Page 70 of Never a Duke
“My employer considers me a plodder,” Ned said, “while I hope the Earl of Woodruff considers me a prospective son-in-law. Was there anything else, Your Grace?”
Walden rose and Ned realized that at some point, the duke had become distinguished. The touch of gray at his temples, the lines fanning from his eyes, the slight grooves bracketing his mouth made a fierce countenance more imposing. Walden was very much a man in his prime, but he was also no longer a dashing swain.
The thought was sad and sobering, for all too soon, Ned would no longer be a dashing swain either, if he ever had been. The years could march past, one quarterly directors’ meeting, one monthly dinner at a time. If Ned did not seize the miracle of a life with Rosalind and hold it fast, he’d become another Tattinger, fawning over widows and fussing over which shade of carnation to affix to his lapel each day.
Ned had no desire to be a duke, but distinction in his later years would be…nice.
“I will leave you with this thought,” Walden said. “Good luck with Woodruff. He’s Tory to his bones and as land-poor as he is land-proud. He’ll be the devil himself as a father-in-law, but if Lady Rosalind is your choice, we will welcome her with open arms.”
Not what Ned had been expecting. “Thank you.”
Walden ambled for the door. “Be careful, Ned. Jane tasked us with looking after each other, but when it comes to courting a lady, every gent is on his own. Lady Rosalind will be lucky to have you, as the Wentworths are and ever have been lucky to have you.”
Walden left on those words, which was fortunate for Ned’s composure. Ned closed the door after the duke, and went to the window, where he stood for a long time staring at the busy street below.
***
“Did I just hear our darling Neddy pinning your ducal ears back?” Lord Stephen Wentworth asked.
Walden took the place behind his own desk, a seat Stephen could never see himself assuming. But then, Stephen had never seen himself married, never seen himself as a father, never seen himself walking with relative ease, and look how delightfully those undertakings were going along now.
“Clearing the air,” Walden said. “Ned has always had the knack of untangling knots. Knotted-up traffic, Bitty’s knotted-up nursery dramas, and now, the knotty problem of Lady Rosalind’s missing maids.”
Something had derailed Walden’s usual focus on bank business first thing in the day. Or someone.
“You have that I-must-discuss-this-with-Jane look about you,” Stephen said. “What has Neddy in such a taking?” What had Walden in a much quieter but equally profound taking?
“I owe Ned my life.”
Stephen refused on principle to occupy one of the chairs facing Walden’s desk—supplicant seats, all too often. He instead appropriated the sofa beneath the window and helped himself to a tea cake.
“When you met Ned, he was a scrawny little thief with an impressively foul vocabulary.” Which Stephen had envied him. “You have seen him educated and employed, while Jane has seen him scrubbed up and made presentable. How could you be indebted to him?”
Walden took out a nacre-handled penknife and began trimming one of the three quills in his pen tray.
“How good are your begging skills these days, Stephen?”
“You’d have to ask Abigail.”
Walden’s lips quirked. “Not those begging skills. The ones you survived on as a child when my wages were insufficient.”
Truth to tell, Walden’s wages had always been insufficient. As a younger man, Stephen might have noted that point for the record.
“If I had to beg my way to a crust of bread now…” Stephen thought of his son, a sturdy little fellow with two sound legs. “Maybe for the boy, I could do it, or for Abigail. For myself, I haven’t the knack.”
“Exactly. We lose the knack. There I was in Newgate, all decked out in my Bond Street finery. Ned had to remind me that I should part with my gloves first, not to buy food, but rather, to buy pen and paper. Getting word to my family would solve the food problem and many other problems besides, but I had forgotten those priorities. I had also forgotten that nobody makes a good fist wearing his gloves.”
“Ned reminded you of that too?”
“Within moments of taking me under his wing. The other inmates were still sizing me up, deciding how to relieve me of everything including my teeth. Ned swaggered up to me and appointed himself my general factotum. He negotiated with the guards on my behalf, amplified my reputation for violence considerably, and quite simply saved my life.”
“You were five times his size, easily,” Stephen said, picturing the Ned who’d been dragged, kicking and cursing, into the Wentworth household all those years ago. “You could have taken anybody in a fair fight.”
Walden tested the point of the pen against his fingertip. “A fair fight in Newgate is one where the guards don’t intervene. I was rusty, Stephen. I had worked for years to put aside my skills as a brawler. I craved refinement andinfluence, because the raw violence of the street fighter was too much of Jack Wentworth’s world. Ned was one-fifth my size, but he had ten times my fight. In that, he was like you.”
A compliment lurked well below the surface of Walden’s observation. Stephen would plumb the depths for it later.
“What has all this to do with Ned telling you to sod off now?”
