"Oh, dear," Judith whispered as the door closed softly behind him. "I didn't mean to sound so dismissive, but I couldn't think what other excuse to make."

"After tonight, you won't have to make excuses." Sebastian pushed back his chair. "Let's get back to work."

By five o'clock, they knew they had covered every eventuality, every combination of hands that skill and experience could come up with. They knew how Grace-mere played when he played straight, and Sebastian knew what tricks he favored when he played crooked. They now had in place their own system that would defeat the earl's marked cards.

"We've done the best we can," Sebastian pronounced finally. "There's an element of chance, of course, but there always is."

"He's a gamester who's scented blood," Judith said. "We know what that madness is like. Once in the grip of it, he'll not stop until he's at point non plus … or you are."

"It will not be I," her brother said with quiet confidence.

"No." Judith held out her hand. They clasped hands in silent communion that held both promise and resolve. Then Sebastian bent and kissed her cheek and left. She listened to his feet receding on the stairs, before going up to her room to lie down with pads soaked in witch hazel on her eyes, and a swirling cloud of playing cards in her internal vision.

Gracemere escorted Agnes Barret to Devonshire House some time after ten o'clock. They were early, but not unfashionably so, and spent an hour circulating the salons. They danced twice and then Agnes was claimed by a bewhiskered acquaintance of her ailing husband's. "I shall enjoy watching you pluck your pigeon later," she said softly as they parted. Her lips curved in a smile of malicious anticipation, and her little white teeth glimmered for a minute. Gracemere bowed over her hand.

"Such an audience can only add spice to an already delicious prospect, madam."

"I trust you'll have another audience also," she murmured.

The earl's pale eyes narrowed vindictively. "The sister as well? Yes, ma'am. I trust so. It will add savor to the spice.

"It's to be hoped she doesn't vomit over you again." Agnes's soft laugh was as malicious as her earlier smile, and she went off on the arm of her partner.

Gracemere looked around the rapidly filling salon.

There was no sign as yet of Sebastian Davenport, but he saw Judith enter with Isobel Henley and her party and his lips tightened. Since the debacle at Jermyn Street, he had continued to cultivate her as assiduously as ever, although always out of sight of Marcus. His motive now was simple. A beloved sister would watch her brother's downfall. Judith would suffer in impotent horror as she witnessed her brother's destruction, and the earl would have some small satisfaction for the mortification she had caused him. Marcus's pride would be humbled at the public humiliation of his brother-in-law, and Gracemere and Agnes would have Harriet Moreton and her fortune.

The earl made his way over to Judith. "Magnificent," he murmured, raising her hand to his lips. His admiration was genuine. Emeralds blazed in her copper hair and around the white throat. Her gown of gold spider gauze over bronze satin was startlingly unusual, and a perfect foil for her hair.

"Flatterer," she declared, tapping his wrist with her fan. "But, indeed, my lord, I am not immune to flattery, so pray don't stop."

He laughed and escorted her to the dance floor. "Your husband doesn't accompany you?"

"Alas, no," she said with a mock sigh. "A regimental dinner claimed his attention."

"How fortunate." A smile touched his lips and Judith felt clammy. "I don't see your brother here either."

"Oh, I daresay he'll be along later," she said. "He was to dine with friends."

"We have an agreement to meet at the card table," the earl told her, still smiling. "We're engaged in battle."

"Oh, yes, Sebastian told me. A duel of piquet." She laughed. "Sebastian is determined to win tonight, Bernard, I should warn you. He says he lost out of hand last night and must recoup his losses if he's not to be completely rolled up." She laughed, as if at the absurdity of such an idea, and Gracemere allowed an answering chuckle to escape him.

"I'm most eager to give him his revenge. Dare I hope that his lovely sister will stand at my side?"

"Well, as to that, sir, it might seem disloyal in me to appear to favor my brother's adversary," she said archly. "But I shall maintain an impartial interest. I confess I derive much pleasure from watching two such accomplished players in combat." She leaned forward and said almost guiltily, "But I do believe, Bernard, that you have the edge."

"Now it's you who are guilty of flattery, ma'am," Gracemere said in barely concealed mockery. Fortunately, Judith appeared not to hear the mockery.

"But you did win last night," she pointed out very seriously. "However, perhaps the cards weren't running in Sebastian's favor. It does make a difference, after all."

"Oh, of course it does," he agreed. "All the difference in the world, my dear Judith. Let's hope luck smiles upon your brother tonight… just to even things up, you understand."

"Yes, of course." The music stopped and the earl was obliged to relinquish her to a new partner… but not without reminding her of her promise to be in the card room later. Judith agreed, all smiles, and then took her place in the set. So far so good.

When Sebastian arrived, he was all smiling good humor, greeting friends and acquaintances, obliging his hostess by dancing with several unfortunate ladies who were without partners, imbibing liberally of champagne, and generally behaving like any other young blood.

To his relief and Harriet's not-so-secret chagrin, Harriet had not received an invitation to the ball. It was her first Season and she was too young and unknown to move invariably in the first circles. Once Sebastian declared his suit and her engagement to the Marquis of Carrington's brother-in-law was known, that would change, as Letitia told her, but this was small comfort to Harriet, spending the evening in dutiful attendance upon her mama.

It was after midnight when Sebastian and Gracemere met in the card room. Judith was watching for the moment when they both disappeared from the dance floor. It had been agreed that she wouldn't make her own appearance at the table until after they'd been playing for a while, by which time Sebastian would have established a winning pattern and they assumed that Gracemere would be ready to resort to marked cards.

For nearly an hour she continued to dance, to smile, to talk. She ate supper, sipped champagne, and forced herself not to think of what was happening in the card room. If it was going according to plan, Bernard Melville would by now be wondering what was happening to him.

At one o'clock she made her way to the gaming room. Immediately it was dear that something unusual was happening. Although there were people playing at the hazard, faro, macao, and basset tables, there was a distracted air in the room. Eyes were flickering to a small table in an alcove, where two men played piquet.

Judith crossed the room. "I've come to keep my promise, my lord," she said gaily.

Gracemere looked up from his cards and she recognized the look in his eye. It was the haunted feverishness of a man in captivity to the cards. "Your brother's luck has turned, it would seem," he said, clearing his throat.

Judith saw the pile of rouleaux at her brother's elbow. The earl was not yet resorting to vowels, then. She took up her place, casually, behind the earl's chair.

Gracemere was confusedly aware that the man he was playing with was not the man he thought he knew. Davenport's face was utterly impassive, he was silent most of the time, and when he spoke it was with staccato precision. The only part of his body he seemed to move were his long white hands on the cards.

Initially, the earl put his losses down to an uneven fall of the cards. When first he thought there must be more to it than that, he dismissed the idea. He'd played often enough with Sebastian Davenport to know what quality of player he was. True, occasionally he had won, sometimes puzzlingly, but even poor gamesters had occasional successes. As Gracemere's losses mounted, the ridiculousness of it all struck him powerfully. He increased the stakes, knowing that everything would go back to normal in a minute-it always did. All he needed was to win one game when the stakes were really high, and he would recoup his losses in one fell swoop. With that knowledge in mind, he played his first marked card. His sleight-of-hand was so expert that Judith missed it the first time and he won heavily.

Sebastian was unmoved, merely pushing across a substantial pile of rouleaux. Judith gave an excited little cry, saying in an exaggerated whisper, "Oh, well done, sir."

Gracemere didn't seem to hear her. He increased the stakes yet again. By now people were drifting toward the table, attracted by the tension. It was warm and Judith opened her fan.

Gracemere began to have a dreadful sense of topsyturvy familiarity. This scene had happened before but there was an essential difference. He was not winning. He played with a dogged concentration, writing vowels now much as his adversary had done the previous evening. He played his marked cards, and yet he still didn't win. At one point, he looked wildly across the small table at his opponent as he played a heart that would spoil a repique. But Davenport seemed prepared and played his own ten, keeping his point advantage. How could it be happening? There was no explanation, except that his adversary had changed from a conceited greenhorn to a card player of awesome skill. And not just skill-it would take a magician to withstand the earl's special cards.

He glanced up at the woman, gently fanning herself at his shoulder. She smiled reassuringly at him, as if she didn't understand what was happening to him… as if she simply thought her brother was having a run of good luck for once.

He was a gamester. He knew he needed only one win. If he staked everything he had left, then he could recoup everything and bring his opponent to the ground.

George Devereux had at the last wagered the family estates in Yorkshire. Bernard Melville drew another sheet of paper and wrote his stake, the estate he had won from George Devereux, pushing it across the table to his adversary. Sebastian glanced at it, then swept his own winnings, rouleaux and vowels, together with his own IOU to match his opponent's extraordinary stake, into a pile at the side of the table. He put his hand in his pocket and deliberately drew out an elaborately carved signet ring. This last game he played for his father. His eyes flicked upward to his sister, who nodded infinitesimally in acknowledgment, before he slipped the ring onto his finger, shook back the ruffles on his shirt-sleeves, and broke a new pack of cards, beginning to deal.

Agnes Barret stared at the ring on Sebastian Davenport's finger. Her world seemed to turn on its axis, a slow roll into a nightmare of disbelief. She wanted to scream some kind of a warning to Bernard, so powerful was her sense of the danger embodied in that ring, but no sound would emerge from her throat. Her eyes were riveted on it: the Devereux family ring. She tore her eyes from Sebastian's long slender fingers and gazed at his sister. For a second Judith's golden brown eyes met Agnes's gaze, and the shock of her own recognition stunned Agnes with its primitive, vital force. And she wondered with a horrified desperation why she hadn't known it before… why some instinctive maternal essence had failed to recognize the children she hadn't seen since their babyhood.

Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington, stood in the open doorway of the card room. The buzz of the attentive crowd around the players was so low as to be almost subliminal. He could see across the throng. He could see his wife, the steady, purposeful movement of her fen. He knew what she was doing. She and her brother were defrauding the Earl of Gracemere under the eyes of fashionable London. He couldn't imagine why, he knew only that he could do nothing about it. Only by exposing them could he stop it.

Distantly, in abject cowardice, he wished his evening had not ended when it had, or that he had gone straight home from Horseguard's Parade instead of following temptation and coming to find his wife. Wretchedly he wished he could have been spared this knowledge, because it was a knowledge he didn't know what to do with. It was a knowledge that destroyed love… that made impossible any kind of trust and confidence on which love and marriage could be based.