“She Can’t Understand Us,” They Laughed — Then the Duke’s Bride Silenced Them in Fluent Italian
Chapter 4
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The Duke was not smiling. His king was still standing; her king was still standing. Nothing had been won. The boast was spent, and the game was still going, and every soul in that hot, bright room had heard him make it.Miss Farquhar looked at the clock, then back at the pieces. "Well," she said, a little too loudly. "His Grace is being generous. He is letting her run about a little before he finishes it.""Of course he is," said Mrs. Strickland.The Duke said nothing at all. Gallagher behind him shifted his weight from one boot to the other, the way a man does on the morning of a battle.The Duke was not thinking about the clock. He was thinking about the pawn. He had seen that pawn before—not in a club, and not across any table in London. He had seen it written down in a line by itself at the top of a sheet of paper: the first winter, and the second, and the third. He had sat up at night over it with a candle and a pocket set of his own, cursing and then laughing because it was so bold and so wrong, and it always somehow came right.He looked across at the woman in gray. She had her eyes on the pieces and her inky hands folded in her lap. She looked like a hundred other companions he had never noticed at a hundred other parties. She looked tired.Chance, he told himself. A pawn is a pawn. And he bent over the game and began to press.Mrs. Strickland chose that moment to lean down over her companion's chair. This time, she did whisper. Her breath smelled of claret and cloves, and her rings dug into Thomasina's shoulder through the thin gray stuff of her gown."Lose," she said. "Do you hear me? Lose now, and lose prettily, and say how kind His Grace was to play with you. If you shame me in front of the Duke and the Russian ambassador, you will not only lose your wage. You will lose your place and your character with it, and no lady in England will take you in."Thomasina did not answer. She looked at the board.She could lose. It would be easy: one careless move with her knight, and the Duke's bishop would come through, and in a few moves more, it would be over. The room would laugh, Miss Farquhar would have her bracelet back, and Mrs. Strickland would pay her quarter's wage at Lady Day as she always did—late and short.She thought about that wage. It was twenty pounds a year, paid by the quarter, and it was all the money she had in the world. It was her boots and her candles and her winter; it was the postage on every letter she had ever received.Then she thought about her father at the end, in the little cold house by the chapel, with the pocket board open on his blanket. He had been too weak to lift the pieces, so she had moved them for him. He had lost to her and laughed—a thin, rattling laugh that had frightened her.