Page 51 of Never a Duke
The white feather stilled. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Ned’s judgment about investment schemes is nearly as…itisas good as my own, but in a different way. He sees long-term potential, and he knows how to build something sturdy over time from small parts. I know how to seize the larger market opportunities.”
“And for you, investing has become a sort of game. If you make a few wrong turns, the result is that you are less fabulously wealthy. Like Stephen with a new mechanical challenge, you will move along to another project and chalk up any failures to experience. You might be more cautious, but you will not be ashamed as a result of a blunder.”
Walden would never squirm, but he did shift back on his commercial throne and cross an ankle over a knee. “Ned is not ashamed. He works hard here, and both Jane and I are proud of him. He knows that.”
Ned’s gig turned at the end of the street and was lost to sight.
“Ned works hard,” Robert said, “but does heplay? Does he get down on all fours in the nursery and roar like a bear? Does he have sweet little jokes with an adoring spouse who teases him about his manly vanities? Does he sit around the dinner table with siblings telling fond stories of youthful pranks gone awry? Is he on a cricket team that spends more time drinking and singing than at the green? When was the last time you heard Ned Wentworth laugh?”
“Neither you nor I had those amenities at his age, and we managed.”
“You’ve become a grouchy old man if that’s all you have to contribute to the discussion.” Robert hadnotmanaged. Most of the time, he’d clung to sanity by the slender reeds of hope and determination. He suspected that for Walden, those slender reeds had been the ability to make money and to provide for his siblings.
“Then I am a grouchy old man,” Walden said, “because I do not see how neglecting his duties at the bank to lark about with Woodruff’s daughter will result in Ned’s lasting happiness. Woodruff has paraded Lady Rosalind before every encroaching mushroom and presuming cit to dangle after a titled connection. Ned won’t fare well with a man like that for a father-in-law.”
“In-laws,” Robert replied, “are a cross we all have to bear. Ned needs a partner and playmate, a cohort in mischief, somebody who accepts him for all of who he is, not just the parts of him that fit the Wentworth profile. Have you heard him play the fiddle?”
Walden wrinkled the ducal beak. “I have not. He used to challenge Stephen to pall-mall. The point, I believe, was simply to get Stephen out of doors, and to create an occasion for foul language.”
“You are an occasion for foul language, my dear duke. Ned needs toplay. He needs to be himself, not simply the young fellow the Wentworths are so proud of. He needs…I cannot explain it to you, but I can tell you, a man who does not laugh with genuine merriment is not a well man. Your daughters love you, Walden, in large part because you saw the importance of making them laugh early and often.”
Walden’s brows knit as if he were working on a very complex investment scheme. “I am their papa. Silliness in the nursery goes with the job.”
“Job. Right. Of course. Only you, Walden…”
Walden was regarding him with genuine puzzlement, so Robert tried again, this time with a story, for even small children grasped the essence of a good story.
“When I was at the asylum, the only laughter I heard was one of the residents in a fit of hysteria. Maniacal laughter, desperately unhinged misery turned inside out. Then one day, I came upon the new chambermaid, laughing at a cat that had taken up chasing its tail. The cat careened around the corridor, and the maid was bent over with genuine mirth. When she faced me, her smile was heaven’s light manifest in human features. That smile was all that was good and holy about sanity itself.
“Ned can build all the thriving little businesses he pleases,” Robert went on, “but if his future is to rest on a sound foundation, he must recover the courage to reach for joy. Let him frolic with Lady Rosalind, let him be truant from your damned ledgers, let him have a life beyond your aspirations for him. God knows, if you and I had limited ourselves to the paternal aspirations inflicted on us, we’d both be dead and disgraced.”
“Not fair, Rothhaven.”
“But true.”
Robert let a silence bloom, and though Walden used silence well, Robert considered a capacity for quiet one of his greatest gifts.
“Ned was not doing well,” Walden said, “not in Newgate, and not when he was taken up, if the warden is to be believed. I had the sense Ned allowed himself to be arrested. They let him go the first time, when they hanged his brother, but after his brother died, he lost heart for the struggle to survive, and then…”
Robert knew how that went, when the question became how to make surrender complete, rather than how to fight on.
“Then?”
“I don’t know, but it was bad. I never asked for the details, and I hope Ned has forgotten them.”
“He will never forget those early experiences, Walden.”
“But the nightmares can become less frequent,” Walden said softly, running a finger around the inside of his collar, “and the panics easier to hide. Then you realize one daythat you haven’t panicked since before the last baby was born, and you know you’re through the worst of it.”
For Robert, the nightmares were of never coming home, of being banished to the moors for the rest of his life, of darkness without end. Then he’d waken, feel Constance in the bed beside him, and focus on the sound of her breathing. On the bad nights, he fell back to sleep clutching her hand, her arms around him, but the bad nights were fewer and fewer.
“Ned has come a long way,” Robert said. “But he deserves what you have with Jane, and what I have with Constance. If Lady Rosalind isn’t his answer, then she’s a step in the direction of an answer.”
Walden rose and perched a hip against the desk. He was the picture of aristocratic self-possession, but for the worry in his eyes.
“Jane agrees with you.” A grudging admission. “She says I’m not to meddle. She says her own father was a horror, my father was worse than a horror, and I am not to meddle.”
“We are dukes,” Robert said. “We do not meddle. I assume you have, though, had Woodruff’s finances thoroughly investigated?”
