Page 23 of My One and Only Duke
Constance took up one of the fine porcelain teacups that sat unused on the tray Ivor had brought in. She loathed tea and had a secret fondness for gin. Perhaps grief had deranged even her formidable mind, for she set the cup down and reached for the teapot instead.
This she hurled against the fireplace, resulting in a satisfyingly loud crash. Althea stared at the shattered porcelain and the tea splattered all over the bricks, then did the same with three teacups in succession.
The sisters would manage. Stephen signaled to Ivor, who opened the door. Stephen wheeled himself from the room amid the loud, messy destruction of a fortune in porcelain, and pretended not to notice that Ivor was crying.
* * *
Quinn’s first impression of the celestial realm was that it smelled a lot like prison. Dirty straw, dirty people, despair saturating the air. Somebody was in a taking worthy of Althea holding forth on the subject of women’s rights.
Women had no rights. Perhaps in heaven, that oversight had been addressed.
“He’s breathing,” a man said. “He’ll wake up in a moment.”
Quinn’s head was lifted and the white expanse of the great beyond—or of the executioner’s white hood—was replaced with the warden’s office at Newgate prison.
“I’ve been sent to hell after all.” Quinn’s throat ached, but he could speak intelligibly.
“Praise be,” said a dapper little man with a full head of white hair. “Thank the everlasting powers. Somebody fetch His Grace a glass of water.”
The company boasted a His Grace, more proof that Quinn had been weighed in the scales and found wanting, for this was surely not the afterlife. He struggled to a sitting position, his brain sluggish, his neck burning like the devil.
Perhaps not the devil.
“Here you go, Your Grace,” the dapper fellow said, passing Quinn a mug. “Soon you’ll be feeling just the thing.”
The water tasted metallic, but was cool and soothing to Quinn’s throat. In no version of hell he’d been threatened with were new arrivals offered water.
“Who are you?”
“Thaddeus E. Dodson. My card.” The fellow passed over a card printed on linen stock. The College of Arms. Perhaps this truly was eternal damnation, or the lingering effects of laudanum in an odd version of the hereafter.
The warden’s expression was carefully neutral. Two guards stood by the door impersonating well-trained footmen—erect posture, expressions blank.
Quinn took another sip of the holiest water he’d ever tasted. “Somebody had better start explaining.”
The warden cleared his throat. “You’ve been pardoned, Your Grace.”
“The king himself has seen fit to grant you clemency,” Mr. College of Arms said. “He has forgiven your error as an unfortunate tragedy mishandled by the courts. You are free to go.”
The warden was studying the truly awful portrait over the mantel, a well-fed beldame with a pug in her lap.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Quinn asked. “Fat George never does favors without expecting something in return. I’m a convicted felon. What could he want from me?” A convicted felon who had cheated death. The shock of that truth spread over Quinn like a summer sunrise. He could not trust his good fortune to last, if good fortune it was, but he was undeniably alive.
“You are a pardoned felon,” Dodson replied. “We need not speak of that when more good news is at hand. Did you know, sir, that you were heir to the Walden ducal title?”
The only people who called Quinn “sir” were people who wanted money from him or people who owed him money.
And the whores, Ned, and Davies. They had called him sir.
“I suppose you’ll have to hang me again,” Quinn said, pushing to his feet. “I’m not the duke of anything, and I hope to die in that fortunate state. Shall we get on with it?”
He was not bluffing. The only explanation he could concoct for this reprieve was that he’d now be expected to commit some fraud or deception for the Crown. His father had attempted any crime, any betrayal of decency for the sake of another bottle of gin. Quinn would not follow in those scapegrace footsteps, even to save his own neck.
“You’ll not be hanged,” the warden said. “The bugger has papers, royal seal and all. To hang you now would be both treason and murder.”
Quinn experienced the same dread that had come over him when he’d returned home after a day of looking for work and he’d heard Papa ranting from half a street away. Drunk and mean, drunk and maudlin, drunk and murderous. Those had been the choices when Papa was loud. All of Quinn’s options had stunk then, and they doubtless reeked now.
“Mr. Dodson, you will explain yourself.”
