accused of that himself with my fortune. And if he gets into his head that Leo is taking another man’s leavings for money, it will go horribly. Whereas if we can present Eliza to him as a wronged woman who took her fate in her own hands, he will defend her to his last breath.’
‘The story of the woman who escaped from a villainous guardian and the gentleman who assisted her without thought of reward or reputation,’ Daizell agreed. ‘For which we need to pull this off. And, in turn, that means you need to sharpen your skills.’
Cassian groaned. ‘I have already played three hours of whist today.’
‘And we have another two hours to go,’ Daizell said implacably, or as implacably as he could, which wasn’t very, since he didn’t want to force the issue. Cassian loathed card games, with their competition and shouting, and his mind visibly drifted. ‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t like it either.’
Cassian stepped back to look at him. ‘I had wanted to ask. Is it difficult, doing this?’
Daizell had not played for years because the sight of cards made him see again the empty room, cards scattered over table and floor, the ten of spades sodden to pulp with a dying man’s blood. Cassian wouldn’t touch a card again if he blurted all that out. ‘It’s . . . tainted, yes. But the truth is, I can’t see the pleasure in gaming any more. It’s nothing but patterns on pasteboard and a night’s meaningless, manufactured excitement, and for that I lost my schooling, and my father lost everything else. We’d have been ruined even if hehadn’t killed Haddon. Frankly, it all seems a very bad idea to me now.’
‘Yes, I suppose it would,’ Cassian said slowly. ‘Although lots of people play deep and lose, and most of them don’t kill the winners.’
Daizell blinked, unsure why he would rub that in. ‘Yes, I realise that. My father was peculiarly unwilling to accept his own failures.’
‘So he held the winners up with a loaded gun which he was prepared to fire. He planned it in advance, knowing what it would do to his wife and son, and he left Haddon to die. Doesn’t that strike you as more than not accepting failure?’
Daizell had no desire to defend his father, and yet the words rose to his lips anyway, driven by hurt. ‘They’d ruined him!’
‘Yes. Haddon ruined him,playing with Vier.’ He was looking at Daizell, his luminous eyes wide. ‘And Vier cheats. Did he cheat with Haddon, as he does with Plath? Did they cheat your father together? Daize, do you think your father guessed?’
Daizell stared at him. It hadn’t even crossed his mind to link the two before; now he couldn’t see how he’d failed to do so. ‘Oh sweet Jesus. You don’t think—’
‘I don’t know.’ Cassian had gone pale. ‘I don’t know, but for anyone to resort to such violence—’
‘He thought he was owed the world on a platter as it was. If he felt sure he’d been cheated, and could do nothing about it, he’d have been – oh, beyond enraged. And my mother always took his side. Oh God, you’re right. They didn’t just commit a robbery at gunpoint, did they? It was vengeance. And Vier—’
‘Lost his partner in crime at your father’s hands,’ Cassian said. ‘Would have had to find another man, and train him, with the risks and the loss of winnings that entailed. No wonder he wanted to punish you. No, wait – good Lord, Daize, he wanted todiscredityou. That’s what this was about, all of it, those endless spiteful attacks on your name. He wanted to make sure, if your father told you he and Haddon were cheats and you told the world, that you wouldn’t be believed. Hey. Sit down.’
He had grabbed Daizell’s arm, and now walked him stumbling backwards to the bed. Daizell sat heavily. His head felt peculiar, as though he’d drunk too much gin too fast.
