Never a Duke, page 5
“Do bankers frequently deal in hope, Mr. Wentworth?”
“Never.” Walden had pounded that lesson into Ned’s head early and often. Ned had thus asked to be kept away from any aspect of the bank’s dealings that related to extending personal loans, and His Grace had mostly obliged him.
“But you hope anyway,” Lady Rosalind said. “I do too.”
Ned liked that about her, liked that she had an indomitable streak, and if the discussion had proven anything, it was that Lady Rosalind was not the typical self-absorbed Mayfair miss. Ned wasn’t sure exactly what she was, but he had gained some sense of what she was not.
The curricle rolled along through dappled shade and leafy pathways, birds flitting overhead. Ned’s duties at the bank called to him, and yet, he resisted. An hour in the fresh air with Lady Rosalind was an unlooked-for gift, and if he could not bide in the country, he could at least enjoy this hour.
“I attended Lady Barrington’s musicale last night,” Lady Rosalind said. “The cellist was excellent, the pianist even better.”
What had this to do with anything? “You enjoy music?”
“Some music.” The horses shied at a darting squirrel, and her ladyship soothed them back into a placid walk. “Not bawdy songs that compare the fair Ros-a-lind to the full-rubbish-bin.”
Ouch. “Tell me about the musicale.”
“Miss Cadwallader’s friend, Lady Amanda Tait, allowed as how she might consider your addresses, provided you agreed to join her uncle’s shipping business.”
Ye gods, the Yorkshire countryside was calling to Ned more and more strongly. “Somebody certainly ought to introduce the concept of management into Apollonius Tait’s affairs. He rackets from feast to famine, and since Waterloo, the fare hasn’t been feast.” That much was common knowledge in the City.
Amanda Tait was another young lady who’d not bagged a proposal in her first Season. She was more sensible than most, but she gazed upon Ned as if she were considering bidding on him at Tatts. They all did. She was simply more honest about it than most.
“Then you might consider approaching Miss Tait?”
“I have no interest in Miss Tait, or in the thankless task of rescuing her uncle’s business, but I appreciate the warning.” Jane would likely have passed along the same warning had Ned paid a call on her.
“Do you appreciate the warning enough to escort me to a Venetian breakfast on Thursday? We could compare notes while I tend to a social obligation.”
Ned was coming to understand that Lady Rosalind was honest about her opinions, but much less forthcoming about her feelings.
“My lady, I earn my bread as a banker, but you need not make everything a transaction with me.”
She sat up straighter, which, given her perfect posture at the ribbons, should have been impossible. “I have no idea what you mean, Mr. Wentworth.”
“You won’t ask me to escort you outright, instead you have to offer me some sort of bargain. A bit of gossip for an hour of my time. You are a lady. You can simply say what you need, and any gentleman should be honored to oblige you.”
That inquisitive, alert countenance cooled to a fascinating degree. “No, Mr. Wentworth, I cannot.”
“With me, you can.” A gentleman didn’t argue with a lady, but Ned had no desire to hear the terms upon which half the young women in Mayfair would tolerate his marital overtures.
“And tell me, Mr. Wentworth, what do you want?”
“I have everything I want.”
Her ladyship guided the horses through another turn, so the curricle completed a pleasant loop through the park’s less-traveled byways.
“Then tell me, Mr. Wentworth, what do you need?”
* * *
“I would give anything for a bath,” Francine Arbuckle muttered. She had never realized how badly she would miss Lady Rosalind’s insistence on cleanliness.
“For me, a nip of gin wouldn’t go amiss,” Catherine Campbell replied, dividing the deck of cards in half and passing a stack to Francine. “You know they’re getting ready to move us when they start giving us the gin, or worse.”
“What’s worse than gin?” To Francine, raised among God-fearing country folk, all the wickedness in the world was epitomized by the drink so freely consumed in London. Gin palaces, in her limited experience, were as grand as any actual palace could possibly be. All gilt and polish, good cheer, and gaiety.
Her granny had described them as the gates of hell, and nobody with any sense argued with Granny Arbuckle. Francine hadn’t ventured beyond the front door of any gin palace, though, and had come to grief all the same.
“The guards will give the flighty ones opium,” Catherine said, tidying her half of the deck. “Puts them right to sleep.”
“And where do they wake up?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“You have your suspicions, Catherine.”
Catherine began placing cards facedown on the table. “The same ones you do. The same ones we all do, but meanwhile, we have enough to eat, a place to sleep, and nobody’s interfering with us.”
Francine started laying out the cards when she wanted to fling them to the floor. If a woman gave in to hysterics, the guards subdued her and she was taken away.
She did not return.
And Catherine had a point. The place they were kept was a combination rooming house and jail, large enough for perhaps a dozen women, and comfortable enough as long as Francine ignored boarded-over windows and locked doors. The only hint she had of the house’s location was the occasional whiff down the chimney of the river stink that pervaded much of London.
Who would have ever thought such a rank, damp smell could be a source of comfort?
“What’s it like?” Francine asked, placing her own cards facedown in no particular order. “To be with a man?” For surely she and Catherine were on their way to a brothel in Manchester or Portsmouth.
Catherine made a face and rearranged some of the cards on the table. “Depends on the man. Not much bother usually, unless you get a lively one or a bloke who can’t finish. We might not be headed for the brothels. They could have long since disposed of us that way, if that was the plan.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Haven’t a clue. Your turn to go first.”
Francine made herself focus on the cards, though fear and worry were tearing her to pieces. “I’ve been here a week already. How much longer can they keep us?”
“I’ve been here better than a month. They took all the other girls away when I’d only been here a few days.”
“You were spared because Hiram likes you.” Hiram, the youngest and largest of the guards, spoke in the soft accents of the north and looked upon Catherine with obvious yearning.
“Hiram wants me,” Catherine said, very pointedly not glancing in the direction of said Hiram, who lounged at his usual post by the door. “Not the same thing as liking. Will you play this infernal game, or do we pretend to read Mrs. Radcliffe’s drivel?”
Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines would have been swooning by the hour to find themselves in Francine’s shoes.
“How have you not gone mad?” Francine asked, picking up two cards at random—a knave and a seven.
“You know what nearly drove me mad?” Catherine turned over the same knave Francine had, and one other. “That Magdalen house. They about send you to Bedlam with their sermonizing and bad food and endless laundry. We weren’t paid a quarter what a laundress is paid, we weren’t allowed out, we weren’t permitted visitors unless they were from some rubbishing charitable organization. I don’t fancy another turn on the street, but I won’t go back to that place either.”
“You cheated,” Francine said. “You peeked at the cards as you laid them down.”
Catherine smiled, a startlingly warm-hearted grin. “Of course I did. I peeked when I shuffled, too. If you’re going to play, play to win, me da always said.”
“Show me how to peek.” Granny Arbuckle would have disapproved, but Granny Arbuckle was in far-off Somerset, and Francine was unlikely to ever see her again.
She learned from Catherine how to cheat at Patience, and all the while, Hiram watched them from his place by the door.
* * *
One minute, Ned had been having a difficult, if necessary, discussion about the fates that could befall missing maids in merry olde Londontowne. The next, he was trying to come up with a polite answer to Lady Rosalind’s entirely irrelevant query regarding his needs.
Her question flummoxed him. As a boy, he could have answered her: He’d needed his family to be well and for his papa to bring in enough work. He’d needed food. He’d needed a safe place to sleep. As short as the list was, every item on it had been cast to the wind before he’d turned ten.
Ned had been careful that nothing and nobody had become a need ever since.
“I need the good esteem of the Wentworths,” he said slowly, an admission he would rather not have made. “I need to do well at my appointed duties.” The bank relied on him, the duke relied on him, and the duchess in her way relied on him most of all.
Or so he liked to think.
“That’s all well and good,” Lady Rosalind replied, steering the horses onto the verge to allow another vehicle to pass, “but those are needs everybody shares—to get on with family, to exhibit some competence in daily life. What are the needs that make you who you are?”
Ned felt the strangest compulsion to leap from the vehicle and take off at a dead run. “I require respect for my privacy, I suppose. A banker hears all manner of confidences he’d rather not. To keep his own affairs in hand matters to him a great deal.”
Lady Rosalind smiled as she drew the horses to a smooth halt. “Touché, Mr. Wentworth. I need my privacy too, and I’d go so far as to say, I also need solitude. My companion, Mrs. Barnstable, regards this as a sign of inchoate eccentricity, but she enjoys her hours at liberty nonetheless. Will you take the ribbons? I cannot go about Mayfair without my bonnet.”
Ned accepted the reins, though that earlier question—what did he need?—had become a burr under his mental saddle. Annoying. Vexing. What sort of question was that, anyway?
“What of yourself?” he asked, as the lady dealt with her millinery. “What besides solitude do you consider a need?”
“That is complicated. I need to be taken seriously, to be seen as a person with a mind and heart as well as the usual feminine attributes. Napoleon said women are machines for making babies, and I suspect all too many Englishmen agree with him. If we’re machines, why does reproduction so often kill us?”
Machines break down. Ned had sense enough not to say that, but he’d thought it, which proved the lady’s point.
“A banker is supposed to be an abacus,” he observed, clucking to the horses. “We look at the sum requested, the risks inherent in lending it, the security available to safeguard our interest, and we make a rational choice. When the result is a family’s ruin, we shrug and say a loan would have only prolonged the inevitable and allowed them to sink deeper into debt.”
“Unless that family is titled,” Lady Rosalind said. “Then the debt can go uncollected for generations.”
“Precisely,” Ned said. “We apply one logic for the shopkeeper and another for the baron, and I find that inconsistency most trying.” Thus he managed the bank’s employees, and left the ruining and rescuing part to His Grace.
“You’re a radical?” Lady Rosalind asked, as pleasantly as she’d ask how he took his tea.
Radicals in recent years had been the Crown’s excuse for suspending habeas corpus, such that a man could be tossed into jail without charges being laid and then held indefinitely without any promise of a trial. And what dangerous, unreasonable needs drove those radicals?
Bread for their children, decent wages for their labors, housing that didn’t collapse in a strong wind.
“I am not a radical,” Ned said, “though like most loyal subjects of the Crown, I have concerns. John Coachman cannot be expected to manage the complexities of international trade, but I can’t see that Parliament is doing a very good job of it either.”
“Do you even like being a banker, Mr. Wentworth?”
“I like being a Wentworth,” Ned said, signaling the horses to pick up the trot, “and thus I am a banker. His Grace saved my life, and I will repay that debt by loyally executing any task he gives me.”
They crossed into Mayfair proper, with its attendant noise and chaos. Ned wanted to be rid of Lady Rosalind and her vexing questions, and he wanted to steer the horses back into the park’s bucolic quiet.
“You are a loyal abacus,” Lady Rosalind said. “If that’s anything like being a machine for making babies, I don’t envy you the post. Will you escort me to the Venetian breakfast, please? Lady Walters does like to show off her garden.”
“I would be honored to accompany you.” Ned gave Lady Rosalind the polite demi-lie a gentleman was bound to tell. Better that than more of the truths that came out of his mouth unbidden in her company.
“I wish I could accompany you on your inquiries,” she said, when the stately Kinwood town house came into view seven eternities later. “I wish I could root through all those brothels and demand the return of my maids. I am worried sick about them, and I can do nothing but fret.”
“I can make the inquiries safely, my lady, while your great good looks alone would put you in peril in such establishments. They’d dose you with absinthe or laudanum, and then I’d be looking for three missing women rather than two.”
He drew the horses up in the porte cochere and leaped down to assist the lady. She descended with his aid and stood for a moment, her gloved hands resting on his sleeves.
“You don’t tell me not to worry, and you don’t pretty it up for me. Thank you for that, Mr. Wentworth. At all times, I would rather know the truth, even the ugly truth.”
No, she would not. She only thought she would. “I hope to have more to tell you when next we meet, my lady.”
She stepped away and glanced up at the imposing façade rising to four stories. “You can’t wait to get back to your ledgers, can you? I have that effect on most people.”
Ned had not exactly enjoyed the past hour, but he did enjoy her. Liked her lack of small talk, her devotion to her missing domestics, her blunt speech.
“You challenge me,” he said. “The only other women who do that are the Wentworth ladies. Their menfolk are better for being made to think on topics menfolk would generally rather avoid.” His Grace, Lord Stephen, and Cousin Duncan would all agree with that observation. The womenfolk would merely smile at Ned for having stated the obvious.
Her ladyship looked only half-convinced. “I’m not simply a machine for making babies?”
“Far from it, and I am not merely a loyal abacus, though your reminder caught me by surprise.” He took her hand and bowed over it. “Until Thursday, my lady.”
She dipped a curtsy and Ned waited until she’d disappeared into the house.
As he took up the reins and signaled the horses to walk on, his mind presented him with another observation: Her Grace, the Wentworth sisters, Stephen’s Abigail, and Duncan’s Matilda would all brace Ned on any topic they pleased, however uncomfortable to him, and expect honest answers from him.
He might find the interrogations unpleasant, and even resent them, but he held each of those ladies dear and esteemed them greatly for both their integrity and their courage.
“Time to get back where I belong,” he muttered, which set the horses’ ears to flicking about. “Back to the ledgers I am paid so handsomely to mind.”
Chapter Four
Venetian breakfasts were neither Venetian nor truly breakfasts. For Rosalind, they were a sort of outdoor penance, where she ran into people she’d rather avoid and had twice also acquired a bout of food poisoning.
“An orange,” she said to Mr. Wentworth. “I will start with an orange.”
He selected two from the bowl on the buffet. “Only an orange?”
“You will think me daft, but I don’t trust Lady Walters’s kitchen.”
“What of her bread and butter?” Mr. Wentworth asked. “Safe enough?”
Safe was an interesting word in the context of Mr. Edward Wentworth. Rosalind had sorted through a year’s worth of society pages and found no mention of him anywhere. The financial pages were equally silent, though his titled Wentworth associates were much commented upon.
Who was he? Who was he really? “A slice or two of bread with butter will do,” Rosalind said, “but not the croissants, please.”
He assembled the food on one plate. “Let me guess: croissants are messy.”
“As a girl, I loved them. I’d take mine to the garden to eat with jam and clotted cream, and no child ever indulged in such gustatory bliss. Let’s find some quiet, shall we?”
The gardens stretching behind the Walters mansion were just beginning to come into their spring glory, with daffodils blooming in the occasional sunny corner and tulips still tightly furled in others. Pots of heartsease added color, and the new foliage on the birches and oaks stirred in the afternoon breeze. The setting would have been lovely, were it not for the traffic thronging the paths.
“This way,” Mr. Wentworth said, turning down between two hedges. “I want to know what came between you and your gustatory bliss.” He led Rosalind to a bench before a sundial, the hedges giving the place an air of seclusion belied by periodic laughter from the direction of the back terrace.
“Miss Tait is in good form today,” Rosalind said, taking a seat on the sun-warmed bench. She ought to have asked Mr. Wentworth to find her a place in the shade, and she ought to have kept her parasol handy, and she ought to have declined this invitation, no matter how badly Papa would have fussed at her for doing so.
“One does not want to appear ungentlemanly,” Mr. Wentworth said, taking the seat beside Rosalind, “but the lady does have a distinctive laugh. Rather like a coach horn with a stocking stuffed in the bell. Part bleat, part hoot. Shall I peel your orange?”
