His White Wager: Dark Duke’s Legacy
His White Wager
Dark Duke’s Legacy
Tammy Andresen
Copyright © 2021 by Tammy Andresen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Her White Wedding
About the Author
Other Titles by Tammy
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Hugs!
Chapter One
Rebecca sat just inside the large wooden doors with massive black metal hinges. The doors were made for cargo, each the width of a tall man. They weren’t used for goods currently, however. Unless one counted men as cargo. Which Bec supposed some people did.
On one, a small sliding window was embedded in the wood about the height of a man’s head. Not her head, of course. Even for a woman, she was small. But the guard could easily reach the little window and regularly slid it open, barking out his single phrase over and over. “What’s your pleasure?”
The man on the other side of the door inevitably answered, “A good fight.”
It was a passcode of sorts to ensure that the men who arrived to watch two other men beat the spit out of each other were meant to be here.
They weren’t engaged in anything as sinister as slavery, but the gaming ring her boss ran wasn’t strictly legal. Every man here knew that fact to be true, and so they all dutifully muttered the passcode. It was about the only rule many of these men followed.
The door was set into a vast stone wall, one of the few in this neighborhood. Most buildings had been converted into housing—tiny rooms crammed with more people than one could imagine. People who were too poor to afford anything better or were just criminals and thieves. Dirt and filth covered every surface. Broken windows lining the walls were made worse by the fact that they had to be stuffed with rags to keep out the vermin, but they made the rooms darker and kept the air from moving.
And those buildings that hadn’t been stuffed full of people who were too poor to afford anything better were filled with goods.
Not that many of those goods went to the people who inhabited the neighborhood. Much of it was for the other inhabitants of London, the sort who would never step foot in the likes of High Garden.
The name was laughable, as though naming the neighborhood after tall, pretty things would make it so. If a man or woman had landed in High Garden, they’d sunk just about as low as a person could go.
Bec hadn’t grown up exactly in High Garden. Her mother, an immigrant, was a talented seamstress, and together they lived and worked on Petticoat Row making dresses for the elite.
“Hey, Bec,” one of the patrons called and then spit on the floor. “I’ve got a guinea on James losing in the fifth.”
She gave a nod and held out her hand for his coin as she carefully calculated the amount of his bet and his possible winnings and likely losses.
But the coin didn’t immediately drop into her hand. Pulling the brim of her hat down lower, she tilted up her chin. “Coin.”
For the last three years, she’d taken the bets for the twice-weekly fights that were held in this old, falling-down building.
The men had learned she didn’t speak unless necessary. She didn’t fight, and she didn’t cheat. Her employer had learned that too, which was why she had her own personal guard behind her.
“I got a question first,” the man said, his chin jutting out as he stood over her, peering down. “How come you ain’t never grown? A boy your age should be taller.”
Her jaw tightened as she resisted the urge to touch the binding about her breasts. Not that they were overly large, but they were big enough that they had to be wrapped in order to disguise herself as male. “My mother didn’t feed me. Coin.”
He frowned, giving her a long stare before he finally extended his hand and dropped the coin in her hand. “It’s odd is all. I’ve seen some short men before but not like you.”
She didn’t answer as she returned to scratching down figures in her book. Best not to speak much, otherwise the man in front of her might also note that her voice hadn’t dropped and her hands in her gloves were small and finely boned.
Her mother had always asserted they’d be good hands for a seamstress, but Bec had no affection and no affinity for waiting on the elite of London. She did, however, understand numbers and she enjoyed thumbing her nose at the law, so an illegal gaming ring suited her just fine. At least for the present. She had other plans for the future. But she’d stay here as long as she could. The pay was exceptional for someone like her.
Unfortunately, she’d likely have to move on soon. More men were asking about the boy who never seemed to grow up. Her boss, known only as Crito, didn’t seem concerned. “You’ve got a guard. Who gives a fuck?”
Well, to be precise, she did. She gave a fuck. Because she’d been around men like these all her life, and she knew the trick to staying safe was to stay one step ahead of them.
She sighed. It was a lesson her mother had never quite mastered.
Which was likely how Bec came to be in the first place.
Bec didn’t know precisely who her father was, but she knew he was one of the others. The elite. The people who ignored the slums and the filth and went about their shiny lives. Oh sure, they’d drop their trash here in rookeries, come to gamble, or to whore, and then they’d leave again. Back to their pretty lives.
She shook her head.
Her mother had been a servant before she’d been a seamstress. The daughter of a Japanese merchant who’d died here in London, stranding his family in a foreign land. Not that that mattered to Bec. She’d lived here all her life, and it was home, she supposed. But her father, whoever he was, had impregnated her mother and then shipped her off to London, never to be seen or heard from again.
The man, in her mind, represented everything wrong with London, with England. And she did what she could to thumb her nose at the elite he’d represented.
Another knock sounded at the door. Bec didn’t look up as she slid the beads on the abacus before her, doing a few more calculations. Crito would be pleased. Whoever won, the house would bring in a good profit this evening.
“What’s your pleasure?”
“A good fight.”
Her fingers paused as the muffled voice from the other side of the door caught her ear. The accent was fine, the notes of the baritone deep and rich. Plenty of men from the other side of town made their way to High Garden. It wasn’t unusual, and when they did, they paid extra for the privilege of visiting the rookeries.
But that wasn’t why she paused. Something shivered along her skin. An awareness of just how fine of voice that man had.
The door opened, creaking as it did, allowing the stench of the Thames to filter in, mingling with the smell of unwashed bodies that permeated the air. Rough voices called from all around her, hard, crass words and all of it in stark contrast to the fi
ne sound that had just tickled her ears.
She couldn’t help herself. As the door slid back, she lifted her head to meet the eyes of the man who entered.
Jacob Veritas held his breath as he entered the large room packed to the gills with men of all walks of life. It wasn’t that he was frightened, not even nervous. It was the…smell.
He knew he couldn’t hold in his breath for that long, but he could delay it a bit, allow the stench to slowly permeate his nostrils. Create an adjustment period of sorts.
As a general rule, he didn’t visit these sorts of places…ever.
He was a barrister. A man who took his work as seriously as he did the letter of the law. Which meant he did not consort with criminals unless it was in their prosecution.
But today was different.
He’d been assigned a task by his most affluent and important client, the 6th Duke of Whitehaven.
Upon the death of the 5th duke, certain details had come to light concerning His Grace’s past, including but not limited to, illegal whisky, wine, criminal dealings, and most pertinent to Jacob, a bastard child.
The new duke, bearing little love for his father, and wishing to unearth all the shadows that might darken his door at some future date, had asked Jacob to investigate the unknown sibling of the new duke.
R. White had been the only clue as to the identity of the bastard child.
And while he was a barrister and not an investigator, building cases against criminals required him to follow leads and research wrongdoing and he’d used those skills to fulfill his client’s wish.
He’d started by interviewing the staff members who had spent nearly their entire lives serving the family. Always an excellent place to start and it had served him well this time. At least he hoped.
They’d alluded to the fact that the duke was prone to having relations with the female staff and that those relations usually ended with the servant being removed from the house. Finding employment records, Jacob had created a list of women who’d left the duke’s employ and begun tracking down each one to see if they’d delivered a child whose age matched the approximate time their employment had been terminated. And he’d been systematically crossing women off the list.
He’d begun with more recent staff and was working his way backward. Ten names in all had been investigated and found to most certainly not be the mother of a bastard child, born to the 5th Duke of Whitehaven.
There were only a few names left on the list and the one he currently worked on was promising. Mrs. Aiya Burton had been employed by the duke twenty years prior. An immigrant of Japanese descent, she’d married an Englishman within the last ten.
She was known to have a grown child. A male who was employed here.
The door closed behind him as he surveyed the room. Packed with bodies, shouting, drinking, and raucously waiting for the fight to begin. A ring had been roped off in the center, ready for the match.
“Bet,” came a quiet voice from his left.
He turned his head to see a boy seated at the table, his hat low, his hands gloved as he deftly stacked coin. The boy’s head notched up a bit, his face still covered by the overlarge brim. “Bet?”
The word repeated held a note of irritation in contrast to the soft voice that had uttered it. How old was the child and what fate had brought him here?
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he didn’t bet. Gambling was a vice in which he never indulged. But he was here to investigate under the guise of attending the fight and so he pulled a coin from his pocket and reached toward the gloved hand.
“Which fighter?” The boy’s chin notched up and Jacob noted the fine bone structure that lent an almost delicate air to the boy. But more importantly, his skin was a pleasingly smooth yellow as though he were not English at all.
Was this Mrs. Burton’s boy?
Veritas pulled his hand back, rather than place the coin in the boy’s palm. Mrs. Burton’s boy should be nineteen at least and this boy couldn’t be more than twelve.
“Bec.” A large man just behind the boy leaned forward. “This guy giving you trouble?”
A small shake of the boy’s head and the man straightened again. Jacob grimaced. Bec was not a name that started with an R.
He dropped the coin into the boy’s hand. “What are the odds?”
The boy’s other hand slapped on the table. “Place a bet or don’t. But you’re blocking the door.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that.” He was wasting time and showing his inexperience. He needed to move on. “I won’t bet then,” he said as he turned toward the ring, leaving the coin in the boy’s hand. He’d have his work cut out for him scanning this crowd.
But an hour later and three circles of the room had yielded no results. The only one who appeared related to Mrs. Burton was the boy at the door. The fight had started and ended, and Jacob positioned himself by the exit to watch the crowd depart, the men who’d won collecting their money from Bec on the way out the door.
Jacob tried to keep his eyes on the crowd, but his gaze kept drifting to the boy. Something was off. His manner was too fine, his bones too perfect, his movement fluid and controlled. Not like a boy at all.
And then a new thought occurred to him. Perhaps this was the younger sibling of R. White? Did they both work here, the elder getting the younger a job?
It was a possibility, even if slim, and the only lead he had. Jacob waited until the crowd had thinned, and then he took his leave, stepping out into the alley that was flanked by the river. He needed to speak with this Bec, and the conversation needed to be private.
While the delicate boy might be a lead, he very well might not. Either way, Jacob intended to find out.
With that in mind, he slipped into the small gap between two buildings, shadows masking him as he waited.
Would Bec come out with another person? An older sibling? There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Two
Bec let out a long sigh as the crowd finally cleared out, rubbing her hand along the back of her neck. This was the part of the evening she liked better. Fewer gruff men, far less pretending.
Crito’s crew all thought she was a boy and they’d ceased asking questions, mostly just accepting Bec’s oddities.
She sat counting the coin, double-checking all her numbers, portioning out the various shares. Larger ones for the fighters, smaller for the rest of them. When she finished, a single shilling remained on the table. Left over and unaccounted for.
That wasn’t true. She knew exactly where it came from, the man with the fine voice who’d left it with her but hadn’t placed a bet. The question was what to do with it now.
Part of the reason she’d been employed here for so long was that she was exactly precise with the math. A spare coin had never found its way into her pocket. She sat looking at the shilling, wondering what was to be done.
“Is it diseased?” Crito asked as he came up behind her, a fat cigar hanging out of his beefy lips. He was a man who liked everything in excess. His food, his drink, his money, and his personality.
“A man left it on the table but didn’t place a bet,” she said frowning.
Crito gave a loud laugh that quickly devolved into a cough. He slapped Bec on the back. “It’s yours then, but be careful. He might have thought he was paying for another service in advance.”
Another service? She looked up at Crito her question clearly written in her eyes. “What?”
“After all this time, you still don’t know?”
Was he referring to an exchange of money for sexual favors? “But he thinks I’m a boy.”
Crito’s smile grew lecherous. “Some men like that sort of thing too.”
Her own eyes grew wide and her lips parted before she snapped them shut. No depravity should shock her at this point. She’d seen theft, seen men beaten to death, babies left on the street to die. But her mother had done a decent job of sheltering her from the worst of High Garden and so she was still ca
ught unawares on occasion. “I see.”
“Best send Skull with you on the walk home, at least to the edge of the Garden.” Crito grabbed his pile, always at the very end as he glanced at the rest. This was his evaluation of her work. He’d stopped counting the piles at least a year prior, trusting her to have done an accurate accounting. Or perhaps he could just tell by the size that each was correct. “We can’t have anything happening to our brilliant boy.” And then he laughed again as the men lined up to each collect their shares.
Bec was last, her pile one of the smallest, not that she concerned herself with that. Their home was on the very edge of the Garden, close to Petticoat Lane. It was larger and cleaner but still a far cry from luxury.
Her plan was to save enough money so that she could buy a decent place for her and her mother and her mother’s husband to live. Harold, her stepfather, had his shop, and Bec would take it over. She already kept the finances. That would be enough to live. But to a buy a new home, she needed this job, and she was nearly there.
She had another dream too that involved a future career of her own, but first, she needed to ensure her parents’ safety.
Scraping her pile into her small bag, she stuffed the bag in a hidden pocket of her jacket and then rose. Looking back at her guard, she handed him his small pile of coin as well. “Can you walk with me a bit?”
“A bit,” he answered, spitting. The large scar that ran along his hairline, down by his ear of his jaw, flexed as he spit. It was rumored that they called him Skull because the cut had been so deep that everyone who witnessed it could see his actual bone. He was a cold, hard man who Bec secretly hated, but he was good at this job and scared men away who might think to steal the coins on her table. “But you might have to give me that extra shilling. I only work jobs that I get paid.”