Sycamore. Della picked up her cards and saw only pips swimming in her gaze. “I bleat,” she said. “I sound exactly like a sheep when I try to breathe. A gurgling wheeze when I draw in a breath. Sometimes, I faint.”
“I haven’t fainted yet,” Sycamore said, tossing two cards face down on the table. “One more thing to worry about. I keep hoping I’ll outgrow it, but no luck. Can you see Lady Tavistock?”
“She and Mrs. Tremont are by the windows. They are playing Portly and Mrs. Chastain. The game looks quite friendly.”
Della discarded the first two cards her fingers grasped. “Did you tell Ash about your panics?”
Sycamore cut the deck, and Della turned over the new top card. “Had to. He thinks his damned doldrums make him some sort of freak. I wasn’t out of the nursery when I… Well, I thought he had a right to know. I trust Ash.”
Three words, and yet, Sycamore had probably never uttered them about any other family member.
“I trust him too, Sycamore, and I trust you. The marchioness is really quite striking, isn’t she?”
Sycamore’s smile was purely sweet, none of his usual naughtiness. “She likes me. I don’t think she liked her husband very much, but she likes me.”
“I like you too,” Della said, “though admitting as much will doubtless swell your head to the proportions of a small asteroid.”
“Everybody likes me,” Sycamore said. “The predictability of my appeal approaches tiresome monotony. This evening, Golding will keep you company.”
Della was trying to make sense of her cards—how could Ash concentrate with all the tumult of the day?—when Sycamore’s words sorted themselves in her mind.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Golding. Chastain lied to him, told him Tavistock was—my signature delicacy fails me—yearning for a left-handed tryst with a man of experience. Golding is mortified that he was so easily and dangerously manipulated. Golding, among others, will ensure that you are never alone for Chastain to accost.”
Della had formed no particular opinion about Mrs. Tremont’s brother, but avoiding more threats from Chastain was imperative.
“Ash had you arrange this?”
“He did. Mrs. Tremont, Lady Fairchild, Miss Catherine, the marchioness, myself… a few others, and the staff too are charged with keeping you company when Ash cannot. Chastain does not know how to play fair, and when Ash wrecks him, Chastain will try to threaten you.”
“Let him try. I am not the cowering ninnyhammer he forced into a sham elopement.”
“I dearly wish the marchioness would force me into an elopement. She could grab me by my darling little ear and drag me anywhere. I would go willingly to my fate.”
Sycamore kept up that outrageous banter for the next hour, while Della lost one game after another. She was too preoccupied watching Ash and Chastain, trying to read the course of their play from what she could observe.
Ash smiled occasionally, Chastain drank at a great rate, and Della told herself not to panic. The week would be long and expensive, but the battle was worth winning, and she and Ash—and now Sycamore and apparently half the other guests—were determined to win it.
“You’re toying with Chastain,” Sycamore said, appropriating a purple and yellow viola blossom from the bouquet on the library’s sideboard and tucking it into his lapel. “Playing out the line. He won’t know what hits him when you haul him flopping and gasping onto the riverbank tonight.”
Ash had spent his week doing exactly as Sycamore said. Winning some, losing a little more. Winning more than that, losing yet still more. The oscillations in his fortunes—and Chastain’s—were increasing so gradually, that Chastain did not appear to have noticed that play had become quite deep.
Not deep enough.
The tournament was now down to a single table. Ash and Chastain would play the marchioness and Mrs. Tremont. Both women had lost to Ash and Chastain earlier in the week, and Ash intended to see them, among many others, made whole and then some.
“You look very jubilant for a man who’s about to spring a trap,” Sycamore observed taking a nip from his flask, then holding it out to Ash.
Ash shook his head. “The trap isn’t sprung yet. Chastain’s usual recklessness has been held in check by the notion that he could win a fortune if our luck holds. He’s not accustomed to winning, and ineptitude could make him more unpredictable than arrogance usually does.” Ash had spent his week managing the cards, calculating odds in his head, keeping track of what had been played and what had not, and also managing Chastain.
With humor,