Aubrey’s eyebrows rose. That was quite a sum. He resisted the urge to ask what his sister thought of his gambling with difficulty but could not suppress a sense of disapproval. Miss Marwick relied on this young scapegrace for the roof over her head. He may well be clever with the cards, but Aubrey had seen the most seasoned gamblers lose everything when they became too cocksure and careless. Yet he did not wish to offend the lad either. After all, hehadwon.
“Very well. A guinea it is,” he said as Alfie dealt the cards.
“You don’t approve of me, do you?”
Aubrey looked up from his first glance at a reasonable hand of cards to meet his eyes. “What gives you that impression?”
Alfie snorted. “You do. It looks like you’re sat upon thorns, desperate to give me a dressing down for spending my sister’s savings but not daring to cause offence.”
This was so close to what Aubrey had been thinking that he felt heat prickle up the back of his neck. All the same. “Well, are you?”
There was a look in Alfie’s eyes, there and gone, that gave Aubrey pause. There had been a glimpse of steel in that easy grey gaze, a flicker of light on a knife’s edge. “No,” he said crisply, daring Aubrey to pursue the subject.
Aubrey held his gaze, unsurprised when Alfie did not flinch or look away. “Very well, then.”
They played on, and Alfie won the game easily, in no small part due to Aubrey being thoroughly unsettled.
“Don’t worry, I’ll not ask for another go. Wouldn’t want you to accuse me of being a Captain Sharp,” the dreadful boy said with a grin that made Aubrey want to laugh as much as he wanted to shake him.
“Decent of you,” Aubrey said dryly.
“I’ll even get the drinks in,” he offered, ordering them another round.
There was silence until the innkeeper set them on the table. Not an uncomfortable silence exactly, but the easy camaraderie of their first meeting had taken a knock.
“Was your sister very disappointed to give the brooch back?”
Alfie looked up from his pint and shook his head. “Nah. Alice knows right from wrong. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable owning something she knew belonged to Miss Seymour.”
“That’s not precisely what I asked,” Aubrey pointed out. “It was a beautiful piece. She must have cherished it.”
Alfie shrugged, looking slightly uncomfortable for the first time that evening. “She likes pretty things. I’ll get her another.”
“Not like that one,” Aubrey said with a laugh, and was immediately met with that steely gaze that said otherwise. He stared at the lad in surprise and Alfie laughed suddenly, the indignation and challenge melting away.
“No, not like that one,” he said ruefully, but Aubrey felt he had touched a nerve, pricked at the young man’s pride. Why? Because he could not afford to buy another like it, or… because he could?
“She seems to like Little Valentine, and the ladies' club?” Aubrey ventured, wondering if he could learn a little more about Miss Marwick. “Is it very different from where you lived before?”
“Very,” Alfie agreed amiably, though offered no illustration of how it differed or where from.
“You lived in the city?” Aubrey pressed.
“Sometimes. We moved about a fair bit. What about you?”
“My family’s home is in Kent, but recently I’ve lived mostly in town. I’ve enjoyed spending Christmas here, though. It’s reminded me how much I miss the countryside, and there’s something about waking up every morning and seeing the sea that lifts my spirits, even on a dismal day.”
Alfie seemed to relax a degree upon hearing this. “Yes. I love the sea too. I never realised until we came here, but it’s soothing. Even when it’s thrashing about like it hates the world and everyone in it. I don’t know, it’s just nice to know it’s there, though I’m glad enough that I wasn’t born a fisherman. Those poor devils are mad, the weather they go out in.”
“What about the sporting kind of fishing?”
Alfie shook his head. “Never tried it.”
“Perhaps I’ll take you one day,” Aubrey offered, rather surprised at himself.
Alfie looked startled by the offer and then, to Aubrey’s surprise, he blushed. The young man ducked his head and took a drink to avoid his embarrassment, but Aubrey had seen it, not that he understood the cause. He’d looked ridiculously young in that moment, innocent as a lamb, which Aubrey was coming to suspect was far from the case. Like his sister, he was a riddle, a puzzle of contradictions and unanswered questions, and the more Aubrey was confronted with dead ends, the more he wished to find out what was being hidden from him.
Aubrey waited for him to speak again, not wanting to press when the fellow was out of sorts, which he clearly was.
