Page 12 of Never a Duke
And perhaps that was for the best, all things considered.
Chapter Three
“We had a narrow escape,” Lady Rosalind said as Ned escorted her to his curricle. “We very nearly collided with Lindhurst at the start of his appointed rounds.”
A narrow escape in Ned’s experience was being hauled out of Newgate by ducal decree hours before you were to be moved to the hulks, there to rot—or worse—while awaiting a transport ship.
“You and your brothers don’t get along?”
“George is nice enough, but Lindy has an exaggerated opinion of his own cleverness. He is the heir, and thus owed the awe of his younger siblings and the world at large.” Her ladyship climbed onto the bench nimbly, and Ned would not have been surprised to see her take up the reins.
“I thought siblings were to be protective of one another.”
“I am protective of my brothers,” she said, as Ned came around the vehicle and took the place beside her. “To the extent they’ll allow it. What of you, Mr. Wentworth? Any siblings?”
“None.” Ned took up the reins and considered letting that polite half-truth serve. He was driving out with the lady to discuss her troubles, not to burden her with his past, and yet…Rosalind deserved at least a three-quarter truth.
“I had an older brother. He did not survive his thirteenth year.” Poor Robert had not been lucky enough to deserve transportation.
“I am sorry for your loss. When my mother died, I felt as if I was half-asleep for the entire period of mourning, and all around me, people were pretending…Well, it was difficult. To lose a sibling must be even worse.”
Ned gave the horses leave to walk on, which at this hour of the day was about all they could manage. The streets were thronged with fashionable carriages, drays, cabs, pedestrians, stray dogs, and other effluvia, including a herd of a dozen geese flapping and honking along the green side of Park Lane.
“I love this,” Lady Rosalind said. “Love the hum and bustle. There’s no place on earth like London in springtime. What of you? Do you prefer country or city?”
This discussion had nothing to do with finding a missing maid—a missing pair of maids—and yet it wasn’t quite small talk either.
“I am a banker,” Ned said. “We ply our trade in or near the City, and in cities generally.”
“I am an earl’s daughter and must be dragged ’round the usual Mayfair blandishments each spring until I am too elderly to be presented as anybody’s potential wife. That doesn’t mean I enjoy any part of it.”
They passed into the park proper, and into quieter and less malodorous surrounds. “You don’t like turning down the room in a new frock?” Ned asked. “Don’t enjoy sharing the latest tattle with other women?”
Her ladyship was quiet for so long that Ned realized he’d blundered. With Althea and Constance, the Wentworth sisters, he knew how to go on. But for a little teasing and a little blunt opinionating, they mostly left him in peace. They were married now and busily managing their adoring spouses.
The Duchess of Walden, Jane, had been as much at sea to find herself married to a duke as a very young Ned had been to find himself employed by one. Ned and Jane had rubbed along, with her taking the role of older sister and deportment instructor. Ned would die for Her Grace, but all his conversations with her revolved around Wentworth family business.
To genuinely converse with a lady was a novel challenge.
“One doesn’t turn down the room in a new frock,” Lady Rosalind said pleasantly, “unless one is asked to dance. That great blessing has befallen me in the past two years only if my partner is some widower or aspiring cit my father seeks to flatter or an aspiring cit’s son. One doesn’t exchange tattle with the other ladies unless one is includedintheir gossip rather than the buttoftheir gossip.”
Ned hadn’t merely blundered, he’d tromped on very sore toes indeed. He inventoried options—what would Quinn Wentworth do in such a situation? Stephen Wentworth?
The duke would change the subject. Stephen would recount all the gossip that he himself had caused. The final Wentworth male by birth, Duncan, was a former cleric turned country squire, and his inspiration proved the most helpful.
“My lady, I am sorry,” Ned said. “I did not mean to make light of a circumstance painful to you. If you must know, I prefer the country.” The curricle rolled along beneath maples leafing out in all their gauzy green glory, and Ned was reminded of Yorkshire, rife with sheep and fresh air, domed with a sky as big and blue as heaven. “The duke first took me north when I was a boy, and the sheer wonder of realizing that a great, beautiful world lay beyond London’s filth and squalor still awes me. I’ve been back to Yorkshire a few times. The quiet grows on me.”
Her ladyship sent him a curious glance from beneath her bonnet brim. “You don’t care for London?”
“I live here. It’s home, I suppose.” In London, Ned had lost his parents and his brother, then his liberty and his birthright, as humble as that birthright had been. “The noise and chaos, the utter lack of compassion for one’s fellow creatures, the stink and disease, the canting preachers, and canting politicians…All that is vile and contemptible about the species is concentrated here, no matter how many pretty churches we erect or parks we build.”
Another silence ensued, this one more thoughtful. “But we have libraries, Mr. Wentworth. We have the foundling hospital, the newspapers, the charitable organizations. Campbell came to me from a Magdalen house. There is hope here, too.”
The Wentworths embodied that hope, in their many charitable undertakings and in their refusal to risk their business for the sake of some peer’s social convenience.
“The Magdalen houses work the women unmercifully,” Ned said, “and pay them next to nothing. In some of those places, the residents aren’t even permitted to speak as they work, and a matron drones scripture at them every waking hour. Campbell was lucky to find a post with you and probably very grateful for it.” He turned the curricle down a shady lane, relieved to have the discussion back on safer footing.
Though what did it say, that kidnappings were safer footing than Ned’s opinions about London generally?
