Page 8 of Never a Duke
With the occasional willing woman, Ned went gratefully to bed, but as for the rest of it…
“Good night,” he said, bowing to Stephen rather than extending his hand. When a man relied on two canes, handshakes could become awkward.
“You were born for domesticity, Neddy,” Stephen said, tucking one cane under his arm and downing the last of his drink. “Jane and her legion of Valkyries will have you married by June. It’s your turn.”
No, it was not. “That reminds me,” Ned said, pausing by the private parlor’s door. “You were right, Walden. Cadwallader is rolled up. He’s trying to marry off the self-same daughter whose entertainments have been bankrupting him for the past three years. Clotilda is vain, dimwitted, and chattery. Cadwallader isn’t titled, so I don’t see it ending well.”
“He’s old money,” Walden said. “Somebody might take the bait in hopes of a title for a grandchild.”
“He’s apparently old debt,” Stephen said. “How did you come by thison dit, Neddy?”
Lady Rosalind thought to thrill me with the news.“I hear things that don’t reach titled ears.”
“I’m glad you do,” Walden said. “Cadwallader almost had me convinced to offer him a mortgage. We’ll send him on to Barclays.”
When Ned was once more alone in the cozy parlor, he took Walden’s untouched brandy to the wing chair Lord Stephen had occupied. That last little bit, about Cadwallader, had been nice. To for once know something Walden or Lord Stephen hadn’t yet learned was gratifying.
As the waiters cleared the table and Ned finished the brandy, his mind wandered back to a question Lady Rosalind had asked him: Did he want a big family?
Of course not. Families were expensive and complicated. They required worrying about and feeding and keeping track of. Children especially were prone to getting into scrapes, and life was uncertain. What foolish god had thought it a sound plan for the human young to require years to reach independence when a parent could be carried off well before the child’s need for that parent was at an end?
Besides, Ned had a family. He was a Wentworth in name and by association, and that should be enough family for anybody, certainly for gallows bait turned banker.
Ned finished the duke’s drink and left the club, though he still had much to do before he could seek his bed.
***
“Miss Arbuckle is young,” Mr. Wentworth said. “She’s attractive and…” He waved a gloved hand.
Today he wasn’t even pretending to search through the biographies. His eyes were shadowed, and he’d been five minutes late.
“She’s smart?” Rosalind said. “Hardworking? Trustworthy?”
Mr. Wentworth dipped his head to speak very softly near Rosalind’s ear. “Virginal. If the likeness is accurate, she has an air of innocence.”
“I told you,” Rosalind said, making no effort to keep her voice down. “Arbuckle is a decent girl. My father would only employ domestics of sound character, and the agencies we consult before hiring—”
Mr. Wentworth touched her forearm. The most fleeting brush, through three layers of fabric, but the shock of it, the intimacy, stilled Rosalind’s tongue.
“I do not mean to impugn anybody’s character or choice of domestics, my lady. I mean to suggest that to a certain unsavory business, a young woman with an air of innocence has particular appeal.”
Oh.Oh.Rosalind paced off between the bookshelves. “You mean she’s been taken up by an abbess?” One heard of such things, mostly in shocked whispers and bawdy jests, but it did happen. Otherwise, Rosalind herself might be permitted to cross the occasional street without her companion to her right and a muscular footman to her left and three paces back.
“I’ve asked questions,” Mr. Wentworth said, following Rosalind deeper into the biographies, “but the answers will take some time, and every day the likelihood of finding her diminishes. She’d be traded up to York or the Midlands, possibly as far as Edinburgh or Dublin.”
“Traded, like, like a horse or a pair of pistols?”
He nodded once, and today his gaze was all business.
“That’s awful.” That Ned Wentworth would know of such goings-on, and know how to investigate them, was also awful…and fascinating. “I’ve brought you a sketch of Arbuckle’s predecessor.” Rosalind withdrew the folded paper from her reticule. “If Arbuckle has an air of youthful innocence, Campbell is positively elfin. I doubt she is fifteen years old. Young enough that her disappearance could be attributed to an unsteady temperament.”
Mr. Wentworth took the sketch, glanced at it, and tucked it into a coat pocket. “The next maid you hire must be plain and older, please.”
“The less experience they have, the less they cost,” Rosalind said. “And I prefer a lady’s maid with some wit and mischief to her, provided she doesn’t flaunt her wares at my brothers.”
Rosalind had paced to the end of a row, right into a dead end. In the close confines of the shelves, Mr. Wentworth’s height was more apparent, as was the immaculate care he took with his turnout.
George and Lindhurst could learn from his example. Rosalind’s brothers fussed at great length about how their cravat pins rested amid the linen and lace of their neckcloths, but their gloves were often less than pristine, and they tended to smell of horse or tobacco, not of a sunny glade in an old, quiet forest.
