Page 18 of Never a Duke
Ned Wentworth, aged eight, would have raced into the garden and sent those pigeons flapping for their lives. “How would you have evened the scales?”
He started on the second orange. “Retribution takes patience. I’ve watched Walden go about it, and with him it’s always a polite financial transaction, sometimes years in the making. Personal slights he usually ignores, but anybody who attempts to cheat the bank is made to regret his folly. Walden is so calculating, so dispassionate about addressing a past wrong that it puts me in mind of how my father cut out a morning coat. Every snip exact, every seam perfectly straight, and yet the whole, thousands of snips and stitches later, was exquisite. Save for the color, the finished garment bore no resemblance to the bolt of fabric that had come in the door a fortnight earlier.”
Rosalind took a succulent bite of orange. “Your father was a tailor?”
Mr. Wentworth paused in his peeling. “He was. I’ve been talking to the streetwalkers.”
The subject had been unequivocally changed. Why? Was the forbidden topic the duke’s interesting talent for retribution or Mr. Wentworth’s patrimony?
“What have you learned?”
He munched a section of orange. “None of the ladies recognized the sketches. None of them have been approached by any new abbesses promising wealth and ease to young women willing to travel up to Manchester or over to Dublin.”
“Dare I hope there’s abut?”
He consumed more of his orange, and were his report not so worrisome, Rosalind would have marveled to find herself eating oranges in a sunny garden with a handsome and eligible bachelor.
“They know something,” Mr. Wentworth said. “They suspect or fear something, but these women are nothing if not shrewd. They never work alone if they can manage it, always congregating in groups where gentlemen are likely to pass. They know that if presented with a selection, a man is more likely to make a choice than if he’s given only one option. The question in his mind becomeswhich onerather thanthe club or a diversion?”
“I thought the ladies of the night worked in groups for safety,” Rosalind said. “If a woman refuses an offer, she has two or three compatriots to chase the nasty pigeon away.”
Mr. Wentworth peered at her, as if he might not have heard her aright, but he had.
Prostitution was a fact of life in London. Genteel women could ignore the reality, but they passed by it every day and every evening. Expensive brothels sat cheek by jowl with fashionable addresses, and a trip to the theater meant pretending transactions weren’t occurring across the street from where the most elegant carriages waited.
“The ladies can’t refuse many offers,” Mr. Wentworth said. “But that’s one advantage of working the street over employment at an established house. The streetwalker retains some choice of clientele and she keeps every penny of the proceeds.”
Questions crowded into Rosalind’s mind: Did the ladies ever refusehim? Did he patronize those established houses? A bleakness in his tone suggested perhaps not, and yet, Ned Wentworth was a man of means who had no attachments. Debauchery was his right and privilege.
“Are these women afraid to tell you what they know?”
He finished his orange and took out an embroidered handkerchief. “Perhaps. One learns discretion in their trade. If all they’ve heard are rumors and suspicions, they will be reluctant to say anything. I don’t believe the women I questioned have seen Miss Arbuckle or Miss Campbell.”
Rosalind finished her orange as well. “Will you make further inquiries?”
“Of course.” He passed her his handkerchief. “I will explore farther afield. If your maids were snatched from the streets of Mayfair, prudence alone suggests they’ll be employed in some other part of Town.”
Someunsavorypart of Town, where nobody knew or cared who Lady Rosalind Kinwood was, much less that she was missing her employees and worried sick about them.
“I wish I could do something,” she said, scrubbing at the sticky juice on her fingers. “I feel the same way about the cockfighting and bear baiting and badger baiting. Cruelty for sport does not become a civilized society, and if we must exploit our base natures for the sake of profit, might we at least limit our violence to pounding on each other?”
“You are an advocate of the fancy?”
“Never, but grown men have choices that lowly animals do not. Do you know how dogs are taught to tear one another limb from limb?”
“As it happens,” he said mildly, “I do, and I agree with you that the practice is barbarous. I’ll have a slice of that bread, if you don’t mind.”
He agreed with her?Agreed with her?Rosalind passed over a piece of buttered bread. “You aren’t planning to lecture me about natural urges and masculine humors and how dogs are born to fight?”
He tore the crust from his bread and stuck a piece into his mouth. Nothing with Mr. Wentworth was hurried, nothing spontaneous. If he sought to right a wrong, he’d be like the duke, relentless and methodical. If he kissed a woman, he’d be…
Well, that was neither here nor there.
“From what I’ve observed,” he said, “dogs are born to cooperate with one another. They might snarl and snap or even nip at each other, but you seldom see a single stray dog loose on London’s streets. They keep together, for warmth at night, for safety, for companionship. I’ve seen mongrels hunting rats, one dog chasing, one waiting at the mouth of the alley to snatch up the slowest rat. That is not the behavior of a species born to murder its kin.”
Where had he seen such a sight?
Amanda Tait’s laughter came again, closer this time. She truly did sound like an obstructed coach horn.
