Page 22 of My One and Only Duke
The rope was tightened, the knot pressing against Quinn’s jaw and brushing his ear.
Being married to Jane had been odd and sweet. Quinn’s siblings and Joshua would manage—they’d none of them ever forget the lessons learned in York—but Quinn worried about his bride.
The guards stepped back. A hush fell, the morning air fresh and still. Quinn wasn’t ashamed to have been outsmarted—bad luck befell everybody sooner or later—but he was furious that the author of his misfortune would not be held accountable.
For the first time in decades something like a prayer formed in Quinn’s mind. See my enemy brought as low I’ve been brought. Take care of my family, and take care of Jane and the child.
A thump sounded, and then the world fell away from Quinn’s feet. He could not breathe, could not stop fighting to draw breath. His chest exploded in pain, and the white of his hood faded to an awful, airless black.
Chapter Seven
The clock ticked relentlessly in the quiet of the morning room. Althea stitched, Constance stared at a treatise on the symbolic use of light in oil portraits, and Stephen went mad.
“He’s gone by now,” Stephen said.
Over at the door, Ivor flinched.
“Joshua will bring us word,” Althea said.
Joshua would bring them Quinn’s body. Murderers were turned over to the doctors for anatomical studies. Stephen knew exactly what that meant, despite the general unwillingness of his siblings to tell him anything useful. A mere manslaughterer’s remains were returned to the family for a proper burial.
“Thus endeth the short and merry tale of Quinton Wentworth,” Stephen said. “From footman to felon, by way of Mayfair’s finest neighborhoods.”
Constance exchanged a look with Althea.
“That’s enough, Stephen,” Althea said, but without the usual whipcrack tone she used on him.
“Quinn is gone,” Stephen retorted. “We’re on our own now.” Stephen hated the idea that he was supposed to meekly sit in his wheeled Bath chair and grieve for a brother who’d been arrogant to a fault, for all Quinn had also been ferociously conscientious regarding the bank’s business.
“Quinn got above himself,” Constance said. “He made sure we didn’t commit the same error.”
The Wentworths lived quietly, but they lived quietly and well in London, a far cry from the quagmire of misery that had spawned them in York.
Stephen was seventeen and should have gone up to university. He would never go to university, for two reasons. First, he already knew more than most of the professors teaching at either Oxford or Cambridge about the subjects that mattered to him.
Second, the damned Bath chair.
But his wheeled chair offered lessons of its own, such as how closely madness hovered near the unsuspecting. Stephen had frequently considered taking his own life, before Quinn had brought Duncan down from York. With the implacable assurance of a man equally expert in Socrates, biology, and scripture, Duncan had insisted that a laboratory and greenhouse be added to the town house. To Stephen’s amazement, Quinn had listened, and life had changed.
Today, life was changing again.
“Quinn has himself to thank for this day’s work,” Stephen said.
Constance tossed her pamphlet onto the low table. “What would you have us do, Stephen? Post notices in shop windows that we’ll meet our brother’s killer in Green Park at dawn? Quinn told us not to interfere.”
Althea pulled a thread taut. “Quinn was forever telling us what to do. When did we listen?”
“We did sometimes,” Constance said. “When he was sensible, not simply blustering and being overprotective.”
Stephen wheeled himself to the window, where a sunny London morning was bustling to life. He’d spent much of his life looking out of windows, until Duncan had said that the mind needed fresh air to invite fresh ideas.
“Quinn was always overprotective,” Constance said, “and when it mattered, he had no one to protect him. I tried. I sent a hundred pounds to the warden, simply seeking an interview. He sent it back.”
“Two hundred,” Althea said, “and that was also returned.”
In the complicated economy of a prison, a returned bribe meant one of two things: Somebody else had paid a much larger bribe, or had made a more effective threat.
Stephen’s sisters didn’t need him to spell that out for them. He’d been eight years old when Jack Wentworth had died, old enough to know, as Duncan said, which from that. His sisters were both older than he and knew all manner of subjects not taught in any finishing school.
