Retold: A Regency Fairytale Retellings Collection (Regency Retold) by M.C. Frank

Author:M.C. Frank [Frank, M.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

…

The man who had come to consult her brother the night before had been a middle-aged man, a baron with a wife and six children. He had ruined himself inside the walls of an establishment of sin, the gaming club everyone called ‘Hell Club’.

Its real name was The Hellion Club, and it was housed in a set of buildings situated beneath London’s tangled streets, appropriately named ‘The Underworld’.

From what Poppy could tell, the place was aptly nicknamed the Hell Club, because every night it attracted desperate men of low or no morals, who would then proceed to fleece the meager fortunes of poor unsuspecting men who happened to have a gambling addiction, like this baron.

Poppy’s brother had taken hours to finish his diatribe on the vices of gambling and the like, and after that, he had bestowed one of his long-winded prayers on the poor, ruined man. But Poppy had known that praying would not bring back the money the man had lost on the gaming table, nor would it feed or house his six children, since he had lost his ancestral seat to the satan-like owner of the Hell Club, a man so deeply deprived and immoral, he was nicknamed ‘Lord Hades’.

The day wore on, excruciatingly slowly, and soon it would be nighttime again.

Her brother spent the whole day enclosed in his study, and she was free to soak her wounded legs in warm water and think.

When was the last time she had thought, actually thought for herself?

She couldn’t remember.

What was there to think about, besides her many and repeated sins and offenses; her constant companion, pain; and the enduring, hollow ache at the absence of her father?

She was better off not thinking much.

But now, here was something worth the pain of remembering.

Of finding herself.

That night, she lay awake until four in the morning, when she was sure her brother was snoring in his bed. Then, she got up in a trance, as if some other, brave and horrible creature had taken over her body, proceeded to put on some old clothes of her father’s, and went alone out into the night, dressed like a man.

She took one of her brother’s horses and rode all the way to Mayfair, and to the Hell Club. She spent the greatest part of the night standing outside the exclusive gentleman’s club, waiting. Waiting for a man like the one who had come to the vicarage for help.

This was no impulse: she had thought it through.

She was looking for some desperate soul who would stumble out of the club drunkenly, desperately, straight out of the card room and into the night, having lost his entire fortune and mad enough with grief to do something foolish.

When one such man came out, in the small hours of the morning, Poppy followed him and stopped him from doing something desperate.

The next night, she did the same.

The next as well.

She carried on in this way for a week.

And then, one night, it was so miserably cold outside

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