Page 89 of Never a Duke
“I cried,” he said, very softly. “I cried for a good brother who’d only done what he’d had to do to keep us alive. I cried because it was my fault. I would gladly have switched places with him. I was a burden to him, and Bob never once complained. I cried, and Rosalind, it didn’t matter.Idid not matter, Bob did not matter, my father, my mother.…We simply were of no moment to anybody in a position to make a difference.”
Rosalind glanced around the common, then rose.
Ned accepted that he’d asked too much of her. It was one thing to know in theory that a man had a criminal past, it was quite another to learn that his bungling had seen his brother dead at the end of a rope. Ned stared hard at the bread, denying himself the impulse to reach for Rosalind’s hand and call her back.
He’d walked away from her, after all. Tried to, anyway. He was no better at leaving her than he’d been at picking pockets.
Rosalind came around to Ned’s side of the table and slid onto the bench beside him. “Damn them all. Damn them, damn them. You were a pair of hungry boys, no parents, no family. The Royal Navy snatched your father away, and you had nobody to take you in, nobody.…Oh, just…” She wrapped her arm around Ned’s waist and laid her head on his shoulder. “Damn them all to eternal, flaming hell.”
The sight of the bread blurred. Ned put an arm around Rosalind’s shoulders and closed his eyes. He did not know how long he sat there in the humble tavern, where lovers being too familiar was of no moment, but something inside him eased at the feel of Rosalind tucked close.
Sorrow, rage, guilt, despair…he did not have to name the burden to know that it would never again weigh on his heart so heavily.
“I grew mean after that,” he said. “Tough and determined. It helped.”
Rosalind took his hand. “Tell me the rest of it.”
Chapter Sixteen
How much heartache and injustice could one man endure? Ned’s story put Rosalind in mind of the animals tormented for sport. The dogfights, cockfights, bear baitings…Perhaps there was something fundamentally wrong with the human character, that it could ignore the suffering of children and delight in the abuse of mute beasts.
What manner of society could end a child’s life, because he sought merelyto eatin a city that claimed to be the wealthiest on earth?
Ned kissed her fingers. “The rest of it is equally ugly and not half so excusable. I grew bolder and graduated to stealing property. I had a talent for getting into and out of dwellings undetected, and I had a nose for where valuables would be stored. I began to work alone and was too adept at my trade. My competitors saw me taken into the keeping of a house of ill repute that caters to a certain clientele.”
Rosalind sorted through blunt translations. “A molly house?”
“Ladies aren’t supposed to know of such places.”
“I read Latin, Ned. I hear my brothers gossiping. Aunt Ida is not one to mince words.”
“I hope to meet your Aunt Ida one day, if you’ll still have me.”
Rosalind looked around. A pair of old sailors sat knitting in the snug, and a bag of canine bones snoozed before a cold hearth. In the corner, a gent of no particular description wearing a hat of equally unimpressive provenance nursed a pint, and at the bar, a maid wiped down tankards and hummed a tune that probably had bawdy lyrics.
“I willhaveyou, Ned Wentworth, at the next available opportunity.”
He laced his fingers with hers. “Will you, Rosalind? Will you have me? I spent one night in that molly house. I was too stupid to realize the soup would be drugged. I woke up in the same bed with an older boy. He had a pretty little speech all rehearsed, about regular meals, warm blankets, nobody the wiser, and why work like a dog only to end up in jail, when a little frolicking would result in all the security a boy ever needed?”
“Did he violate you?”
Ned pulled Rosalind close and kissed her temple. “The windows were nailed shut, so I broke the glass with my fist. Tossed my clothing and boots out before me and left that place mother-naked in the dead of winter. I have never been so frightened in all my life. Not when Bob went before the magistrate, not when I landed in Newgate, not when I was sentenced to transportation. The last thing that was mine on this earth—my very body—was to be taken from my control.”
He hadn’t put that into words before, hadn’t admitted the depth of his fear.
“This,” Rosalind said, “is why I could talk you into looking for missing women, because you were nearly forced into the flesh trade yourself.”
He took a sip of ale, though his hand shook slightly. “You did not talk me into anything. You asked, and I could not countenance the notion that you’d go poking around the stews on your own.”
Rosalind covered his hand with hers and brought his mug to her lips. “They serve good ale here. Exactly how did you end up in Newgate?”
“I was set up, of course. The same people who’d turned me over to the molly house arranged for stolen goods to be found at my lodgings. My sentence was transportation, but I well knew what that would mean for a boy on a long voyage. The whores did what they could to protect the children, but I’d heard the stories, and I wasn’t about to…I stopped eating.”
“You excelled at going without, I suspect.”
“Precisely. If the great and the good of London thought I was not worth feeding, then I would simply oblige their pious wishes that I be admitted into heaven’s benevolent light. I exercised the one right left to me, the right to abandon the hell to which I’d been consigned. I missed my family, and all I could think was that a benevolent Deity would surely allow me to see them again. If Walden hadn’t come along, looking so fierce and so lost…”
Ned offered Rosalind a bit of cheese, then finished the slice himself. “I knew the bewilderment Walden hid so well, knew the utterly paralyzing confusion of a life knocked arse over ears. I could not leave him to the tender mercies of the Newgate regulars. I decided I could always starve myself to death later.”
