Read by Rose Biggin (4th story in podcast, at 57m 35s)
St James’s Street, Piccadilly: April-morning mist and distant birdchirp, as two young dandies stumble from the sort of gentlemen’s club of which families disapprove, into dawn’s accusatory brightness. A shabby four-wheeler cab clops up in hope, but they wave it on despondently.
“Well, Eli, I’m cleaned out,” the first declares. He is broad-built, copper-headed, and pale as wax from the night’s amusement.
His taller, dark-curled friend rummages the pockets of his exquisite coat. “Damn that last ace, Charles! We should’ve quit the table when it struck three.”
“Or four at the latest,” Charles compromises. Poor disappointed suitors of Lady Luck, whom, despite persistent wooing, she has spurned! From Eli’s ransacked pockets spill a raffle of torn betting-slips from the weekend-races, when not a guinea was laid but the horse stumbled, went lame, or sauntered slowly over the finish-line like a Sunday picnicker.
They know and dread what awaits them in Mayfair: for the Honourable Charles Sparks, his Puritanical father’s stern disapproval, and for Elijah Vavasour, Esquire, the softer shame of his sister’s tears. They are not bad young men, perhaps, but nor are they good: certainly not at gambling, despite several years of dedicated practice since each turned twenty-one.
“I’ll have to marry the Widow Shaw,” Eli sighs.
Charles’s laughter peals, the first since yesternight. “She’s no need of you: she has all your money already!”
The owner of Shaw’s, a blonde belle of thirty, has managed her dead husband’s “golden hell” (as such expensive gaming-houses are called) adroitly for the last five years, providing card-games, dice, and other midnight diversions. The Widow is as rich as they are currently poor: which is to say very, though she seems no happier for it. If her blue eyes ever lost their sadness, or her red lips softened in a smile, she would be quite beautiful.
“I heard she was a carpenter’s daughter when she married old Benjamin,” Eli remarks.
“And now she’s the ruin of half the young fellows in London, without even opening her legs,” Charles rejoins ruefully, this crudeness earning a reproachful scowl from his romantic friend. “Better far to own the damn’ place than play in it. ‘Tis a fool’s game; I’m sick on’t!”
Eli stops dead and grasps his arm. “D’you mean that?”
Charles looks within himself and finds with surprise that at this moment, exhausted and embittered, with a heart like a turned-out pocket, he does. He’s always first to sit down at the card-table and last to quit: but if there’s a time to change his ways, and more importantly his luck, it’s now.
“Why, what is it?” says he. Eli loves to gossip and banter at the buffet-tables; what’s he heard tonight?
“There’s a rumour going about that the Widow’s looking to retire.”
Charles’s jaw slackens. “Retire? Kill the golden goose? Whatever for?”
Eli shrugs. “Boodle says she wishes to remarry. White claims she’s going into a convent. Almack swears she’s putting all her money in railways, and so should we. The thrust is she’s selling up, and at a good price, too, if Brooks may be believed.”
“What price?” asks Charles.
Eli names a sum.
Charles’s eyes widen, then narrow. He thinks of the gold-filled strongbox in his miserly father’s study, big as a fruit-crate and heavy as a corpse. His mother, with her dying breath, had whispered where the key was kept, if ever he was in “dire need”. And if his current need isn’t dire, he cannot think what might be.
“I may be able to lay my hands on half that,” he says hesitantly, “if you can find the other half.”
Excitement runs liquid down his spine. They could run the place together, the two of them. If anyone knows what rich, idle young gentlemen want in a gaming-house it’s surely they? Here is a chance to profit at last, where formerly they have lost!
Eli considers. “My sister’s diamonds… I know a fellow at Coutts Bank who’ll take ‘em as security on a loan. She shan’t miss ‘em for months–”
“And by then you’ll have paid it back!” They lock glinting eyes as Charles completes the thought; and the empty pockets of their hearts begin to fill with hope.
*
The night’s wine-dark when Charles and Eli meet outside Shaw’s once more, the gas-lamps touching their conferring heads with a discreet golden gleam, like a blessing from Fortuna herself.
They’ve an appointment with the lovely widow, and are nervous as the thieves they both now, alas, are. Charles hefts a Gladstone-bag weighted with gold sovereigns, and Eli, having abstracted his little sister’s diamonds from the family safe, carries in the sanctum of his breast-pocket a cheque from Coutts, for a sum to the exact current value of his personal honour.
Yet worth it, surely, to stoop low, for the sake of rising so high? The real crime would be to let this opportunity escape them! So the conspirators assure one another as they pass through the green-baize door, ascend the marble stairs and hover bluebottle-like beside the buffet-table, where they disconcert fellow-patrons as, anxiously, they await Mrs Shaw’s summons.
Their appointment-hour passes, then recedes. Eli frets. Charles sweats. The evening’s sultry and the room close, the magnificent gas-chandelier overhead giving off more heat than light. The play tonight is baccarat, faro and Hazard: cards and dice, eternal twin stars in the constellation of chance. Charles has sworn off that now, of course, but there’s no harm in looking, seeing how the cards fall, the dice roll.
For soon, he must find pleasure in watching alone: every loss will be their gain; every gambler’s win a voluptuous postponement of the inevitable moment when the money returns to them again dozenfold. For the house always wins. Why had he never understood that when he sat where these fools sit now, when he’d laid down his own gold to be swallowed by the insatiable green maw of the card-table?
No matter. They’re minutes from wealth, from their troubles’ end. That is, if they can persuade Mrs Shaw to take a little (a trifle, a mere few thousand) less than her asking-price: for, pooling their assets, it had emerged that the Sparks strongbox had been a touch less full, and the Vavasour diamonds a shade less perfect, than anticipated.
It’s nigh-on eleven. Where’s the lady, fickle as Luck herself?
Eli, without strong drink to stiffen his resolve, grows pallid and clammy as a drowned man; Charles senses second-thoughts congregating over his friend’s head like Scrooge’s phantoms. Whisking the cheque from Eli’s pocket for safekeeping, he sends him into the Club garden for fresh air, and perhaps some diverting conversation with the young ladies who loiter there.
Women were ever Eli’s weakness: gambling always Charles’s.
But no more, of course, because it’s not really gambling if you know you’ll win, and so when a seat at the baccarat-game before him becomes vacant, the exasperated loser tossing down his cards in disgust, it seems only natural for Charles (who’s been standing hours now, not a chair to be had unless it’s at a card-table) to sit there
…and once seated, naturally the croupier deals him in
…and as in a dream, as though they spring from the bag of their own volition, like a golden waterfall in reverse, his father’s sovereigns are upon the table and his bet is laid
…and now he holds three cards which add up to nine, baccarat’s perfect number, unbeatable, and this, this soaring, this triumph, this safety, is why he comes back – why gambling has always been his weakness, because when you’re winning it feels like strength...
He wins the hand.
Doubles his stake. Wins the next.
And again.
How much time has passed since Eli went to the garden? It doesn’t matter. Some time.
Charles keeps winning.
It’s one of those golden nights when he cannot seem to lose: every card’s the right one, every dice-roll high (for he tries his luck at Hazard too, knowing he’s invincible tonight; knowing the dice will fall for him as they never shall again). He laughs and drinks, and fellows clap his back and fetch him wine, so he doesn’t have to move from the game, break his lucky streak. Nobody’s seen play like this in a lifetime: the swagged, bleary eyes of the old roués glister with nostalgia and avarice, the young bucks’ lips tighten with lust and envy.
Charles has forgotten about Eli, about the Widow; about anything but the turn of cards and the placing of bets. Every stake is doubled, trebled, till there’s a sliding pile of gold before him, almost Mrs Shaw’s original purchase-price.
The clock strikes two: it’s a sign. If Charles adds Eli’s cheque to his winnings and doubles his stake, they can buy Shaw’s outright and repay what they stole, within the day, so it will never be missed! Their thefts will go undiscovered and unpunished, and their mortgaged honour will be redeemed.
He doesn’t even think, the solution is so obvious. Who wouldn’t snatch such a chance? – hardly even a chance, because he knows he’ll win.
Charles plucks the cheque from his breast-pocket, showing the amount to the croupier, who hesitates; then accepts the stake. Heart stone-steady, Charles begins to push the glittering mound across the table.
A hand covers his. It is a woman’s hand; pale, cool, soft and immovably firm. Aggrieved, Charles glances up, and the piercing blue sadness of her eyes in the smoke-haunted twilight of the room stops him dead.
“That’s enough,” says the Widow Shaw, in an irrefutable voice, though he makes a feeble protest: you’ve no right, this is an outrage! before seeing that behind her stands Eli.
“You do not understand,” says she. “That’s enough to buy Shaw’s.”
Charles gapes.
“Mr Vavasour made me an offer, and I accepted. I am so sorry to have kept you waiting, gentlemen: it was unforgivable.” She glances at Charles’s heaped sovereigns. “Almost fatal, I fear.”
So that’s why Eli was so long in the garden. Oh, brave fellow: what a coup! Charles grins at his friend in delighted triumph, but Eli’s eyes are fixed on the white curl of his own cheque atop the pile, and he is not smiling.
“’Tis a hard thing,” says Mrs Shaw quietly, “hardest in the world, for some, to watch yet not to play. ‘Twas my husband’s fatal weakness, alas. I tried to save him, to stop him: still, he lost all but this house, my sole legacy.”
Charles is relieved, yet (damn it!) cannot help but hate Eli a little. Cannot but think of the fortune he might’ve made on the turn of the next card.
“Perhaps you do not know Mr Shaw widowed me by self-slaughter, sirs? For five years now I have watched without playing: watched ruin and despair, and stayed my hand for so that I might survive. I’ve watched husbands hang themselves and sons beggar families; brothers break sisters’ hearts, and lovers abandon sweethearts. But that’s enough. No longer must I watch silently! At last, I have enough.”
Reluctantly, slow as a child going up to bed, Charles moves aside so she can sweep his winnings back into the Gladstone, the clash-clatter of coins deafening, almost obscene, in the sudden quiet. Yet a single thought pounds, drowning all others, as he stares at the cards still clenched in his hand: But one more to make a perfect nine, just one!
Mrs Shaw nods at the croupier. “Play on.”
They watch the turn of the next card.
It is an eight.
Added to those in Charles’s hand, it takes him well beyond nine. It would have lost him, them, everything.
His body is suddenly drenched in icy perspiration, heart tumbling in his chest like a handful of dice. What had he done? What in God’s name had he almost done? Charles exhales a tremulous sigh. His eyes brim with relief as he looks at Eli, but his friend’s returning gaze is hard and cold as marble and sends a queer shiver through him.
Mrs Shaw smiles, but there’s no mirth in it.
“The house always wins, does it not? A truth so obvious nobody ever believes it. Yet save for that last card, I lost tonight, and I confess I am glad.”
She glances between the two of them: Charles corpse-pale, Eli stone-faced and blank-eyed. “Enjoy your purchase, gentlemen. I wish you both luck.”
(c) Maria Kyle, 2025
Rose Biggin is a writer & performer based in London. She has worked in live art, immersive theatre & plays. Most recently she devised & performed in alt. opera Star Quality (Cockpit Theatre), featuring on BBC 6 Music and Resonance FM. As a writer she is the author of two novels, punk fantasy Wild Time (Guardian's "Hottest Front-Room Seats") & gothic thriller The Belladonna Invitation, & she is an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck.
Maria Kyle is an Oxford-based freelance editor with stories published by Arachne Press, Liars’ League London & Hong Kong, & the University of East Anglia in the Suffragette Stories anthology. Her fiction has also been read internationally, & performed in BSL. She likes writing about pirates, gamblers & spiders, & is working (very slowly) on a novel.
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