The Virgin Who Humbled Lord Haslemere by Anna Bradley

 

Prologue

Oxendon Street, London

July 1780

Georgiana Harley was the third.

Lady Amanda Clifford heard the girl’s name before she ever saw her face. Just rumors at first, a whisper here and there about a ragged orphan who spent her nights in Covent Garden, fleecing the pockets of every drunken rake in London.

Gossip had it the girl had the devil’s own luck.

Luck. A destitute street urchin, lucky? Lucky in the way of chimney sweeps, hunchbacks, and hangman’s nooses, perhaps.

Which is to say, not lucky at all.

Lady Amanda believed in a great many things—fate and chance, destiny and intuition—but luck wasn’t one of them. If a street urchin was warming her palms with coins plucked from London’s hardened gamesters, she possessed something more valuable than luck.

Guile, perhaps. Cunning. A talent for treachery.

Lady Amanda didn’t make a habit of scouring London’s streets for stray waifs, but when the rumors swelled to a fever pitch, she and her servant Daniel Brixton made their way to Oxendon Street to see the girl for themselves. It was, Lady Clifford would later recall, one of the few occasions on which she acted contrary to her habit.

It wouldn’t be the last. Not where Georgiana Harley was concerned.

She was perched on the street outside The Crimson, a low gaming hell named for the crimson-colored door, the one bright object in a neighborhood of soot-blackened buildings and shadowy streets.

Lady Amanda didn’t emerge from her carriage, but directed her coachman to wait. She lingered far longer than she’d intended, watching the girl through the carriage window in silent fascination.

She wasn’t a cheat. Not in the strictest sense of the word.

But neither was she simply lucky.

She had a piece of rough board balanced on her lap, her eyes darting back and forth as she slapped the cards down with a deftness born of practice. One deck, two, half a dozen. The number of cards didn’t seem to matter.

Back and forth, back and forth…

Counting, and calculating.

She didn’t lack for culls. Men of all sorts, high born and low, penniless or flush, drunken or sober, paused for a game on their way past The Crimson. The meaner among them saw an easy mark, and were eager to strip the girl of her winnings. Others, those with the guineas to spare, were merely taken with the novelty of the thing.

Regardless, the pile of coins in the girl’s lap continued to grow. When the weight became burdensome, or the dull glint of copper became too tempting to pickpockets, she’d scoop them up and secret them away in some hidden pouch, secure from thieving fingers.

She wasn’t greedy. She might have fleeced her victims for every last miserable shilling, but she was restrained, judicious. This more than anything else intrigued Lady Amanda, as an existence scraped from the grimy London streets was more apt to drive one to avarice than subtlety.

Luck? No. Lady Amanda hadn’t expected the girl’s gift would turn out to be divine good fortune. But neither had she expected to find a ragged little waif spinning survival into an art with every twitch of her agile fingers.

An artist, in Covent Garden, crouched on the filthy street outside a gaming hell.

Then again, there was nothing remarkable in finding art at a museum, was there?

The real genius was in recognizing brilliance, even if one stumbled across it in the last place on earth they’d ever think to look for it.