Page 43 of My One and Only Duke
“Of course you were. Put your boots on, Susie. I smell bacon.”
Susie grabbed the largest pair of boots in the wardrobe. “My name’s Susan. I don’t think Mr. Wentworth was raised respectable.”
“He weren’t. I heard a couple of the guards talking. Some say Mr. Wentworth were a highwayman, some say he stole jewels off rich women. Some say he did worse than steal. The guards didn’t bother him, I know that. Why do I feel prettier in this ugly dress than I ever felt on the stroll?”
“’Cause you’re daft. These boots fit. I haven’t worn a pair of boots that fit, ever.”
“You know who I really fancy?” Penny asked, putting on the second boot.
“The man with the most coin,” Susie replied, though that was a whore’s response, and she was done with whoring. Maybe.
“Him too, but I do think young Mr. Davies cleans up nice.”
Davies was likely the same age as Penny, but he was also young in a way Penny could never be. “He’s sweet. He’ll make a fine footman. Don’t scare him, Pen. Prison takes a toll on a fellow the first time he’s locked up.”
“D’ye think Mr. Wentworth has been locked up before?”
Locked up for sure, though maybe not in prison. “He’s cold, Pen. Cold right down to his bones. He didn’t get us out of Newgate because of his kind heart. He took us along like spoils of war, a hearty up-yer-arse to King George. That’s a cold man what gives it back to the king who pardoned him.”
Susie stood, the boots feeling odd on her feet. Real heels, that added more than an inch to her height and made noise when she crossed the room. Laces without knots, stockings without holes or darning to give a blister a place to start.
“So Quinn Wentworth is cold,” Penny said, dropping her skirts around her ankles. “What about marrying Miss Jane? Was that a cold man, speaking his vows to a woman in her condition?”
Susie’s belly rumbled, and for once she didn’t have to ignore her own hunger. “We’ll keep an eye on Miss Jane. She didn’t bargain for none of this, least of all on being the wife of Quinn Wentworth. I’m tellin’ you, Pen, something’s not right with that man.”
“We look a treat, don’t we? Newgate yesterday, respectable today. Let’s go find some bacon and flirt with the footmen.”
“You flirt with the footmen. I’m for the bacon.”
* * *
“Miss Jane might not be dying,” Ned said, over the clatter of the wheels on the cobbles.
Quinn’s personal gargoyle of doom was perched on the back of the phaeton. Ned had been offering helpful pronouncements through half a mile of snarled traffic and pedestrians with nothing better to do than inspire Quinn’s rage.
“A tiger occupies his post silently,” Quinn said, steering around a costermonger’s cart only to face a parked coal wagon.
“Why call me a tiger if all I do is lounge about up here on me rosy feak and watch you drive like a parson’s granny?”
Quinn backed the phaeton up several yards—no mean feat—and pulled around the coal wagon. “You wait, silent as a tiger, until you are required to pounce to the cobbles and hold the horse. Goddamn it, take the reins—”
Ned was already off his seat, wading into a verbal conflagration between a portly dandy in a gig and a pair of beldames in a dogcart.
“His worship hasn’t time to watch you lot heckle away the day,” Ned bellowed, seizing the bridle of the dandy’s prancing bay and dragging the horse from the intersection. “You should be ashamed, all o’ ye, making a spectacle in a decent neighborhood when folk have pressing matters and the king’s business to be about. Your mothers couldn’t peg out the wash stone sober on a sunny day and neither of ye can steer worth a draft horse’s Sunday fart.”
Quinn drove through the opening Ned had created, and Ned jumped up behind as the gelding trotted past.
“Impressive, Ned.”
“A tiger’s got to roar sometimes. Maybe Miss Jane fainted. She used to do that, at Newgate. She always woke up. She tossed up her accounts a time or two as well. The whores said it weren’t nothing to fret over.”
Ned kicked his feet idly, while Quinn reviewed the litany of emergencies that could have pulled him away from the bank: Jane’s baby was coming too soon—though what was Quinn supposed to do about that besides curse fit to scour a London sewer?
Perhaps Stephen had taken a fall. The boy had no sense of his own limits, not when it came to aggravating his sisters, not when it came to his physical problems, and certainly not regarding his temper.
Maybe Constance had secreted a bad bottle of gin in her rooms, which had last happened when she’d been fifteen and as wretched as a girl that age could be.
Althea.…If a summons had gone forth from the house, then Althea hadn’t been in any condition to prevent it.
