Page 64 of My One and Only Duke
“Then Stephen is bound to be disappointed. I’ll see you at supper.” For Duncan always attended family meals, usually in the capacity of referee or scorekeeper. One wondered what Duncan truly thought and felt. With the younger Wentworths, one never wondered.
“I’d best protect the cutlery from Papa’s admiration,” Jane said. “Until this evening.”
Duncan bowed and strode for the front door, and even in his walk he had something of Quinn’s air. Perhaps that was appropriate. If anything happened to Quinn and Stephen—angels forefend!—Duncan would become the Duke of Walden.
* * *
“Will it stink like this all the way to York?” Ned asked.
“You’re smelling Smithfield Market,” Quinn replied, as the coach turned onto St. John Street. “In the course of a year, a million sheep and tens of thousands of cattle are penned on less than five acres.”
“Bloody lot of sheep shit,” Ned said, wrinkling his nose. “Whose idea was it to put a livestock market in the middle of London?”
Long ago, Quinn’s view of life had been equally circumscribed by inexperience. He’d known his neighborhood, then his town. The transition to working at the Tipton estate in the Yorkshire countryside had left him feeling very much a man of the world.
And then, very much a fool.
“The market was established when London was still contained within the City walls,” Quinn said, “hundreds of years ago. I expect it will move eventually.” Somebody would make a lot of money when that happened.
Ned’s nose remained pressed to the glass. “Tell ’em to move it downwind.”
That commonsense suggestion bore the inklings of profit. The livestock market would be moved someday not because of the stink—Londoners were far from delicate when it came to the city’s myriad stenches—but because slaughtering that many animals created the sort of waste that threatened water supplies and public health.
Had Quinn not left Jane less than a quarter hour earlier, he’d have turned his mind to where—downwind of London—a livestock market might ideally be located, and how he could quietly buy that land now. Such a purchase might not yield a profit for decades, but profit and patience often went hand in hand.
Instead of land development schemes, Quinn’s head was full of regrets. He wished he’d lingered with Jane in bed. He wished he’d not left her to deal with her father alone. He wished he’d lectured Duncan at length—at greater length—about the need to ease Jane’s transition into a family that knew nothing of gentility.
“You miss her?” Ned asked, breathing on the window, then drawing his finger through the condensation.
“Would you like to ride on the roof, Ned?” Quinn used his most quelling tones, which would have had any bank employee trembling in his boots. “Two hundred miles of stink, wind, and rain might teach you to keep impertinent questions to yourself.”
Ned wiped his palm over the window, erasing the lopsided W he’d drawn. “I miss her. Miss Jane is that sort of female. I hear her in me head, reminding me to wash behind me ears. I feel her hand brushing the hair outta me eyes.”
Oh, yes. Jane was that sort of female. “Stop smudging up my windows and pay attention.”
Ned grinned and breathed on the window again, but before he made another streak, Quinn snatched him onto the opposite bench.
“You will comport yourself according to my rules, Ned, or I’ll toss you out of the coach now. You can go back to sleeping in church doorways and hoping you don’t wake up in a brothel.”
Quinn had had that experience when he’d been about Ned’s age. His abductors had neglected to tie his feet, leaving him free to break a window and hare off.
I hate that I must return to the north. The Walden ducal seat was not far from York, and even closer to the Tipton estate.
“The abbesses won’t get me,” Ned said, kicking his boots against the bench. “I’m too fast.” His gaze had gone flat, suggesting he too had had a near miss.
“They can make another attempt, so test my patience at your peril. While we’re traveling, you don’t refer to me as Mr. Wentworth or Your Grace. You don’t gossip with the stable boys. You keep your gob shut or I’ll leave you in Yorkshire, where winter starts in September and doesn’t let up until May.”
A child living on the streets knew to fear the cold.
Ned popped off the bench and resumed peering out the window. “Miss Jane would fetch me home, and she’d ring a peal over your head if you left me behind.”
True, and a comforting thought. “I’ve faced the hangman, young Edward. A nattering female holds no terror for me.” Not that Jane nattered. She chided, she teased, she sighed, she counted to three, and she yawned.
She nestled against her husband in the night, as trusting as a kitten and a hundred times more dear.
“What’s York like?”
Like an ancient slice of hell, for a hungry boy with no safe place to lay his head. The enormous edifice known as the York Minster cast its shadow over the entire city, a looming presence that marked a site even the Romans had used as a gathering place.
