Hester Waring's Marriage by Paula Marshall Page A

tonight, I wonder?’
    â€˜His memory, is it?’ said Pat, who had lost to Tom more than once. ‘I doubt if it’s as simple as that. He knows the odds, does Tom, and he knows men, and it’s something you can’t teach anyone. I shouldn’t get into a game with him, if I were you, Osborne. Depend upon it, he’d fleece you.’
    â€˜He wouldn’t fleece me,’ sneered Jack Cameron, who had come up as Pat was speaking. Cameron’s own bad temper and rather surprising good luck seemed to go together.
    â€˜No?’ Pat shrugged. ‘You’ve not played against him, have you? Is it because he’s an Emancipist?’ For Jack, who had little beyond his pay, had become even more fierce in his condemnation of Emancipists since Dilhorne had refused to sell him his horse.
    â€˜Damn him, no,’ snarled Jack, flinging himself into a chair. ‘His money is as good as anyone else’s, ain’t it? It’s chance I’ve not met him on the tables. He gave up cominghere before I arrived from home. We’ll see how good he is tonight. I’ve a mind for a game with a so-called master.’
    He looked around for those he considered easy marks to make up a table. ‘I can see Parker, but where’s young Wright these days? I thought he’d be here tonight.’
    â€˜Oh, Frank.’ Pat yawned. ‘He’s a dull dog since he married Lucy Middleton. She won’t let him play often. He rarely visits Phoebe’s now.’
    â€˜Damme if I’d let any skirt, wife or not, keep me from play,’ said Jack contemptuously. He swung around in his chair and shouted rudely across the room to Tom.
    â€˜Hey, Dilhorne, they tell me you’re a master. Why not take a hand with us and let me find out? Be a pleasure to take an Emancipist down.’
    Tom regarded Cameron mildly. He was drinking brandy and water and, since he had come to play, his glass contained a great deal of water and very little brandy. While other men drank deep while they played, Tom only seemed to. More than one of the glasses of rum, brandy and fierce rot-gut whisky which he appeared to swallow had ended up watering Madame Phoebe’s potted palms or the floor.
    â€˜Happen I will,’ he drawled, and made his way over to the table.
    Tom knew full well that Jack Cameron’s reputation as a gambler, both on the tables and at other games of chance, was suspect. However, to accuse a man of cheating at cards was something few cared to do.
    There was a code of honour about these things and Jack’s cheating would have had to be sufficiently marked for anything to be said or done. A false accusation, or one which could not be sustained, would ruin the accuser, instead of the accused. Those caught cheating at cards or dice became pariahs. Honour demanded that they resign from the army and decent society.
    Tom knew of, but cared little about, codes of honour. Gentlemen invented them to pass the time. The only code for which he cared was that governing survival. To survive you did anything, played any trick, destroyed enemies, defended friends fiercely, although if you were sensible you didn’t have too many of them. You kept your given word, but only if others kept theirs, and avoided stupidity—such as cheating at cards.
    Above all, you watched your back. Honour was keeping to your own rules, not some imaginary niceties which merely served to perpetuate social differences.
    So he began to play against Jack, using his excellent memory as the young officer had said, calculating the odds, and finally employing his intuition which rarely failed him at cards, as in life.
    He soon knew that Jack was cheating, and that most of the other players were too green, or too drunk, to care. Too drunk to notice that the brandy in the bottle before Tom, its level dropping, was not going down his throat. He thought, too, that Jack also was not as drunk as he appeared to be, and slowly he