At faro, as in love, the bank wins in the end; the player wins only the interval., The Card-Player's Catechism (privately printed)
Lord Nathaniel Blackwood stood at the centre of our tale like a locked room in a house one has been invited to admire: everyone circled him, and no one was admitted.
He was a man made of contradictions, and he wore them the way other men wear good tailoring, so naturally that one suspected nothing deliberate in it. Power sat on him easily, yet there was a bruised quality to the ease, as of something once broken and set with great care.
He charmed without appearing to try; he kept secrets the way the Bank keeps bullion, in vaults, and at a temperature that discouraged enquiry. Serena, who would come to know the contradictions better than anyone, was captivated before she was warned, as, indeed, were we all.
He was tall and lean, broad through the shoulder, built along the lines of a man who had fenced in his youth and never entirely stopped.
His black hair, worn a shade longer than fashion strictly allowed, was always impeccably brushed, though a strand of it had a way of falling across his brow at moments of calculation, like a curtain drawn across the stage.
His eyes were dark, not the warm brown of mahogany but the black of wet slate, and they had the disconcerting habit of resting on a person a moment too long, as though he were reading a letter over her shoulder. Experience had written its small print along his mouth and at the corners of his eyes.
A strong jaw, a beard trimmed close and black as his name: everything about his face argued certainty, and everything beneath it, one somehow felt, argued otherwise.
He dressed as men dress when they have never once been required to consider the cost of it, dark cloth of a richness visible only in its drape, waistcoats of figured silk, a cravat tied with that deliberate carelessness which takes a valet twenty minutes.
A watch of French make rode in his waistcoat pocket on a chain of black enamel; a cane with a silver knob accompanied him on the rare occasions when he walked anywhere he might be seen. The overall effect was of a man who had stepped out of an engraving and found the modern world mildly amusing.
He was, in company, a man of silences punctuated by sentences. He did not chatter; when he spoke, it was in complete thoughts, often turned like riddles, and he had a way of answering the question behind your question that made you feel simultaneously flattered and exposed.
Those who attempted to draw him out on politics, or money, or his family found themselves charmed down an entirely different corridor of conversation and set down at its end, alone, wondering how they had arrived.
He had wit, real wit, the kind that wounds without raising its voice, and he used it sparingly, which is the only way wit retains its edge.
Beneath all of it, if one watched long enough, one could detect the outline of a conscience: not a comfortable Victorian conscience, embroidered with chapel and good works, but something older and more scarred, a sense of honour that had survived contact with its own violations and come away limping.
His motives were his own. That, more than anything, made him dangerous and, to a certain kind of woman, irresistible.
His past was a country with closed borders. The lineage was unimpeachable, the Blackwoods had held land since the Tudors, and the estate in Surrey, whatever its mortgages, was magnificent, but the years between his coming of age and his reappearance in London society were documented only by rumour.
There were whispers of government work of an unofficial kind, of several years on the Continent, of a marriage, or was it merely an engagement?, that had ended in circumstances no one cared to detail over dinner.
His money was real, which distinguished him from half the peerage, and its sources, like its owner's history, were various and discreetly arranged.
He served, in the architecture of our story, as the hinge on which Serena's door would swing, though whether it opened onto a garden or a stairwell, not even he could have told her.
That was the trouble with Nathaniel: he did not know himself which of the two he was offering, and he seduced, in the end, not by deception but by an honesty so partial it amounted to the same thing.
She should never have gone.
The invitation had arrived by hand, in an envelope of heavy cream paper bearing no crest, and the note inside was three lines long and written in violet ink, and it asked her to come alone after dark to an address in a street she did not know.
Any sensible woman would have burned it. Serena, who was many things but had never once in her life been sensible about a mystery, put on her grey silk and went.
The house stood back from the road behind iron railings, and the door was opened by a servant who did not announce her or ask her name. He simply bowed, took her cloak, and stood aside, and Serena understood that she had been expected down to the minute.
The drawing-room to which he conducted her was a study in opulence and neglect: good furniture shrouded under holland covers, a chandelier dressed in linen, and in the grate a coal fire burning with the extravagant indifference of money.
One branch of candles had been lit on the mantel, beeswax, she noted; no smell of gas here, and the rest of the room was left to the firelight, which moved across the wallpaper like something liquid.
The air smelled of beeswax and a trace of some Eastern scent, sandalwood perhaps, threaded through with cigar smoke.
She had been standing there perhaps five minutes, telling herself that she was quite at ease, when the heavy curtains at the far end stirred, though there was no draught, and he came through them.
She knew him at once, one did; his face had been in the Graphic
only that spring, and the knowledge did nothing to lessen the shock of him. He was taller than she had imagined, and the firelight did flattering and dishonest things to his face.
"Who are you?" The question came out more breathlessly than she intended, and she hated herself for it.
He did not answer immediately. He crossed the room to the sideboard, poured two glasses of sherry from a decanter that was already waiting, two glasses, she noted; he had known she would come, and held one out to her with the grave courtesy of a man receiving at his own club. When he spoke, his voice was low and beautifully modulated, the voice of a man who has been told all his life that people are listening.
"You know who I am, Miss, " he paused, delicately, ", though perhaps I should not presume. You came to my house, after all. That suggests a certain willingness to be introduced."
"I came because your note told me nothing. I dislike notes that tell me nothing."
"Do you?" He smiled then, and it transformed his face in a way she distrusted on sight. "How honest of you. Most people dislike notes that tell them everything. They find it vulgar."
He set his glass down untouched and took one step toward her, only one, but the room seemed smaller for it. "Very well. Nathaniel Blackwood, at your service.
And you are Serena, and you have been reading Kant in the original German, which is more than most men at my club have managed, and you ask too many questions at lectures, and you have been lonely in a way that has nothing to do with company. I have been watching you for some weeks. You may as well know it."
The impertinence of it, the accuracy of it, brought colour to her face. "You have no right—"
"None whatever," he agreed pleasantly. "Shall I apologise? I warn you, I do it very well. It has been much practised and means nothing at all."
"I should leave."
"You should," he said, with such calm agreement that it stopped her hand on the door-strap of her reticule. "The door is behind you.
The carriage I sent for you is still at the kerb, because I am a great believer in leaving lines of retreat open, it encourages people to advance." The fire cracked; somewhere in the house a clock measured out four slow seconds.
"But you won't go, Serena. Not yet. You have walked into the one room in London where nobody wants anything from you that you aren't curious to give, and you will want, at the very least, to see what that feels like."
She stayed.
She stayed forty minutes, and she argued with him about Chartism and the education of women, and he argued back with an attentiveness that no man had ever accorded her ideas, and when she finally rose to leave he did not touch her, he was too clever for that, but walked her to the door himself and stood in the lamplight on the step and said, only, "The next note I send you will tell you everything. You will find it says less. Good night, Serena."
She dreamed of him, which she considered beneath her, and thought of him, which she considered dangerous, and waited for the second note, which she considered inevitable. It came in five days, in the same violet ink, and it said: I have reconsidered. I have decided to tell you nothing. You will have to find it all out for yourself. Come on Thursday.
She went on Thursday.
It would be pleasant to report that what followed was simple ruin, the straightforward chronicle of a woman led astray. It was nothing so honest.
What grew between Serena and Nathaniel was, at first, a companionship of minds conducted with a propriety that deceived everyone, including, this was his gift, its participants.
They met at lectures and at the houses of mutual friends; they walked, once, in Regent's Park at the fashionable hour, at a distance of precisely four feet, conversing about the chemical lectures at the Royal Institution.
It was observed that Lord Blackwood had taken an interest in Miss, in the young woman who did so much for the Ragged School in Spitalfields; it was observed that she was improved by the attention, more confident, more vivid, and no one, no one but the reader, who has seen the violet ink, suspected that the improvement came from being, for the first time in her life, fully attended to.
He never hurried. That was his art.
The hand that lingered a half-second too long at the clasp of hers over a book; the glance held across a dinner table until she had to look down at her plate; the carriage, twice, that materialised at the precise moment the rain began, each incident alone was nothing, and he had the patience to deal in nothings for months.
When at last he kissed her, in that same drawing-room, on an October evening with the fire low and the house quiet around them, it felt less like a beginning than like a debt long deferred and at last honourably paid.
She did not resist, is the truth of it, and the truth of it is that she had been resisting for months, and was tired.
"You planned all of this," she said afterwards, not accusingly, she was past accusation by then, which was its own small tragedy. "The note. The sherry. The lectures."
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"I planned the first note," he admitted, his hand moving slowly through her loosened hair with an absorption she would later recognise as the satisfaction of a gambler stacking his counters. "The rest was you. I have never yet been able to plan for you, Serena. It is the only unpremeditated pleasure I have."
She believed him. She believed, God help her, the gambler's most reliable tell: the apparent confession.
For Nathaniel's transformation, the philanthropy, the good works, the visible reformation that Emma would one day put her name to, was never quite the conversion it appeared.
The man who sat on the committee of Serena's charity and wrote generous cheques with a steady hand was the same man who, three nights a week, descended into the card rooms off St. James's where fortunes changed owners over green baize and no questions were asked of anyone whose stake was high enough.
Cards were his first love and his oldest sin; he played the way other men drink, not for pleasure but for the cessation of an ache. He read faces the way clerks read ledgers.
He could tell from the way a man replaced his cards whether his hand held honour or ruin, and he had long since stopped distinguishing, at the table or anywhere else, between winning money and winning souls. It was, though no one said it in his hearing, the family disease.
His grandfather had died at Newmarket with a draft for fourteen thousand pounds in his pocket and a smile on his face; his father's losses had paid for the mortgages on the Surrey estate; and Nathaniel, who knew all this and could have recited it, dealt himself in night after night as if the history were a challenge rather than a warning.
"You gamble too much," Serena told him once, in the spring, finding him at dawn at her door with the grey light on his coat and the winnings still in his eyes.
"I gamble precisely enough," he said. "The error is always in the dosing, not the medicine."
"And what is it the medicine cures?"
He was silent so long she thought he would not answer. Then he took her face between his hands, gently, as one handles something already cracked, and said: "Myself, of course. What else does anyone cure?" He kissed her forehead, the brow, not the mouth; even his tenderness was a calculation of dosage, and went home to sleep until noon.
The infidelity, when it came, came not out of desire but out of the same vacancy.
It was a night in June; Serena was at the charity ball at the Cannon Street Hotel, seated at the head of her own table in green velvet, radiant and occupied, and Nathaniel, whose invitation had been declined on the committee's behalf by a secretary who did not know what she was doing, had dined alone at his club and found himself at eleven o'clock in a box at the Empire, and afterwards in the company of a widow of his acquaintance, a handsome, foolish, good-natured woman who found his sadness romantic and asked nothing of him but anecdotes.
It lasted three weeks.
It was, in every particular except the important one, nothing; and the important one was that when Serena came home from the ball with her cheeks still flushed from her own success, smelling of other people's flowers, and told him about it for an hour with the lamp-light on her face, he had sat and listened and kissed her good night, and said nothing, and the nothing had a weight, and he carried it for two months before it broke him.
He told her on an August evening, in the sitting-room, with no warning and no art. He had planned a speech. The speech, it turned out, could not be delivered; what came out of him was plain and graceless and better for it.
"There was someone. In June, while you were at the Cannon Street. A woman I have known for years. It is finished, it was nothing, I am not telling you because it matters, but because it happened, and you should have the truth of your own life from me, at least once."
He stood at the window with his back to her, because he could not have said it to her face, and his shoulders were very straight, and she understood that this was the closest thing to a naked man she would ever see of Nathaniel Blackwood.
She did not cry at first. She was too busy being surprised, by the steadiness of her own voice, by the smallness of her first question. "Did you love her?"
"No."
"Did you love me, that month? The month you were doing it?"
"Yes," he said, and turned around, and she saw that he was grey. "That is the part I cannot excuse. The rest is appetite, and I have never pretended to be a better man than my appetites. But I sat across from you at breakfast every morning of it, and I loved you, and I said nothing. A man who can do that—" he stopped. "I don't know what such a man is for, Serena. I have never known. I hoped you might."
What she said to him then does not belong in this account, except this much: she did not send him away. Readers will judge her; let them.
She had wagered her whole self on the reformation of a gambler, and she knew, she, of all people, who had sat at the charity's books and balanced other people's losses, that a man does not stop gambling because he has been found out.
He stops, if he ever stops, because the game has ceased to pay.
And she intended, she told him, with tears on her face and her chin up in a way that broke his heart more completely than any scene could have, to make quite certain that Nathaniel Blackwood never again found it profitable to cheat.
They rebuilt. It was slow and unglamorous work, like restoring a fresco: months of scaffolding, and the picture underneath only gradually emerging. He was patient in a way he had never had to be before, patience was a stake he did not know how to calculate, and he paid it out blindly, and it worked, or it seemed to work, and the autumn came, and with it the scandal.
It began, as such things do, with a name she had never heard him speak.
An investment concern, the Albion Consolidated Trust, or some such respectable chimera, collapsed in September, and the collapse took with it, among other fortunes, a sum of money that Nathaniel had put into it, and a rather larger sum that he had persuaded others to put into it, on the strength of his name.
He had not stolen; let the record show that. He had believed, in the shallow and intermittent way that rich men believe in things, and he had recommended, and men had followed the recommendation, and the ground had given way. There was no crime in it, strictly.
There was, however, the appearance of a crime, and the appearance, as he explained to her in November, when it could no longer be concealed, sitting forward in his chair with his hands clasped between his knees like a boy outside the headmaster's study, the appearance was everything.
"How much?" she asked.
He named the figure. It was larger than the charity's endowment. It was, she realised with a falling sensation, larger than the charity's endowment and the Surrey mortgages and everything else she had ever seen him sign, added together.
"And you said nothing. Since September."
"I said nothing since September," he agreed, "because I believed I could make it whole. I still believe it. I have three schemes, genuine ones, Serena, I am not, " and he stopped, because they had arrived, both of them at once, at the word gambling, and neither of them said it aloud.
"And if you cannot make it whole?"
"Then," he said, with the gambler's terrible lightness, "we shall discover what the money was for. That is the one consolation of ruin: one learns at last what one's money was doing."
The Minister of Finance sent for him in the second week of December. The meeting took place not at Whitehall but at the Athenaeum, over brandy that neither man drank, which told Nathaniel everything about its nature before a word was spoken. The Minister was a lean, grey, exhausted-looking man of fifty-five who had survived four administrations and intended to survive four more, and he did not trouble to be pleasant.
"Blackwood," he said, without preamble. "The Albion business. You understand that if it becomes a court matter, it becomes a government matter, and if it becomes a government matter, it becomes, whatever we decide it is. We are not fond of variables. We are especially not fond of variables with your history."
"I am prepared to make restitution in full."
"You are prepared to," said the Minister, tasting the verb, "because you must. That is not restitution; that is arithmetic." He turned his glass a quarter-inch on the tablecloth. "There is a ship sailing for Calcutta on the twenty-third.
The Governor of the North-West Provinces is a connection of mine, an old connection, a useful one. He has asked for a man with your talents, and I have told him there is only one such man, and that the man is unfortunately required to leave the country.
You will be gone by the twenty-third. In five years, perhaps, you may come back. Your affairs will have settled. The Trust will have been forgotten. Some new calamity will occupy the papers. That is how these things are arranged."
"And Serena?"
The Minister looked at him then, really looked, for the first time. "I am told," he said carefully, "that Miss, that the lady in question has an unblemished reputation and a great many friends.
I am further told that reputations are like crockery: they survive removals remarkably well, provided no one drops them." He paused. "I should not wish anyone to drop hers, Lord Blackwood. Not while you are in India. Not ever. It would reflect badly on the arrangement."
It was not a threat.
It was far worse: it was a memorandum of understanding, and Nathaniel, who had spent his life among such memoranda, recognised the hand of the true author, which was not the Minister's but the Crown's, or the City's, or that great weathersystem of unnamed interest that governs England and is never once mentioned in the newspapers.
He could refuse. He weighed refusal for perhaps a quarter of an hour, in silence, while the Minister attended to his brandy, and at the end of it he understood that refusal was a bet he was not being offered at fair odds.
"The twenty-third," he said.
"The twenty-third," the Minister agreed, and stood, and offered his hand with the first warmth he had shown, because a man who accepts his sentence without a scene is a man who may yet be useful again. "A wise decision. They usually are, in the end."
He told Serena that night, in the drawing-room with the violet-ink fire, and he told her the truth, the whole of it, for once, laid out like a hand of cards face up on the table: the Trust, the sums, the Minister, the ship, the five years.
He told her because he had learned, at cost, that the one currency she valued could not be counterfeited; because she would hear it from the papers otherwise, within a fortnight; and because he loved her, and loving her had become, over the past year, the only uncomplicated fact in his life.
She listened to the whole of it without interrupting, her hands folded in her lap, her face giving away nothing, she had learned that from him, and he saw his own lessons worn home to him, and deserved it. When he had finished she was quiet for a long time.
"Five years," she said at last.
"Perhaps less. The Minister's arithmetic is—"
"Nathaniel." She stood, and came to him, and took his face in her hands, reversing, deliberately, the gesture he had made on the October night, and looked at him for a long moment with those blue eyes that had been his undoing from the first note. "Listen to me. You will go.
You will do whatever it is they want done in India, and you will do it well, because you do everything well when you are watched, and you will be watched. You will not gamble.
You will not, " her voice went, briefly, and she recovered it, ", you will not be unfaithful, not to me and not to the man you have been pretending to be at my charity committee. And you will come back. Do you understand me? Not when it is convenient. Not when the papers forget. You will come back."
"Serena—"
"You will come back," she said, "because I am not a line of retreat, Nathaniel. I am the thing you are retreating to. You said so yourself, the first night, on the step. I have held you to very little, these two years. I am holding you to that."
He promised.
He promised with everything he had, which she understood, and with everything he was, which she understood rather better, and the promise held for three years, held across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and the long brown leagues of the subcontinent; held through the Governor's hospitality and the Governor's wife's melancholy and the card rooms of Simla, where the stakes were in rupees and the losses were in souls.
But that is another chapter, and the reader has perhaps already guessed that Nathaniel Blackwood was a man whose promises were always sincere, and whose sincerity, like everything else about him, had a shelf life.
On the twenty-third he sailed, and Serena stood on the dock at Tilbury until the ship was the size of a thumbnail and then the size of a full stop, and she did not cry, because she had work to do and a charity to run and a reputation to keep un-dropped; and if she wept, later, she did it in the dark, where England keeps its honest griefs, and where the reader, having come this far with her, may be permitted to leave her.