The Mystery Woman (Ladies of Lantern Str - By Amanda Quick Page 0,28

with him. Don’t worry, Nelson, I will keep an eye on the women.”

“Mother is very worried about your scheme. She keeps talking about how you were nearly killed on your last case. She says your temperament is similar to that of the other men of the Gage bloodline. She worries that you will come to a bad end.”

“You know Hannah tends to fret.”

“True.” Nelson glanced at the cane and grimaced. “But she says she can’t forget that she had a terrible premonition shortly after you left London to investigate your last case.”

“This is a very different situation.”

There was nothing else he could say that was reassuring, Joshua thought. Hannah had good reason for her concerns. She was the one who, at seventeen, had been left to pick up the pieces and care for her younger brother when their recently widowed father, a thrill-seeker all of his life, had died while on a hunting trip in the American West. Edward Gage had been accidentally shot and fatally wounded by one of his companions.

On the heels of the telegram that had delivered the news of Edward Gage’s death, she had been forced to confront another disaster, one of a financial kind. After learning of his client’s death, Edward’s man of affairs had absconded with the Gage fortune.

With the very real threat of the workhouse looming before them, Hannah had taken the only respectable avenue available to her. She had accepted an offer of marriage from William Trafford, a wealthy man who had generously agreed to take his bride’s younger brother into his household.

Trafford had proved to be a decent, scholarly man who had treated Hannah and Joshua with kindness. He had been in his early sixties—old enough to be Hannah’s grandfather. A widower with no children of his own from his first marriage, he had been thrilled when Hannah had given him a son.

Trafford had succumbed to a heart attack a few years later but not before he had instructed Joshua on the proper management of the fortune that he had left to Hannah, Nelson and Joshua. Overseeing the family investments had proved to be a relatively simple, boring matter for Joshua. The men of the Gage line had a knack for making money.

By that time Joshua had “fallen into the clutches of that dreadful man,” as Hannah put it. The dreadful man was Victor Hazelton, known in the shadows of the espionage world as Mr. Smith.

Hannah had devoted herself to Nelson, intent on making certain that he followed in William Trafford’s staid, scholarly footsteps and not those of his grandfather or his uncle on her side of the family tree. For a while all had been well. Until recently Nelson had been a dutiful son who had tried to please his mother.

But in the past year he had begun exhibiting what Hannah called the wild blood that tainted the Gage line. She feared that he would descend into the gaming hells and dark clubs of London’s underworld, just as his grandfather and great-grandfather had done. Just as Joshua had done for a time.

She was right to worry, Joshua thought. Two months ago when he had come to London on a rare visit to take care of some business affairs, he had been obliged to drag Nelson out of one of the worst hells in town. He had arrived just as the manager of the club was sending his enforcers to toss Nelson out into the street. Accusations of cheating were being leveled. Impending violence had simmered in the atmosphere.

A few nights ago he had found it necessary to take time out of his investigation of the blackmailer in order to repeat the exercise.

“Look at it this way, Uncle Josh,” Nelson had said, his voice slurred by a great deal of cheap claret, “I always win.”

“There is no great mystery in that,” Joshua had said. “You’ve got the Gage luck when it comes to cards. Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to much else.”

“Huh. Probably best not to mention this episode to my mother.”

“Agreed. I didn’t mention the last occasion, either.”

Hannah would be horrified if she discovered that Nelson was spending more and more of his nights seeking out the dark excitement and the darker pleasures of London’s most dangerous streets.

Joshua was well aware of what Nelson was going through because he had gone through the same restless, reckless stage at that age. It was as if a fire had been burning inside him. In search of a way to channel the fierce energy