Page 28 of Never a Duke
“Please tell Mrs. Nimitz that Ned Wentworth requests a moment of her time.” Establishments such as this one eschewed calling cards, though the butler wore an exquisitely tailored evening suit, and his dignity would have been sufficient for a ducal residence.
“Of course, Mr. Wentworth. Would you care to enjoy the refreshments in the blue salon?”
The laughter had come from the direction of the blue salon. “No, thank you.”
“The music room is unoccupied at present, sir. Perhaps you’d like to wait there.”
“The music room will do.”
The music room was elegantly kitted out, the requisite great harp standing in one corner, a pianoforte with its lid raised in another. Closer examination of the painting gracing the open lid of the piano revealed a rendering worthy of old Hieronymus Bosch in a frisky mood.
A scene of cheerful debauchery involving men, women, farm animals, and fairies harmonized curiously well with the cherubs cavorting across the room’s painted ceiling, and the half-naked goddesses depicted in the room’s statuary. The parlor’s unifying theme was gilt. Gilt on the pier glass, gilt on the molding, gilt on the picture frames, and gilt edging the piano’s fantastic art.
“It’s all of a piece, isn’t it?” said a dark-haired lady standing in the doorway. “I want to make that point subtly, that how one views the naked form and what one does with it are mostly a matter of perspective and preference. You’re looking well, Ned.”
She advanced into the room and offered Ned her gloved hand. He bowed politely, though he knew that beneath her gloves, her hands bore scars from picking oakum by the hour. Her refined speech was the result of dogged schooling by a procession of elocution instructors, and she’d scrimped to hire the same modistes preferred by the most influential hostesses in Mayfair.
Mrs. Nimitz was a creation born of hard work and determination, much as Ned himself was. He respected her, as he could not respect many of the lordlings who pranced into the Wentworth bank in search of low-interest loans or easy profits.
He could never entirely trust her, though, any more than he trusted those lordlings. “You are in quite good looks too, ma’am.” Only a few candles had been lit, the better to hide what cosmetics could not. Mrs. Nimitz was nearly ten years Ned’s senior, and in proper lighting that fact would be obvious.
“Shall we sit?” she said. “I can ring for a tray.”
“Thank you, no.” Ned did not want to sit, did not want to observe the civilities. “My purpose here won’t take long.”
The lady smiled and settled into the middle of a blue tufted sofa. “As is the case with many gentlemen who call here. The ladies actually prefer a fellow who goes about the business with some dispatch.”
Because the ladies could entertain more men per evening if their customers didn’t tarry overlong upstairs. The banker in Ned grasped the concept, while the man who’d kissed Rosalind Kinwood suppressed a shudder.
“How is our duke?” Mrs. Nimitz asked, fingering a string of pearls arranged to cascade to just above her cleavage.
“Splendid, as always,” Ned said, sorting the sheets of music stacked on the piano bench. Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven…A few of Burns’s more sentimental pieces. “His Grace is more respectable by the year.”
“Quinn Wentworth was always respectable, even in prison. Give him my regards.”
“Of course.” Ned would do no such thing, lest His Grace confide to his duchess his concerns regarding Ned’s female acquaintances. Her Grace would gently take up the cause, and Ned would be subjected to worried glances for the next three months. “You’re faring well?”
“Business is good,” Mrs. Nimitz said, running her palm over the sofa’s velvet upholstery. “I bribe the requisite upstanding members of the constabulary, and see that others are offered free services. We manage. In another year or two, I can retire to the country, a proper widow of means.”
“You’ve been saying that for five years. Why not give it up?”
Ned ambled along the mantel, which displayed a collection of porcelain figurines, some merely pretty, some lewd, all of them graceful.
Once upon a time, when a certain duke had been freed by royal pardon from a certain pestilential prison, that duke had insisted on taking with him not only Ned—his “tiger”—but also a would-be footman, and several of the imprisoned whores, his “maids.”
In truth, during Walden’s tenure at Newgate, he had paid those women to clean his accommodations—and paid them for only that service, much to their consternation. Upon his release, he’d offered the ladies domestic positions at the ducal residence. Mrs. Nimitz, in an earlier phase of her career, had been among those women.
She’d accepted the duke’s offer long enough to clean up, fill her belly, rest, and don the decent clothing provided by Her Grace, and then piked off back to the Holy Land from whence she’d been taken.
“I have my reasons for staying in business,” she said. “Good reasons, and besides, I excel at what I do. The women are happy and safe here, the customers even happier, and we mind our own business. Why do you stay at the Wentworth bank?”
Her reasons included two children, about whom Ned had never inquired. They were very likely receiving a genteel education at their mother’s expense someplace in the shires, and using any name but Nimitz.
Ned took up a wing chair at an angle to the sofa. “I stay at the Wentworth bank because I am useful there to the man who saved my life.”
Mrs. Nimitz twined a finger among the strand of pearls draped about her neck. “You weren’t scheduled to swing, Ned. You would have been sent off to New South Wales, and being a canny lad, you’d have managed well enough.”
No, he would not. He’d made his own plans in prison, and they had not included enduring months at sea being passed from one ship’s officer to another.
