THE LAST WHIST GAME

A Victorian Romance

Part I

The card that broke her father's back was not played until the third round.

Clara Harrington knew this, of course. She had known it since breakfast, when the solicitor's letter had lain on the dining table like a dead bird, its wings spread, its message unmistakable: the Harrington estate had four months before it would be seized by creditors. She had read the letter three times, folded it into her reticule, and said nothing to her mother, who was occupying herself with the business of counting the silver spoons.

The card game that afternoon was held at the home of Lady Wetherby, a woman whose drawing-room was the acknowledged center of all social gambling in the district. Whist, the Harringtons played. Bridge was for the young and the fashionable, and the Harringtons were neither.

Arthur Worthington arrived ten minutes late, which was not impolite in itself -- one was always ten minutes late in London -- but Lady Wetherby's house was small enough that his late entrance meant he had to squeeze past three ladies who turned their shoulders with practiced choreography. He said nothing. He took his seat at the west table.

Clara sat across from him. She had not expected to see him.

He was a man who looked as though he had been designed rather than born: straight lines, sharp angles, an expression that might have been called handsome if one were not also called stern. His hair was dark, cut close, his coat was the cut of a man who spent his mornings in an office rather than at a breakfast table. His eyes, when they met hers across the deal, were the colour of a sky that has not yet decided whether to rain.

"You know Miss Harrington?" Lady Wetherby asked, between shuffles.

"I believe so," Arthur said. He looked at Clara. "Your family owns the estate near Reading."

"We used to."

The word used to hung in the air like smoke. Lady Wetherby, who was not a woman given to silence, filled it efficiently. "Miss Harrington has been most kind as to show us the Reading road. I understand the scenery is most picturesque."

Clara dealt. The first card of the hand fell onto the green cloth.

"Four hearts," she said. It was not the first card of the suit -- she had drawn it from a full hand -- but it was the first card of the conversation. She was saying: I have something you do not. I am offering you a chance to trump it if you dare.

Arthur looked at his cards, then at her. "One spade," he said. He placed it on the table. The card was played with a precision that suggested either confidence or desperation, and Clara could not tell which.

They played for three hours. Clara lost two games and won one. At the end of it, she could not remember who won the third. She only remembered the moment in the second game when Arthur reached for a card and his sleeve brushed her hand, and the touch lasted perhaps a second and lasted perhaps the rest of the afternoon.

When the party broke, Arthur lingered. The other guests filed past him with goodnight compliments and promises to call. He stood by the door and waited for Clara to notice him, which she did not, apparently, intend to do.

"Miss Harrington."

She turned. "Mr. Worthington."

"I have a question."

"About the game?"

"About the estate."

Clara's expression did not change. It was a skill she had learned young: the ability to keep one's face still while one's mind moves rapidly behind it. "What question?"

"If I were to offer to purchase the Reading property -- what would your terms be?"

The word purchase sat between them like an intruder. It did not belong in Lady Wetherby's drawing-room, among the tea cups and the card games and the pleasant pretences. But Arthur had placed it there with the same deliberate precision he applied to everything.

Clara considered him. She was not a woman given to dramatic reactions. "You have my terms," she said. "You are offering to purchase them."

The look he gave her was not surprise -- he had been expecting this -- but something close to respect.

"Will you consider my offer?"

"No," she said. "But I will consider your hand."

She turned and walked away. She heard him exhale, which was perhaps imagination. She was a Harrington; she had learned to tell the difference.

Part II

The offer arrived two weeks later, delivered by a clerk in a suit that cost less than Arthur Worthington's watch.

Clara read it in the library, where her father sat with his newspaper and his gin, and her mother was occupied in the garden with the roses that would not bloom in October. The letter was formal, precise, and generous. The price offered was fair -- perhaps even generous, considering the debts that encumbered the property. It would clear every obligation. It would leave Clara with enough, if she were careful, to live in a small house in a small town and never embarrass herself again.

She understood the mathematics of it with the clarity of someone who has spent her entire adult life doing arithmetic for people who refused to count.

She did not write a reply.

Instead, she attended the next whist party.

Arthur was there. He was not surprised to see her. She was not surprised to see him. They played two hands of whist. Clara won both.

"You play aggressively," Arthur observed between hands.

"You play defensively," she replied.

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes. One assumes the world will give you something. The other assumes you must take it."

They looked at each other across the table. The cards were between them, face down, waiting to be turned.

"I did not mean," Arthur said, "to offend you with the offer."

"I am not offended."

"You sound offended."

"I sound like a woman who has heard this conversation before, in different words, from different men, for the better part of five years. My father has been hearing it since I was born. My grandfather heard it from his creditors. The word purchase does not offend me, Mr. Worthington. It is the most common word in my life."

"Then let me use a different one."

She waited.

"Exchange."

Part III

They played every Thursday for the next month. Sometimes they played at Lady Wetherby's. Sometimes at Clara's, when the estate's decline had become so apparent that Lady Wetherby's invitations had taken on a tone of charity that Clara could no longer tolerate.

They played and talked and talked around the thing they were really discussing. The estate. The purchase. The debt. The cards. Each game was a negotiation, and each negotiation was a courtship, and neither of them would have admitted it to anyone.

Arthur was a fascinating man, which was not the same as a pleasant one. He was precise to the point of cruelty -- in games, in conversation, in the way he organized his pocket watch and his handkerchiefs and the pages of his notebook. But there was a curiosity beneath the precision, a willingness to be surprised, that made him compelling.

"You have a strategy for every hand," Clara said one evening, as they played in the estate's drawing-room by firelight. "But you cannot read me."

"I can read you well enough."

"Then tell me what you see."

He considered this. The fire crackled. Outside, the wind moved through the trees that surrounded the estate -- trees that would belong to someone else in three months, if the terms were not settled.

"I see a woman who is fighting a battle she knows she will lose," he said at last.

"That is not reading. That is guessing."

"Is it?"

She did not answer. She played the nine of diamonds.

"What is your father doing about this?" Arthur asked.

Clara laughed, a short sound that might have been a cough if one were not listening carefully. "My father is doing what my father has always done. He is drinking gin and reading the newspaper and pretending the world is not changing around him."

"And your mother?"

"My mother is counting spoons."

Arthur was silent for a long time. Then: "If I were to increase my offer -- not much -- would you consider it?"

"You mean to help me. You are not asking."

"I am asking."

She looked at him. The firelight made his face softer at the edges, and for a moment he looked less like a man who negotiated acquisitions and more like a man who might, in some other life, have been something else.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

"Because the offer is generous. And because you deserve generosity."

"No," she said. "Because you are trying to buy me."

The word landed between them like a card dropped on the table.

"Clara."

"Don't." She stood up. "Don't say my name. You don't get to say my name."

She walked out of the drawing-room and into the corridor of the estate that would not be hers for much longer. She stood there, in the dark, listening to the sound of Arthur Worthington playing alone at the whist table, turning cards with methodical precision, each one a small victory over a game he had already decided how to win.

Part IV

The final game was played on a Tuesday, in the week before the estate would be auctioned.

Arthur came alone. He brought no solicitor, no banker, no papers. He brought only his cards.

They played in the library. The fire was low. The house was empty -- her mother had gone to visit a friend, her father had gone to the pub, and the servants had gone to their rooms, which was more privilege than they usually received on a Tuesday.

Clara dealt. Arthur dealt. They dealt back and forth until the distinction no longer mattered.

They played for four hours. Clara won three hands. Arthur won four. In the seventh hand -- the last -- Arthur played the ace of spades, the card that would break her father's back, the card she had known about since breakfast. She watched it fall onto the table and felt something break inside her, not dramatically but quietly, like a floorboard giving way under a weight it was never meant to carry.

She did not look at him. She looked at the card. The ace of spades. The death card, the gamblers called it. She had always thought that was melodramatic. Now she understood why they called it that.

"You played well," she said.

"You played better."

"I did not."

"Clara."

She looked up. His face was close to hers. She had not realized they had been standing. She only knew that suddenly his hand was on her arm, and his mouth was a fraction of an inch from hers, and the world had narrowed to the space between them.

"I cannot marry you," she said. It was not what he had been about to say, but it was what needed to be said.

"I did not ask."

"You did not have to."

He stood back. The space between them expanded, and with it, something that had been growing between them -- something neither of them had named, because names were for people who had the luxury of certainty.

"You know," she said, "when I first met you, I thought you were arrogant."

"And now?"

"Now I know you are just certain. And certainty is a terrible thing to fall in love with."

"I am not certain of anything."

"You are certain of your offers. Your terms. Your hands. You play your life the way you play whist -- you calculate the odds and you play to win."

"That is not --"

"That is exactly what it is." She picked up the ace of spades from the table. "You keep this. It belongs to you. You won it fair."

She walked to the door. She stopped. She did not turn around.

"There is one thing," she said. "One thing I have not told you."

He waited.

"When I dealt the first card that first afternoon -- the four of hearts -- I knew it was you sitting across from me. I arranged the deal so that it would be the first card played. I wanted you to know that I was willing to be vulnerable. That I was willing to give you something first, before the game even began."

She opened the door. She stepped into the corridor.

"And you played the one of spades. You gave me nothing at the start. You protected yourself from the beginning."

The door closed.

Arthur Worthington sat alone in the library. The fire had burned down to embers. He picked up the ace of spades and looked at it for a long time. Then he put it in his pocket, where it lay against his leg like a weight, like a stone, like the last card in a game that had ended before either of them knew it had begun.

He never played whist again.