Page 16 of Never a Duke
“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 heneed?—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 evenlikebeing 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 enjoyher. 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?”
