Page 34 of Never a Duke
Rosalind nodded. “His French was atrocious, and his lovemaking worse than that. All the while he was about his pleasures, I was reading the titles on the bookshelf behind him, choosing which volume I’d seize upon next. He was found in a compromising situation with another girl. She implicated me, and my literary aspirations were disappointed.”
Mr. Wentworth sat forward enough to take Rosalind’s hands. “Listen to me, my lady. I don’t care if you bore the curate and his brother six sons apiece. Just because the Wentworths have schemed to provide us some privacy doesn’t mean…”
“Doesn’t mean you want that privacy?” Well, blast and perdition. Heat flooded Rosalind’s cheeks, and she held her tongue lest the moment provoke her to stammering.
“What I want shocks me,” he said, letting go of Rosalind’s hands. “And before you demand further explanations, you need to know that I’ve yet to speak with parties whose business puts them in frequent contact with naval officers and merchant captains.”
Now of all times, Rosalind could not summon the rational capabilities she usually wielded with such ease. She had confessed her greatest transgressions to Mr. Wentworth, and could not tell if he was shocked, amused, impressed, or bored.
“You refer to another madam?” she asked.
“Her nom de guerre is Mrs. Dora Hepplewhite, though her given name is Tryphena, and her place of business is not far from the Pool. If somebody has been smuggling women out of London, she might know, but I suspect she’s been avoiding me.”
“Why would you suspect that?” And why would any woman avoid Ned Wentworth?
“I call upon her from time to time, and yet, she has twice not been home to me, as it were. That is unprecedented in all the years of our acquaintance.”
“And thus your suspicion is reinforced that something dangerous is afoot.” Rosalind did not allow herself to wonderwhyNed Wentworth would have a long-standing relationship with a madam, because the answer was obvious.Lucky Mrs. Hepplewhite.
Mr. Wentworth switched seats. “It’s not what you think.”
“None of my business, Mr. Wentworth.”
“I want it to be your business, and that…” He scrubbed a gloved hand over his face. “My father was an exquisitely skilled tailor, as was his brother. They could not tolerate each other as business partners, though they were devoted siblings. Uncle Amos set up shop in Portsmouth, while Papa kept to London. Papa was off in Portsmouth visiting Uncle Amos when the press gang took him up.”
“Your father was impressed?” The practice had been so unpopular, the navy had abandoned it several years past. Then too, conditions were so awful on the merchantmen that a berth on a naval vessel was considered a step up by most sailors. “Why take a tailor out to sea?”
“The navy suffered a shortage of sailmakers, according to Amos, and would not hear of a wife and children in London needing Papa’s support. One day he was a free man enjoying a pint with his brother, a week later he was at sea. I keep in touch with Mrs. Hepplewhite in hopes that I might hear something of the ship he sailed on.”
“How long ago was this?”
The horses clip-clopped along, and bells tolled in the distance. “I don’t know. Uncle Amos expired shortly thereafter. My mother was in poor health and could not manage the shop without Papa. I wasat largefor a time. I’m not sure how long, because there are no calendars on the street. What does a date matter or a day of the week when all a boy wants to know is where his next meal will come from?”
Mr. Wentworth spoke quietly, but Rosalind could hear the bewildered echo of that small boy in his voice.
“You don’t know how old you were when your father was impressed?”
“I was probably eight. I could read a bit, though I was better at ciphering. I had been working in Papa’s shop for some years by then. I might have been nine, and my brother was several years older than me. I was small for my age. We managed for a time, thanks to my brother, but my memories have gaps. I will turn a corner in some neighborhood I don’t recognize and think,I have been here before…but have no recollection of when. Matters, which were dire to begin with, deteriorated apace after my brother’s demise.”
The brother who had died in his thirteenth year.
Hence, the badgers at the bank. Hence the utter bleakness of Mr. Wentworth’s profile. “You’ve been searching for your father all this time?”
“Not for him. He would have come home to us if he could. But I want to know…Ships change names, they sink, they change flags, and get dry-docked. I knew what vessel he’d sailed on. I traced it to South America, from thence to the Sandwich Islands. Several years later it popped up in the Antipodes under a different name and a different captain, then disappeared again, though there’s no record of scuttling or capture.”
Rosalind disliked her father. The earl was too full of his own consequence, entirely lacking in affection for his only daughter, and his politics were the usual self-serving Tory bloviations masquerading as patriotism.
But he wasthere, a bulwark against many perils, a reliable constant and some check on Lindhurst’s stupidities. To lose Papa would be…
“I am sorry,” Rosalind said. “I am sorry for your losses, which have been many and tragic. What does the navy say happened to him?”
“Papa stopped drawing pay after three extended voyages, and none of those voyages would have brought him back to London. They lost track of him in Ceylon.”
While his son, who could not state his own age reliably, had never forgotten him. “And now Mrs. Hepplewhite is trying to lose track of you?”
“Seems that way, and if I have consistently paid any party to gather intelligence for me, it is she.”
Another silence bloomed, thoughtful, a little sad, but not uncomfortable. Rosalind marveled to think that she and Mr. Wentworth had confided in each other. The experience was novel and sweet, a little like a stolen kiss but more substantial.
