“You sound like Jane.”
“I’m nearly quoting her on the subject of Ned and regular bathing, though I came up with the part about the tragedy myself. Jane said to ask you if I could help with the estate properties, because I have a fine head for numbers. Duncan seconded the motion, then Constance said if you hand me an estate to put to rights, she wants one too. Althea was at the glovemaker’s at the time, or she would have demanded a property as well.”
This was Jane being helpful. Also meddlesome as hell.
Another horseman rode toward them. A largish fellow on a largish bay, no white on the horse anywhere.
“I’ll review the stewards’ reports on the properties when I return from the bank this evening, but it’s not bank business that has occupied me so much over the past two weeks.”
Quinn’s groom—who did carry a gun, a knife, and a pocketful of sand—closed the distance between his horse and Quinn’s.
“That’s Elsmore,” Stephen said.
The Duke of Elsmore sat on the board of directors for the Dorset and Becker Savings and Trust. The bank was ancient, and Elsmore’s family had been involved at a genteel distance since its inception. From what Quinn had seen, the Dorset and Becker was an honest organization, though it catered to wealthy gentry and titles from the northern shires, and its investments were uniformly unimaginative.
Elsmore met Quinn’s gaze when the horses were a good twenty yards apart.
“Look bored,” Quinn muttered, motioning the groom to hang back. “Say nothing.”
Stephen snorted. “As Your Grace wishes.”
Elsmore brought his horse to a halt a few feet up the path. “Wentworth, good day. Perhaps you’d introduce me to your companion?”
Elsmore was several years younger than Quinn, had dark hair, and preferred severe attire to the gold buttons and lacy finery some of his class favored. At the rare gatherings where their paths had crossed, Quinn had sensed only polite curiosity from Elsmore rather than the lurid interest most hid so poorly.
“Your Grace, good morning. May I make known to you my brother, Lord Stephen Wentworth. Stephen, I present to you Wrexham, Duke of Elsmore.”
Lord Stephen Wentworth. That merited an upward twitch of Elsmore’s eyebrow.
Dodson had informed Quinn that the royal hand had been put to the appropriate warrants. Three days ago, Quinn had observed the bare minimum of ritual with the Lord Chancellor, and the Wentworth siblings now sported courtesy titles.
With this introduction to Elsmore, all of polite society would soon hear that news.
“Congratulations are in order,” Elsmore said, his smile surprisingly fierce. “One hears rumors. A ducal title?”
“Yes.”
Silence fell. Quinn’s horse snatched at the reins. Ruddy beast had no manners, but he was fast and fearless.
“Damned George probably saddled you with a load of debt,” Elsmore said, simply an observation from a commercially astute peer. “My condolences must accompany my congratulations, but you’ll sort it out. One hears rumors of a different sort, however.”
You’ll sort it out. From a duke, much less a director at a rival establishment, that was tantamount to sponsoring Quinn for vouchers at Almack’s. Doubtless, Elsmore expected something in return.
“Lord Stephen is in my confidence in every regard,” Quinn replied, and Stephen, who apparently aspired to reach his eighteenth birthday, did not fall off his horse overcome with mirth.
“One hears a certain viscount is considering moving his funds,” Elsmore said, gaze upon the greenery overhead.
Was this a warning, a confidence, an inchoate request for a favor, or…? Ah. Detwiler. A request for help making a decision, then, though a banker never, ever violated client confidentiality.
“Some viscounts can move their assets about in a thimble,” Quinn said, “while their debts would require a wheelbarrow.”
Elsmore appeared fascinated by the surrounding maples. “A wheelbarrow?”
He’d never struck Quinn as slow before. “A bloody big muck cart.”
“With a cloud of flies buzzing over it,” Stephen added, “that you can hear from halfway up the street.”
Accurate, given that Detwiler’s finances were under discussion, though Stephen couldn’t know that.
“I see.” Elsmore gathered up his reins. “Such a pity when that’s the case. Lovely morning, isn’t it?”
“The best London has to offer,” Quinn replied.
Elsmore touched his hat brim. “Your Grace, Lord Stephen, always a pleasure to pass the time in beautiful surrounds. I’ll wish you good day.”
He sent his horse at a walk between Quinn’s and Stephen’s mounts, his air of self-possession as subtle and bright as the sunbeams lancing down through the trees.
The bay’s hoofbeats faded, while Quinn tried to make sense of the encounter.
“What the hell was that about?” Stephen asked.
“The Duke of Walden has made his come-out.” Which Jane had doubtless known would happen on such an excursion.
“But that business with the muck carts and viscounts?”
“A test, and I passed, no thanks to your thespian capabilities.” Elsmore would have a quiet word with his bankers, and they’d advise Detwiler to keep his funds with Quinn for the sake of investment continuity or some such fiction. Detwiler’s financial muck cart would remain parked in its present location amid Quinn’s accounts.
A courtesy done between banking establishments, one that coincided with Detwiler’s best interests, or Quinn would not have even hinted to Elsmore of the viscount’s true situation.
“When will you let me start at the bank in earnest?” Stephen asked, nudging his horse forward on the path. “I’m good with numbers, and I’m entirely in Your Grace’s confidence. I can also keep an eye on you for Jane’s sake.”
Quinn’s gelding kept pace with Stephen’s mount. “You’re entirely a pest.” A loyal pest with quick wits, also Quinn’s only brother. “Robert Pike’s body was not in the grave where it was purportedly buried.”
Stephen stared at his horse’s mane while a squirrel started a racket overhead. “That’s good.”
“And it’s bad. The poor sod in that coffin had his hair dyed dark to match Pike’s, and he might have resembled Pike somewhat in life, but he wasn’t Pike.”
“You can tell his hair was dyed?”
“He was doubtless seriously ill, and chosen for his resemblance to Pike. His hair was dyed some time before he died. For however much longer he lived, his hair grew and nobody thought to touch him up in death.”
“I wish you didn’t know so much about dead people.”
“I know about staying alive, I hope. His skull bore no sign of injury, though the physician’s report said Pike’s death was precipitated by a mortal blow to the head.”
Abetted by exposure to a cold March night, lack of medical treatment, and six pages of nearly illegible lies, deceptions, and obfuscations by the physician, who was not regularly employed in the capacity of coroner. The author of the report hadn’t testified at the trial, but rather, a coroner who’d read that report had mumbled and muttered under oath in his place.
Quinn had brought a retired physician with him to examine the deceased, though anybody could see the poor blighter’s head hadn’t been bashed in.
“You planning to have a chat with the coroner who wrote that affidavit?” Stephen asked.
“He’s on indefinite holiday in a location his former housekeeper could not recall—somewhere far, far away.”
“That’s bad.”
“Pike hailed from York, and his family still bides there. I’ll be traveling north at the end of the week—on business, as far as Jane is concerned.”
The Countess of Tipton hailed from York, as did her in-laws. Quinn had pushed that fact to the very edge of his awareness, where it refused to stay.
Stephen brushed a glance in Quinn’s direction, presaging one of the lad’s rare attempts at delicacy. “J
ane won’t like you disappearing onto the Great North Road even on business. She’ll expect you to take an army of nannies, all of whom will tattle on you without a qualm.”
“I know.” And that was bad too.
Chapter Fourteen
Wellington must have felt this frustrated taking years to advance across Spain. Jane’s only ally in her efforts to create a peer’s household under the Wentworth roof was Susie—Susan, rather—who had been in service long enough to know a lax housekeeper when she saw one, and a lax butler, and a pair of footmen whose discretion belowstairs was sadly wanting.
The maids made a rioting mob look decorous by comparison, to the point that Penny had pronounced them less civilized than streetwalkers.
“They want to do better,” Susan said, “but they haven’t anyone to show them how to go on.”
“The house is reasonably clean,” Jane replied, toeing around on the carpet beneath the desk in search of her house mules. “The meals arrive to the table hot, the fires are kept lit and the hearths swept.” But oiling the gears for Stephen’s lift took precedence over blacking andirons, because Stephen hated when his use of the device made noise.
Dusting Althea’s harps—she had four—was more important than cleaning the windows, and God forbid that Constance’s cats should be occasionally groomed, the better to minimize the hair they left on every upholstered surface.
Worse, both felines roamed the house freely, and had graced one corner of the formal parlor with a decided odor of courting tomcat. Jane could detect that smell from the corridor, though Susan assured her the stink wasn’t “that bad.”
As if any stink was acceptable in a ducal domicile. The house was a monument to minimal efforts applied with minimal supervision, and Jane’s entire day had been spent listing the work to be done in each room. Her usual habit of counting to three when in need of patience had become a slow count to ten.
Down in the foyer, the front door clicked open.
“The hearths are swept,” Susan said, “but half the time, nobody’s at the front door. The menus never vary, the staff bickers, and in the servants’ hall they tipple gin like vicars swilling China black.”
Masculine voices drifted up from below. Quinn and Duncan, and at an earlier hour than usual. Quinn had missed dinner—he usually missed dinner—and Stephen and Constance had started a row at the table over the Irish question. Duncan had tried to intervene—Duncan was nothing if not brave—and they’d both turned their cannon on him. Jane had pitched her table napkin at Stephen’s head and prompted a ceasefire on the strength of the combatants’ sheer surprise.
They’d stopped bickering, though Jane had vowed to herself not to resort to such an undignified tactic again, not that any strategy would work twice in succession with the Wentworth siblings.
“If you’d have the kitchen send up trays, please,” Jane said. “Beef sandwiches and apple tarts.”
“And ginger biscuits,” Susan said, pouring a scoop of coal onto the hearth. “Aye, Your Grace. Your slippers are under the bedroom desk.”
The bedroom desk, which was kept locked, just like the desk in the parlor was kept locked. Jane hadn’t purposely gone looking for the keys, but she’d found them when she’d replaced the stale sachets hanging from the bedposts.
She’d not used those keys—yet. Susan took her leave, while Jane retrieved her slippers. It wouldn’t do to meet her husband in bare feet.
Or would it?
Quinn let himself into the sitting room and stopped near the door. “You should be in bed, Jane.”
“I took a nap this afternoon.” Already, she was tempted by the Wentworth habit of dissembling, and that was unacceptable. She had promised Quinn honesty and expected the same in return.
He speared her with a glower. “You lay down. You never rest for long.”
That Quinn saw through her half-truths was comforting, in a Wentworth sort of way. “I do the best I can. If you’d unhook me, I’ll make another attempt at sleep once I’ve seen you fed.”
He remained by the door, looking tired and beautiful. Jane did not go to him, because she’d tried that. Tried being his valet, tried being his companion at a late-night dinner, tried waiting for him to make any husbandly overture at all. When pressed into her company as an escort, he was polite but clearly bored.
Their marriage was much too young for boredom.
He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it over the chair behind the desk. “I passed Susan on the stair. She should have assisted you into your nightclothes. You must be firm with the staff, Jane. They won’t know their duties unless you make your needs clear.”
One…two…three. “Be firm with the staff,” Jane said, taking Quinn’s jacket into the bedroom and hanging it in the wardrobe. “Which staff would that be, for they adhere to no schedule I can fathom, except the bully boys you call running footmen. That lot is always ready to attend you, God be thanked.”
Quinn squatted to examine the mechanism of the bedroom door latch. “Have you quarreled with my sisters?”
Jane closed the door to the wardrobe with a loud snick. “I’m quarreling with you, Quinn Wentworth. My husband. The man with whom I spoke vows. The person who will parent my firstborn with me.”
He rose and his gaze went flat, even taking on a hint of menace. “We can refine on that impossibility later. What is the nature of your present complaint, madam?”
“Stop it,” Jane retorted. “Don’t give me that Yorkshire growl, as if you’d tear me to pieces when I know you feed wild birds, marry stray widows, and work yourself half to death for your family. It won’t wash, Quinn. You can intimidate every rolled-up title in Mayfair with that performance, but I know better.”
A swift knock sounded on the door and Quinn startled.
“Food,” Jane said. “Lest you snack on the bones of your contrary wife.” She brushed past him, intent on going to the door.
He caught her by the wrist, his grip firm without hurting. “The performance is the civilized banker, the considerate husband. The real man isn’t somebody you’d care to meet.”
“How would you know? You keep him hidden from even yourself.” She tugged free and opened the parlor door.
Ivor and Kristoff brought in trays, set them down on the low table, and withdrew on wordless bows. They were learning. Quinn would learn too.
He took a seat on the sofa. “I see two trays. Will you join me, or have you slacked your hunger by taking several bites from my backside?”
“I like your backside,” Jane said, settling beside him. Sitting these days was an act of faith, a matter of descending to the last point where balance and strength controlled, and then casting off onto the cushions, perhaps never to rise.
Quinn paused with a sandwich halfway to his mouth. “You like my backside.” The menace in his gaze was revealed for what it truly was: caution.
“You’re quite muscular. One appreciates a well-made husband. The kitchen forgot the perishing mustard.”
He took a bite. “This is a mortal sin?”
“The sin is venal, but compound it by a hundred, and it becomes another day in the Duke of Walden’s town abode. Twice I have told the kitchen that you prefer mustard on your beef sandwiches. Three times, they have neglected to heed my guidance. In any proper household, somebody would be severely reprimanded for repeatedly ignoring an employer’s preferences.”
He opened his sandwich, which bore not a dash of mustard, then put the slices of bread together again. “I’ll have a word with Althea.”
The ginger biscuit Jane had been holding crumpled to bits before she could count to three.
“You will not have a word with Althea. Althea has ceded the domestic field to me, and properly so. She has discovered, ten years later than most females do, that attiring herself in flattering styles is enjoyable. She has closeted herself with her harps by the hour, she has read an entire Radcliffe novel and pronounced it ridiculous.”
Finally, Jane had his attention. “Althea read a nove
l? Next you’ll tell me Constance and Duncan have taken up pall-mall.”
“We all played a round the day before yesterday, which is simply a normal family activity on a fine afternoon. In a duke’s household, for the staff to forget the mustard is not normal. For the housekeeper to carry a flask of gin is not normal. For your brother to offer to teach me to shoot a pistol is not normal at all.”
Jane swept the crumbs off her front—she would soon lose a lap altogether—and tried to rise, but the sofa was low and the baby was growing, and nothing, nothing, was going right about the whole dratted day.
The whole dratted marriage.
Quinn’s reply to her diatribe was to pluck her up in his arms and carry her into the bedroom.
“Stephen needs to feel competent and safe,” Quinn said, settling with Jane into the reading chair. “He taught himself to shoot and he’s quite good at it. You’d be doing me a kindness if you’d let him show you around a lady’s pistol. Constance and Althea are proficient with knives.”
Jane was too tired to take umbrage at Quinn’s high-handedness and too happy to be in his arms. He seldom touched her unless she made the first overture.
“Stephen beat us all at pall-mall. He stood to take his shots, which clearly pained him, but his accuracy was deadly. I don’t want to learn to use a gun, Quinn. Guns kill people. Better to have a firm knowledge of reason and civility than a passing acquaintance with weapons.”
His embrace grew more snug. “Guns can kill bad people. I need for you to be safe, Jane.”
Not exactly a stirring declaration, but Quinn meant well. “If you arm me—and I’m not saying I’ll allow that—my first victims will be your domestics. That they forget mustard means they forget to whom they owe their loyalty.”
“You’re upset about mustard?”
“Yes.” Though now that Quinn was sharing a chair with her, Jane could be more honest. “And no. Are you trying to forget you’re married? The midwife was very clear that normal marital activity will present no risk to the baby and is even good for me. When will we consummate our vows, Quinn, or are all your long hours at the bank about some problem you are trying to keep from my notice?”
My One and Only Duke--Includes a bonus novella Page 15