Page 76 of Never a Duke
Ned was even moving differently, prowling across the carpet in a loose-limbed gait that bore little resemblance to the straight-backed posture of a gentleman in polite company.
“Where exactly did you go,” Walden asked, “and why did you go there?”
“I might well have found Lady Rosalind’s missing maids.” Ned opened the sideboard cabinet, extracted a bottle of the best brandy Walden kept on hand, and poured himself a generous portion. “You joining me?”
Ned would not normally take strong spirits before dark, much less help himself to Walden’s finest brandy. He would not be seen on the bank premises in less than pristine turnout, and he would not serve himself first.
Something seriously untoward was afoot. “I believe I shall.”
Ned poured Walden two fingers and passed him the glass. “Lord Woodruff all but summoned the watch on me.”
And what was more seriously untoward than a thwarted swain? “Does his lordship yet draw breath?”
Ned’s lips quirked. “For now. He could bastille me three times a day and I wouldn’t much care, but he threatened to send Lady Rosalind back to the shires if I pressed my suit.”
A mere refusal would not have Ned swilling brandy and roaming London’s backstreets by the hour. “Was that bombast?”
Ned took another considering sip of his drink, the movement casual and curiously elegant. “No, it was not. Woodruff has banished her previously for bad reasons and no reason at all. Because she stuttered, because she stopped stuttering, because she grieved, because she mastered her grief. When he allows her in Town, she’s expected to stand up with every cit or nabob her papa owes money to. When she behaves badly—such as when she expresses an original thought, for example—she’s sent off to her widowed auntie in disgrace, like a twelve-year-old caught smoking her papa’s cigars.”
Walden considered that litany, and considered how Ned, who’d lost his family early in life, would react to a father treating his daughter so cavalierly.
“What if he does banish her? You simply steal the lady away, take her off to Gretna Green, and live happily ever after.” Jane would approve of that course, under the circumstances.
Ned appropriated the chair behind Walden’s desk. “And what will people think, Your Grace? First, that Lady Rosalind anticipated her vows with me and must marry me in haste. Second, that she’s taken leave of her senses because Woodruff will be within his rights to keep her settlements if she marries without his approval.”
“Not necessarily. If she’s of age, the portion that comes to her through her mother’s settlements isn’t subject to Woodruff’s approval.”
“She’s of age,” Ned said, though this seemed to bring him no comfort. “And I can provide for her handsomely enough, but the gossips won’t recollect that.”
Walden took one of the chairs opposite the desk, an unusual perspective. “I doubt Lady Rosalind cares what the gossips think.” Nor did Ned, usually.
“She cares,” Ned said, setting his drink in the center of the blotter. “She has to care. Her brothers have yet to marry, and the scandal of her running off with me would affect Lord Lindhurst’s situation especially.”
Walden snorted. “Thefact that Lindhurst’s father is nearly rolled up will have a much greater impact on his lordship’s marital prospects.”
“He’s what?”
“Woodruff disdains to sully his hands with trade, even to the extent of eschewing mercantile investments. He’s sinking fast, and his acres are overrun with sheep in the usual desperate fashion.”
“That explains the tallow,” Ned muttered. “How long does he have?”
“He might be able to bluff his way through another Season or two, but I feel as if I’m watching two carriages careen toward each other from opposite directions on a road that crests a hill. The coachies can’t see each other, and a spectacular crash looms ahead for both.”
“Who’s in the other carriage?”
“The lovely Clotilda Cadwallader, her mama, three younger sisters, and a boot full of unpaid bills. Cadwallader was in here earlier today bleating to Stephen about an expected improvement in his daughter’s circumstances, and the family’s prospects magically coming right as a result of her good fortune.”
Ned held his glass up to the sunlight slanting through the window. “It can work like that when a cit’s daughter marries into a titled family. The cit is eventually accepted into the better clubs, the titled family gains a share in viable businesses, the younger sisters get all the right introductions.”
“It can work like that, given enough time and money. Cadwallader and Woodruff have neither. Which idiot declared that putting people in hard chairs discouraged them from taking too long to state their business?”
“Some cork-brained duke or other. Woodruff might have tossed me out because he knows Rosalind will have to marry money.”
“Youaremoney,” Walden said, finding it curious that Ned would need to be reminded of that. “Compared to the average younger son, you reek of money. You could be wealthier still, but you lack for greediness.”
“A serious shortcoming, I know.”
Ned looked good in the big chair behind the big desk. He looked at home, confident, competent. He was managing the bank, but he was also…in chargeof the bank, in a manner Walden hadn’t quite admitted to himself. Walden managed the large-scale investing, and a directors’ committee made the bigger loan decisions, but Ned managedeverything. The people, the building, the policies, the day-to-day dramas.
