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She knew gambling was a popular activity among the upper class—and many others—but aside from making the occasional wager in a social setting, Sophronia was not given to games of chance. For one thing, she shared her husband’s belief that money ought to be managed and saved, and she would rather see her funds grow with wise, safe investments like annuities than gamble on a large windfall and lose everything.

Very bourgeois of her, she knew, but then, she had been raised an Edmons, tradesmen who preserved and added to the family’s fortune through canny business decisions, rather than the landed Felthams of her mother’s family, who had never learned a trade and never intended to. Witness her louse of a cousin, who would just as soon take what other people possessed rather than earn something himself.

A woman wearing a white satin gown trimmed with crimson ribbons blazed through the doors from the gaming parlor and stopped short in the small sitting room where Sophronia stood, along with several other women relaxing at their leisure. The woman’s gaze swept the room, and conversations halted as heads turned to look at her. She was a figure of magnificence, with a generous bosom displaying a large necklace of diamonds and rubies that matched the jewels studding her hair. Her cheeks were red with rouge, her eyes glittering brightly, and her face was vaguely familiar.

Her gaze lit on Sophronia, and the woman’s body went still as a hound at point.

Sophronia froze also, sensing a threat. The woman gave Sophronia’s attire a full survey from head to toe, much as the porter had done. Then she turned and, chin in the air, swept back into the gaming parlor.

Sophronia considered leaving right then. She hadn’t come here to gamble, anyway. But leaving without seeing everything would mean she would lose the opportunity to know more about Rowden and the place where he spent his nights and some days.

Another part of her, led by insatiable curiosity, wanted to know if she was right about the identity of this woman and was rather spoiling for a confrontation.

So she walked through the doors, rather feeling that she was deliberately leaving behind the practical, logical Sophronia she had always been, and now, she might become someone new.

CHAPTER NINE

The gaming parlor was decorated in much the same manner as the dining parlor, the pale walls gilded with rococo designs, but the velvet draperies were a dark gold and the carpets, a deep ruby, sank beneath the heels of her shoes. The tables were an assortment of rounds and squares, most with a green baize covering atop. A buzz of conversation, exclamations, and calls created a soft clamor, and Sophronia smelled wine and snuff.

She passed a group playing whist, with gold coins heaped before each player, and a game she thought might be faro. There was the hazard table, crowded with women throwing dice, and then a table with a marked wheel. Even-odd, she wondered, or roly-poly, what the French called roulette? The employees here wore gold satin coats with white and gold waistcoats and white breeches, the small periwigs marking them as staff. Almost all the players were women. She saw an assortment of skin tones, a variety of fashions, and every possible permutation of hat.

“Do country girls gamble? I would have thought the wife of a banker would be quite parsimonious. Tight with the purse strings, and all that.”

Sophronia turned to face the man who detached himself from the faro table and rose to address her. Her throat closed like a pudding bag pulled taut.

“Humphrey Feltham. How odd. The thought of you just crossed my mind, for the first time in ages. But they say one can sense the Devil when he is about.”

Her cousin narrowed his cold eyes. “Claws out already, Sophronia? When we have not seen each other in…” He paused and waited for the memory to rise. “A year. When I did the honors at your husband’s funeral, since you had no one else.”

“My father offered.”

Sophronia, against custom, had attended the burial service for her husband, but then, she was of a stoic disposition and not likely to distress everyone with tears. Or at least, they were not liable to be tears of mourning. More like tears of relief that Henry’s fretful illness had ended and the shadow over her days was now lifted. Or tears of vexation that Humphrey Feltham had come nosing about, curious about how the will would be disposed, though her mother’s family could have no possible claim to anything of Henry’s.

“Your father, the tradesman.” Humphrey closed the distance, his attitude careless, his gaze predatory. He sported all the affectations of a young man of fashion, from the high stock at his throat to the several fobs at his waistcoat. Of a certain the shoulders of his coat were padded. “How is my Uncle Edmons, that old goat? Still playing the gentleman in my family’s house?”

How like Humphrey to get right to the heart of a conversation: his avaricious desire to possess something that did not belong to him.

“Foxleigh was a gift to my parents upon my mother’s marriage. It was her dowry.” He’d been told this several times; she shouldn’t need to repeat it. “Long past time you made peace with your grandfather’s decision, Humphrey.”

“A decision made without consultation with my father, nor in the best interests of the rest of the family.” Humphrey scowled. “Really, disposing of one of the finer and more lucrative properties to help a glassmaker’s son marry my aunt and set himself up like a gentleman, so as not to embarrass the rest of us? The one generous thing my grandfather ever did in his life, to be sure.”

“And not to be undone simply because my mother died.”

Humphrey’s argument at the reading of Henry’s will had been the same as his father’s, made a dozen years earlier. The Felthams claimed that what had been given to Tabitha Feltham upon her marriage should revert to her birth family upon her death. The law maintained that Foxleigh had become her husband’s property upon marriage and should remain so.

Sophronia’s stomach shifted, as if her supper were trying to settle. Humphrey could not be thinking to pursue this fruitless claim again. Yet here he stood in a gambling parlor, expensively dressed, with that hungry, grasping look in his eye and a sour twist to his mouth, framed by the bushy sideburns that lined each side of his jaw.

He would think of Foxleigh were he in need of funds, to be sure.

Sophronia folded her hands across her middle, trying to quell her uneasy stomach. “Perhaps you ought not be gambling away your allowance if your family faces financial uncertainly,” she said. “Though you might consult my husband’s partners for a loan, should the need arise. I can put in a good word.”

Her cousin’s eyes narrowed to slits. He was a mere year or two older than Sophronia, forced to endure her company on the occasions that Tabitha visited the family of her birth. Humphrey had been a fretful infant and an imperious toddler, the tyrant of the nursery. The one good thing that followed her mother’s death was that the Felthams no longer maintained correspondence with her father, whom they had always felt beneath them, and Sophronia had been left to find more congenial playmates.

Like Rowden. His friendship had saved her from drowning in sorrow after her mother died. His friendship had borne her through many a difficult moment thereafter.

She had set those memories aside as belonging to her girlhood when she married and became a woman. But here in London, living under his roof, in his company every day, those memories were back in their legions, reminding her how much Rowden had been part of the very fabric of her life.

“Happens you have any influence with the old bankers?” Humphrey said in his affected drawl, and his careless tone sounded forced. “Any stake in the Hintons edifice?”