Page 86 of The Fortune Hunter’s Gamble

“You would know about vice,” said the Baron. “You and that club of yours.”

“Want to see it,” Giles murmured. “You. Married. Lil. Wife.” He tried to rise and look for her, and Lily took his hand again.

“Oh, Giles. I want nothing more.”

“Good,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and spoke no more.

Sophronia had a horrible, horrible premonition, so dire she could not speak it. Giles was young, she told herself. He would simply sleep peacefully and arise renewed. But he had that same awful coldness in his fingertips, and that same yellow, papery look about his eyes, that Henry had shown in his last moments, before his heart had stopped beating completely.

She looked around for a chair, avoiding Rowden’s eyes, afraid he would read her knowing. “I can sit with him, Lily, Aunt, if you wish to rest and sit with him later.”

“I am not leaving,” the Baron said in his terrible voice. He meant to bring Giles through this dark night through sheer force of will. Sophronia only hoped that he could.

Rowden found a chair for Sophronia, then one for himself. They settled at the foot of the bed, preparing to keep the vigil. They would all bring Giles through this, the combined force of those who loved him.

“A spot of bone broth,” the housekeeper said, entering quietly with a ceramic mug on a tray. “And I’ll make him a posset. My possets do wonders, they do.”

“I will call in the morning and bleed him again if need be,” the physician said. “For now, he must rest and take what nourishment he can. An excess of opium will leave one in a weakened state, but rest will fortify him.”

They all looked at the still figure on the bed. Giles’s chest was barely moving.

“Mrs. Watts will make up a room for you,” the Baron said gruffly. “We must have you near in case he takes a turn.”

“My lord, there are other patients who might need me⁠—”

“Then tell someone at your house to send them here. I will pay.”

The physician inclined his head in a small bow and took his bag with him as he departed the room. He did not dare alienate a lord of the realm, even a lesser baron.

“One of you should read to him,” Rowden said after a long silence settled. “Those insipid ballads that he likes so much, by those poets that the government investigated last year on suspicion of their seditious ideals.”

“The Lyrical Ballads,” Sophronia said, and pointed to the table near Giles’s bed. “There, Lily.”

Lily picked up the small volume and opened to a page. “Love,” she began, and her voice broke. She held the book out to Sophronia, sobbing. “I cannot.”

“Read the one about the bird,” Rowden said, his voice rough. “He likes that one, for some reason.”

Sophronia opened to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “Oh, the young man is going to a wedding. This is a good omen.” She began to read.

She continued, even though the poem grew strange in its tone and style, and a spirit of despair settled over the narrator, the mariner, after he shot the albatross that proved the doom of his crew. When she came to a part where the mariner encountered the spirits of a ghost ship, and witnessed Death and Life-in-Death playing dice for the soul of him and his crew, she shuddered, and the Baron started from his chair.

“Stop,” he cried hoarsely. “What is this? You would speak of this, of devils gambling for souls? You are in league with a demon, Rowden, to read this before me, before my son. You, or your father, made a deal with him anyway. That he should take the woman I loved and bear a healthy son on her, and mine should be so sickly I feared ever for his life.”

The room went utterly silent. A hiss sounded as one of the candles guttered.

Rowden’s expression closed down, his guard going up the way it always did when his uncle attacked him. Sophronia wanted to reach for his hand, but she still held the book, and she feared any movement might turn the Baron’s wrath on her.

“My mother loved my father,” Rowden said in a low voice. His jaw was as taut as a drawn bowstring.

“Yes,” the Baron said, and a lifetime of bitterness lay in the word. “I never had a chance. She loved him well before she was old enough to wed, and she never once looked at me. I had to settle for another, and then…when she died…I had to look at you. Every day. Strong and healthy and so goddamned stubborn, staring back at me with her eyes. While I married a weak woman who gave me a weak son, and I dreaded every day that he wouldn’t live to see manhood.”

A muscle flickered in Rowden’s cheek, the sign of his suppressed rage, but he said nothing to defend himself. Sophronia’s heart cracked.

At least they had an answer, at long last, to the source of his uncle’s resentment. Not just that Rowden was a strapping specimen while Giles had always been fragile, but Rowden was the son of the woman the Baron had loved and not been able to win, despite his title and his claim to the estate. She had chosen the lesser son, and worse still, she had been happy in the brief span of time they were accorded.

“Don’t fight,” Aunt Dobbs said in despair. “Not over this old grudge. Frederick—your son…”

They all looked to the bed. Sophronia still clenched the book of poems, her fingers on the line where Death and Death-in-Life gambled. In the silence, they all waited to see what doom the dice would foretell.