Chapter One: Violet Through the haze of cigarette smoke, I watched the shifty bloke across the table sweat, rubbing at his bulbous nose as he considered his cards. He''d scowled when I entered the dimly lit smoking lounge, but his pocked face had broken into a greedy grin when I dragged up a chair and told him to deal me in. Guess he liked his odds of winning a few hands of Brag against an English lady, even one in a pair of trousers. Unfortunately for him, playing the odds was my speciality. A half dozen more of the ocean liner''s less reputable male passengers lurked behind my opponent, staring hungrily at the pile of scratch in the center of the table. The dealer, a wiry man with a fiery shock of hair, leaned over to whisper something in my opponent''s ear. My opponent grunted, then adjusted his crotch. Bloody men.
"Buy you a drink, doll?" The dealer''s gaze drifted down towards my bosoms. Like most of the men I''d encountered on this ship--and indeed everywhere else since I reached a marrying age--his libido was undeterred by my unconventional habits. I suspected my knee to his bollocks might have done the trick, but Seb had warned me not to provoke physical altercations "or else." After living with Seb for seventeen years, I had grown to dislike his definition of "else," which usually involved a toad in my bed or garden snake in my boots. (Not that I believed a passenger-cargo liner in the middle of the Adriatic Sea housed abundant reptilian or amphibious life, but my brother could be deuced resourceful when necessary.) I considered my empty, smudged tumbler and imagined the caustic taste of whisky burning a track down my throat. In the end, I''m not one to spare a sap, especially a misogynist. "I''ll take another, no promises attached," I told the dealer.
He took my glass, and Seb''s grip tightened on the back of my chair, his knuckles cracking. My drinking whisky made him anxious, one item on an ever-growing list. He''d been roundly opposed to my entering the men''s smoking lounge that afternoon, but I''d been roundly opposed to being denied entry to any room on the grounds of my sex. I must confess, though, the room itself wasn''t impressive. I expect it wouldn''t have been impressive even two years ago, before the war, when there were enough stewards to keep the glasses clean, the dangling chandeliers and wall mirrors polished, the Persian carpets and heavy curtains free of dust and the faint tang of seawater. I slumped back in my chair, mimicking the casual posture of the men around me. Ordinarily, I''d be tingling now, the thrill of the gamble fluttering around my lungs, whirring through my mind, as I calculated the odds of the three cards in my hand topping those of my opponents. The last four rounds we''d played, I''d forcibly schooled my features into slate as I edged up the bets, goading each of my opponents to fold while I weighed the wisdom of throwing in my own scant cash to see their cards.
But this time, there was no gamble. Luck, an unconventional lady herself, had favored me with three aces. In Brag, the only hand higher was a trio of threes. The odds of being dealt such a hand at the start of a game were 5,524 to 1, but since I''d had a pair of threes in my hand last round, and they were now discarded to the bottom of the deck, my aces were unbeatable. The scratch on the table was already mine. We merely needed to finish out the formalities. The dealer slid me the whisky, and I took a pull, grimacing at its fire before tossing in another two bob and staring down my opponent. "So, are you folding like the rest?" He ran a hand over the shadow of a beard on his lower jaw, then reached into his pocket.
His two bob chinked against the mass at the table''s center. Nearly ten pounds sterling in all. "Show ''em." I slapped down my cards. "Your loss." I leaned forward to sweep the silver pile towards me, but my opponent clucked his tongue. "Easy, girlie." He flipped his cards, one after the other.
Three. Three. Three. I gaped, ears burning at the guffaws and backslaps of the men. My chair skidded on the carpet as Seb dragged me up by the arm. "Time to go," he murmured, steering me towards the door. But it wasn''t possible. Unless I''d miscounted the cards.
But I never miscounted cards. And with only four players in the game, three cards per player, a pair of threes buried in the bottom twelve cards of the deck . I glanced over my shoulder to see the dealer and one of the onlookers shake hands as my opponent raked coins from the table. The reality clobbered me like a wave against a cliff. "No. No, no, no." I spun round, but Seb caught me by the waist and hauled me towards the door. "Leave it," he warned.
"Let me go, confound you; he''s a cursed cheat!" "We can''t afford the attention." "We could afford a bloody lot with all that scratch!" Seb shoved me through the door and swung it closed behind us. He braced it with his broad back to keep me from forcing my way back in. I made use of every muscle in my equally broad back as I pounded the wood on either side of his head. "The devil take the lot of you!" Muffled laughter seeped through the cracks, and I roared my frustration. I whirled and stomped down the hallway, the faded carpets barely absorbing the rage echoing from my footfalls. If His Majesty''s shipyards were less adept in their construction, I would have thundered the whole liner to pieces. I stormed out into the open air.
Wind spun through the deserted exterior corridor that encircled the ship''s many mid-deck lounges, tugging my long curls from their chignon and billowing the excess fabric of my Turkish-style trousers. I imagined most of the passengers--those who weren''t cheating at cards--were packing their steamer trunks, anticipating our arrival on the eastern coast of Italy. But even if all the passengers had been on deck, it wouldn''t have been crowded, at least not compared to years past when Seb and I had made our summer pilgrimage to visit our grandmother. Of course, that was before the Great War, when pleasure cruises to the Mediterranean were fashionable. Now, with England, France, and Russia at war with Germany and their Austro-Hungarian and Turkish allies, no one set foot on a ship for pleasure, for fear of attack by one of Germany''s undersea menaces, the U-boats. It had been nearly impossible to book passage at all; Seb and I had spent over a week squatting in the back room of Madame Hermine''s teahouse before we''d managed to find a passenger-cargo liner actually fulfilling the passenger portion of its mission. I gripped the rail, glaring at the blindingly blue horizon as Seb''s sedate footfalls drew closer. With no other men to hand, I turned my ire at the perfidy of masculine arse-rags upon him.
"We needed that money," I said as he joined me at the rail. "They''d have denied you the cash either way. They were sore about losing to a skirt." I dragged my glare from the sea to his face. A placid mirror of myself stared back. Some of the more prudish matrons on the ship might have blinked at an unchaperoned young lady traveling in the company of a young man--if that young man were not so very obviously her brother. Seb and I shared nearly every feature, from broad shoulders to olive skin to hawk noses and spice-brown eyes. The only differences were my scant advantage in height, which took me to an inch below six feet, the slightly rounder curve of my jaw, and the close crop of his chestnut curls.
And the mottle of fading bruises across the left side of his face, a recent ornamentation, compliments of our father. The haircut had earned Seb the bruises. The haircut and the finely tailored suit that he''d worn countless times climbing out our bedroom window to visit his clubs after dark, aided and abetted by Father''s driver. But he''d never worn the suit in front of Father. Though I''d been calling him Seb for years--our whole lives, almost--Father had never paid much mind to that or anything to do with the two of us, both of whom he considered little more than property, valuable only in our ability to secure an advantageous marriage. Advantageous to Father, of course. He''d despaired of marrying me off ages ago. I''d never been shy about telling my suitors precisely what I thought of their dogged pursuit and unwelcome physical contact with my person.
When one of them had the gall to propose that I needed him to care for my tender feminine self through the bondage of matrimony, I spat on his boots. But Seb had always been less brazen than I, the dresses he was forced to wear more shackles than clothing, the name that hadn''t suited him since birth a bludgeon every time it left Father''s mouth. It came as quite a shock to the old man when his breakfast announcement of Seb''s betrothal to an odious business partner was met with a quiet No. Father hadn''t even raged. His jaw had simply fallen like its latch had come loose. And when Seb rose from the table and made his way upstairs, Father didn''t follow. A few minutes later, my brother had returned, hair shorn and wearing his suit, the trappings of his old life passed off, fully and truly Seb . He was still wearing the same suit on the ship.
We were both wearing the clothes we''d fled in, and the promise Father had shouted after us--what he would see done to us when he found us--still chilled me. I tugged at the cuff of Seb''s shirt, stained by drips of blood from Father''s farewell. "You were right. I shouldn''t have called attention to us." His lips twitched. "Isn''t calling attention to us your speciality?" The wind gusted, catching in the folds of my trousers and pushing me momentarily off-balance. I silently curse.