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“I should think it would be good advertisement. Draw more players to the tables. Increase subscriptions, and so on.”

Atwood sighed. “What was it tonight, Rowden?”

Rowden stiffened, bouncing his booted foot on his knee. “A Bedfordshire squire drowning his sorrows in gaming after his daughter went blind from the smallpox. Squandering the income that might keep her from the workhouse or some vile institution.”

“Really, Rowden. You are not responsible for the sorrows of the people who come through these doors.”

“Nor should the Albion become a charitable institution,” Pearse said. “Our receipts would be higher if not for you.”

“I have no qualms taking advantage of a man’s own foolishness,” Rowden said. “But I suppose I cannot stand by and see injustice done to the less fortunate.”

“Then you ought to take up a career in public service. Or the Church,” Atwood suggested. “Shouldn’t that degree you took from Oxford prepare you for orders? I am sure your uncle would buy you a living.”

“If I wanted one.” Rowden lashed his boot with his walking stick. “My talents do not tend toward pastoral care.”

“Your talents lie in winning fortunes, which is why we took you on,” Atwood said. “But you cannot keep cheating, Rowden, not to the detriment of the house. And someone will find you out sooner rather than later, which would do us further damage.”

“I take your reprimand and am duly humbled.” Rowden rose, managing to contain his rage. “I shall dedicate myself to filling the coffers of the Albion, as we agreed.”

“Might as well dedicate yourself to something productive,” Pearse remarked. “Unlike that wastrel cousin.”

“I’ll thank you not to speak of Giles.” Rowden was practically feral with wrath. He didn’t trust himself not to throttle a man who had been his friend for nearly a decade. “My cousin is none of your concern.”

“When we have to peel him off the carpet because he is insensible, he becomes our concern,” Atwood remarked. “Do something about him, Rowden.”

Rowden’s lungs went hollow, as if he’d taken a blow to his bare chest. He didn’t know how to help Giles, and never had. “I will.”

He exited the room into the circular foyer that functioned as a reception and gathering area, ringed by display pillars and a few massive portraits. A cluster of the Albion’s patrons stood about, gaping at the lady who stood in their midst. The elegant apparition basked in the stares of living gentlemen and oversight of the marble and oil heroes with all the aplomb of a practiced actress in possession of a stage.

Rowden suppressed a groan. Fanny was obviously in full operatic mode. Her gaze speared to him, yet he could tell by her stance she knew every eye in the room was riveted to her, and she exulted in her power.

“Victor Rowden,” she declaimed in her carrying voice, a quaver of feminine hurt in her tone. “You have betrayed me for the last time.”

A tight demi-corset, trimmed with red velvet cord, pushed her bosom into magnificent display, revealing every heaving breath. The white silk of her skirts clung to her generous hips and thighs. She was dressed for the theater, and it was chief among her many complaints of him that he did not take her out and show her off as his mistress. How were her peers to know of her conquest if he did not boast of his possession?

“The last time, you say,” Rowden drawled.

This was a promising turn. If Fanny broke with him, it would save him the bother of finding a way to end their association. Her choosing a public place—his workplace, no less—was a deuced inconvenience, but if another gentleman stepped forward to console her, Rowden would be spared the obligation of having to placate her with some expensive bauble. Having just handed his own income into the sweaty clutch of Squire Eatwell, he would be living on credit and his uncle’s sufferance for a time.

“I allowed you to hide me away from the world, as if you feared others to witness your fervent passion for me,” Fanny went on.

God’s bones, her voice would carry into the next room. Rowden gritted his teeth. He had never been more than warm toward her; passion was doing it a bit too brown.

“I was faithful to you,” she went on. “Faithful!” She laid a back of her hand to her brow. Her white turban, trimmed with more red velvet cord, sported a short, feathery adornment that trembled with each gesture.

“Faithful,” Rowden echoed, allowing doubt to infuse his tone.

“Indeed.” She glared at him. “You teased me with the highest expectations—the ultimate of hopes! And now I find you have installed another woman into your house?”

“Another— Not in my house.” Fanny must be confusing him with a different protector. Rowden kept his clothes at the house in Clarges Street that sheltered his uncle, Giles, and Aunt Dobbs, but he slept more often than not in a cot in the honeycomb of rooms on the third floor of the Albion. He would miss Fanny’s glorious feather tick; it had been the highlight, for him, of their acquaintance.

She stamped her foot, the very picture of feminine indignation and wounded pride. She was a handsome woman, and her looks had gained her notice on the stage despite a talent that could at best be called middling. She had been clever enough to augment her successful career with support from a parade of benefactors, of whom Rowden was only the latest, and it was a relief to know she would not be bereft without him. Another man would step forward to provide for her, perhaps someone in this very room.

“I saw them today. Setting down in the street, as bold as you please, with all their boxes and baggage carried into your uncle’s house. Really, Rowden, this is the outside of enough. I kept silent when you chased after that dowdy Miss Kemp, though neither I nor the world knows what you see in her. But now you are keeping women under your roof? Miss Kemp will not look kindly on your suit when she hears of this! And neither do I,” she added with a sniff.

“I am not courting Mary Kemp.” Rowden rubbed a spot between his brows where an ache had begun to develop during his dealings with Squire Eatwell and now boded to become a pounding headache. “If my uncle has invited relatives to stay with him, that is none of my doing, Fanny.” Though they had no female relatives, not outside Aunt Dobbs, his uncle’s sister who in her widowhood had taken an interest in Giles, as much as Giles could be interesting.

“Of course you are courting Mary Kemp. You attend her everywhere.”