Lina gave a shaky nod and he looked back at his opponent and the cards and the panic ebbed away, leaving her shaken but determined. He believes in me.
‘Here.’ Gregor thrust a bottle into her hands and wandered vaguely in the direction of Quinn’s table, taking a swig from his wine glass as he went. A rowdy group was playing a game she did not recognise with much slapping down of cards and exchange of money; Gregor stopped close by and watched along with several other men. Lina pressed up behind him, careful not to knock into a table beside them where two sombre men were engaged in a silent game.
She shifted her position so she could see the table from the shelter of Gregor’s shoulder and found that Quinn was close enough for her to overhear. He had a sizeable pile of guineas and banknotes on the table in front of him and Reginald Tolhurst was sweating.
‘Mine, I think.’ Quinn swept the stake money towards himself. ‘Another hand? You’ll be wanting to win some of this back, I’ll be bound. Your luck must change sooner or later; I’m amazed at how well I’m doing. We’ll have a new pack, shall we?’ He sounded almost naïvely enthusiastic.
‘Yes. My luck’s bound to change.’ Tolhurst opened the pack and shuffled.
‘Double or quits?’ Quinn said. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in a position to say that!’ He took what appeared to be an incautiously large swig of wine and waited.
Is Tolhurst the fool Quinn thinks he is? Lina wondered, seeing how he was luring the man into taking one giant incautious gamble.
He was, it seemed. ‘I’ll have to give you a vowel,’ he said. At Quinn’s nod he scrawled IOU and paused. ‘What’s the sum?’
Quinn made a show of adding up the money in front of him. ‘Four hundred.’
‘Eight, then.’ Tolhurst’s hand shook, but he tossed the note into the middle as Quinn pushed his winnings and a further four hundred pound notes out.
‘Good thing I went to the bank this morning,’ Quinn remarked.
There was silence as they began to play. Gregor turned and strolled up to watch over Tolhurst’s shoulder and Lina shifted to keep behind him and to one side so she could see both men’s faces. They were playing whist, she saw, the hands falling reasonably equally at first. Then Quinn began to win and, as he did so, Tolhurst became visibly more anxious, his judgement clearly affected by the tension.
When the last card fell he stared at the tally of points, white-faced. ‘Your…your game.’
‘So it seems.’ Quinn raked the money towards him, stowing it away in his pockets. ‘I must thank you for an entertaining evening. The only thing is…’ he picked up the IOU between thumb and forefinger ‘…I’ll need to ask you for this in a day or two—I’m going over to France for a bit. Could I have your direction?’
Tolhurst stared back white-faced. ‘I… By the end of next week?’
‘No, sorry. As I said, I’ll be leaving. There’s no problem, is there?’ Quinn let the mask of amiability he’d been wearing all evening slip as he stared at Tolhurst and Lina shivered. She would not want him to look at her like that.
‘Goodness, no!’ Tolhurst pulled out his card case and handed one over. ‘No problem at all.’ His hands shook.
Quinn stood up, ignored Gregor, nodded to Tolhurst and walked out. As he went out of the door Gregor shifted so he was alongside Tolhurst. Lina ducked further into the shadows to watch. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose while apparently gazing with interest at the next table. With the handkerchief came a ring that landed on the baize, spinning in the candlelight. Tolhurst’s hand shot out, flattened over the gem and drew it back. He looked around, his gaze sliding over Lina as she watched him from the corner of her eye. Gregor, apparently bored with the game, stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket and wandered over to the door, Lina scurrying behind like a servant who has been taken by surprise.
‘He’s taken it,’ Gregor said as they moved out of the door and into the small courtyard of Pickering Place.
Quinn came out from behind a pillar. ‘Now he’ll need to get it off his hands fast. It is too big and too distinctive to take just anywhere, if he fenced the sapphire, he’ll take this to the same place.’ He led the way back down the passage and climbed into the carriage. ‘Now we wait.’
Lina wished they were alone. She wanted to confess how frightened she had been, how the message in Quinn’s eyes had steadied her and given her courage, but she could not say that in front of Gregor and after a moment she realised she could not say it to Quinn, even if they were alone—he would take it as encouragement, a sign that she was weakening. She swallowed th
e words, clasped her hands together tightly around the wine bottle against the urge to reach out and touch him, and closed her eyes.
‘Nervous, Celina?’ Quinn asked, his voice sounding like a caress to her ears. ‘I will not let him hurt you.’
‘Just apprehensive,’ she said. Just wanting you. ‘I have been so frightened, it is hard to believe this could be the end of it.’
‘It is.’ His voice was deep and certain and she was conscious for the first time in many days of the slight foreign intonation. He is the adventurer again, not the English gentleman. ‘Why are you clutching that bottle?’
‘Gregor gave it to me.’
‘Then let us all have a drink.’
She passed it to Gregor, who tipped it up for a good swallow, wiped the neck and gave it to Quinn. He drank more moderately, wiped it in turn and handed it to Lina. She put it to her lips and drank a little, imagining she could feel the heat of his lips on the neck, remembering with sudden and shocking vividness how it had felt when she had taken him into her mouth.
It was such an outrageous thought that she choked. Gregor grabbed the bottle before she dropped it and gave her a firm buffet on the back.
Lina let her spluttering coughs last far longer than necessary, aghast at her own wanton imaginings and glad of an excuse for being red in the face. The door opened and the two sombre men who had been sitting at the card table next to Quinn’s opened the carriage door and climbed in. She swallowed, braced for action, but they were obviously expected.