He should have remembered all the times Maria had tried to get him to play the dratted game with her. No matter how often she’d patiently explained all the rules and moves of the various chess pieces, his eyes had glazed over once they actually were at play. The strategy and tactics of the game had escaped him all those years ago when he was a very young man so much in love with an older woman that he’d have done anything to please her.
He had trouble remembering the lines of the patrician face he’d loved so well back then, but the wide blue eyes always so full of laughter, albeit mocking laughter - he’d never be able to forget. They would haunt him as long as he had life and breath to protect the current bearer of those eyes.
He ignored the stinging memories and moved out into the foggy London night outside Goodrum’s. Since pleasure seekers were still out in full force, ignoring the foul weather, he pulled his pocket watch out of his serviceable dark navy waistcoat and nearly laughed out loud at the time. It had taken barely half an hour for the chess mistress to crush him in defeat, not to mention all the tense moments of begging like a besotted fool before she denied him his lost journal pages.
Since this was one of his rare nights off from the service, he decided to find a chess teacher at one of the coffee shops in Covent Garden which were open all hours of the night and day. There were always games in progress somewhere in the dark corners of the city that crouched on the shore of the Thames like a great hulking prison ship. And like it or not, he was more like one of the prisoners than a gaoler.
* * *
After she finally fled thechess room for the evening, Charlotte dipped a linen kerchief into the cool water sitting in a basin behind a brocade screen in a corner of her room. She wrung out the delicate square before throwing herself across the Empire daybed she rarely used in her quarters at Goodrum’s. She covered her eyes with the damp kerchief and sank into the quilted plump cushions without bothering to have her maid turn back the neatly made bed.
In the cool dark, she tried to make sense of what was so important in the journal pages, which were now hers. What would make a well-known Bow Street runner lower himself to play a game about which he knew next to nothing and then beg for her help in such a public place?
Once she’d recovered sufficiently, she rose and tossed the domino costume across the back of a chair behind the screen. She drew on the voluminous black silk robe she kept on a hook on the wall, and shivered with the sheer luxury of the fabric sliding against her skin.
She walked across the room to her dressing table and added a dab of scent from an elegant stoppered bottle - a fusion of new green grass, lavender, and a touch of tangerine. She’d recently ordered another bottle of the specially made scent from Floris. Charlotte liked to surround herself with the expensive perfume, including having her maid pour generous amounts into her bath water along with the other oils and soaps.
Sometimes late at night, though, she could still smell the stench of the London streets and stews, not to mention that of her torturers, from which El had rescued her ten years earlier.
Back then, her handler had made a fine profit off selling her for the night to the men she bested at chess in coffee houses. The mere memory had her squinting her eyes tightly against the unbidden scenes that flitted through her mind.
If not for Captain Goodrum’s protection, she knew the men she brutalized each night at Goodrum’s chess boards would have debased her by now to ease their own pride. She had no idea how she’d come by the knack of knowing the tactics of chess as well as her own mind. She didn’t think about her moves. She merely dominated the critical center of the board each night and let the tingling in her hands take care of the rest.
But for now, her curiosity got the best of her. She needed to read the powerful Bow Street runner’s pages of sensual conquest again. What, she wondered, was so damning in them that he’d go to such lengths to retrieve them?
So far, she’d only read them whilst in the midst of pleasuring herself. She needed another set of eyes…or two to figure out what secrets lurked there.
She pulled the bell rope beside her bed and waited for her maid to help her dress for a carriage ride. She needed to return to her villa tucked away in a cozy corner of St. John’s Wood. Her house companions were experts at unraveling puzzles.
* * *
April 5,1826
Covent Garden Coffee House, London
Col adjusted his long legs to accommodate the low stool across from the chess master who’d been recommended by one of the officers at the river police station. He had no way of judging whether the man knew what he was about, or was just stringing along a “nob” haunting the back streets of Covent Garden.
He reflected, too late, that he might have had better luck in his oldest, worn jacket and scuffed boots. In the finery he’d worn to fit in at Goodrum’s, he now stood out like a shiny pence dropped in the midst of gutter refuse at the side of the street.
However, he conceded that inside the coffee house, the patrons were mostly of the genteel, if drab, sort. They seemed to be intellectually bright men whose professions - no doubt bakers, typesetters, shop-keepers and the like - were what they toiled at by day but kept their wits alive by playing chess against each other by night.
“Wake up, sirrah. I’m not about to sit here all night awaiting your attention for three pence.” The garrulous old man across from him brought Col roughly back to reality. The man wore a gray-tinged shirt with patches sewn at the elbows. His threadbare woolen waistcoat was in similar disrepair, probably purchased or sewn sometime in the previous century by someone who had once been at the old bastard’s beck and call. His wiry silver hair was tamped down beneath a gray knit hat, and his wire-rimmed spectacles sat precariously close to the end of his nose.
He squinted up at Col and demanded, “Tell me again why you need to learn to play chess? You obviously have no aptitude for the game.”
“Another chess player has something I need, and this, um, player demands the satisfaction of my winning a game to have my property returned.”
The rheumy look the elderly gentleman leveled at him across the top of his spectacles spoke volumes. He no doubt found Col’s explanation as preposterous as it sounded to him the minute he’d uttered the words.
“What kind of man would use chess to keep your property from you?”
Heat flamed across Col’s face. “This is not exactly a normal situation.”
The man relented and lowered his gaze. “Show me the opening moves this player made…and the moves with which you countered.”
“How will that help?”
“Since you seem reluctant to reveal the whole story, we have to start somewhere.”
