Page 4 of Never a Duke
He snapped the leash back onto Hercules’s collar.
“Thank you, Mr. Wentworth. Thank you so very much.”
Ned tipped his hat and sauntered on his way, though some dim back corner of his heart put those words of thanks in a special hiding place, where they would be well guarded and much treasured.
***
The problem with Ned Wentworth was his eyes.
Rosalind came to that conclusion as she pretended to browse a biography of a long-dead monarch. She had come to the bookstore early, the better to ensure that her companion, Mrs. Amelia Barnstable, was thoroughly engrossed in the travelogues two floors above the biographies.
Ned Wentworth dressed with a gentleman’s exquisite sense of fashion, and he spoke and comported himself with a gentleman’s faultless manners.
But his eyes did not gaze out upon the world with a gentleman’s condescending detachment. Rosalind’s brothers, by contrast, had learned by the age of eight how to glance, peruse, peer, and otherwise take only a casual visual inventory of life, and then to pretend that nothing very interesting or important graced the scene.
Certainly nothing as interesting or important as her brothers themselves.
Ned Wentworthlookedand hesaw. His visual appraisals were frank and thorough, as if everything before him, from Rosalind’s reticule, to a great panting behemoth of a dog, to a swan gliding across the Serpentine’s placid surface, were so many entries in a ledger that wanted tallying.
His eyes were a soft, mink brown, his hair the same color as Rosalind’s. On him the hue was sable, of a piece with his watchful eyes and sober gentleman’s attire. On her the color was a lamentable brown, according to Aunt Ida. He was on the tall side, but not a towering specimen like the Duke of Walden, and not a fashionable dandy like the duke’s younger brother.
Ned Wentworth’s eyes said he’d somehow held out against domestication, unlike his adopted family, who had famously come from lowly origins to occupy a very high station. He prowled through life with a wild creature’s confidence and vigilance, even as he partnered wellborn ladies through quadrilles and met their papas for meals in the clubs.
“She was quite the schemer, wasn’t she?”
Rosalind turned to behold those serious brown eyes gazing at her. Up close, Ned Wentworth was a sartorial tribute to understated elegance. His attire had no flourishes—no flashy cravat pin, no excessive lace, no jewels in the handle of his walking stick.
His scent was similarly subtle, a hint of green meadows, a whisper of honeysuckle. Rosalind hadn’t heard his approach, but she’d be able to identify him by scent in pitch darkness.
“Queen Elizabeth was devious,” Rosalind replied, “but she died a peaceful death after nearly achieving her three-score and ten. We must account her a successful schemer.”
“Are you a successful schemer, my lady?”
Rosalind closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. “Do you attempt to flirt with me, Mr. Wentworth?”
The biographies were unpopular, hence the conversation was not overheard. Had Ned Wentworth known that would be the case?
“If I were attempting to flirt with you, you’d likely cosh me over the head with yonder tome. Tell me about Arbuckle.”
Rosalind withdrew a folded sketch from her reticule. “A likeness. I am no portraitist, but Francine Arbuckle was willing to serve as my model on many occasions. She has no family in London, and the last I saw of her, my companion had sent her to retrieve a pair of dancing slippers from a shop near Piccadilly.”
“Specifics, please. What shop?”
Rosalind endured an interrogation, and Mr. Wentworth’s methodical inquiries helped her sort recollection from conjecture.
“I told you I tried to talk to the crossing sweepers,” she said, when she’d recounted all she could remember regarding Arbuckle’s disappearance. “They acted as if conversing with me would turn them to stone.”
“They might have had trouble comprehending your words, my lady. They know their Cockney and cant, and can recite you bawdy poems without number, but drawing room elocution eludes them.”
“It eluded me for years as well. I developed a stammer after my mother’s death. My governess was horrified.” Rosalind was horrified. She never alluded to her stammer, while her brothers never let her forget it.
Mr. Wentworth frowned. “You stuttered?”
“For years. My brothers used to tease me unmercifully. Then my father hired a Welshwoman as my drawing master, and she taught me to think of speaking asrecitativo. I do not stammer when I sing, and if I can hear a melody…” Rosalind fell silent, for she was prattling.
That her usual self-possession had deserted her was Ned Wentworth’s fault, because after he posed a question, helistenedto the lady’s answer, and the whole time, he gazed at her as if her words mattered.
Very bad of him. “This isn’t helping us to find Arbuckle,” Rosalind said.
