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 novel? 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?”
He remained silent, his lips pressed to Jane’s temple.
* * *
Every sin Quinn had ever committed, and there were many, every mistake he’d made, and those were even more numerous, haunted him in the person of his wife. Jane was bustling, scolding, and quarreling her way into his heart, the last place she should hope to be.
The town house had always oppressed Quinn, with its relentless geometry of portraits hung perfectly straight, carpets running down the exact center of the corridors, wallpaper patterned to precisely match, panel by panel. Who could thrive amid such endless, purposeless order?
And yet, the house had a musty smell in the corners, reminiscent of pets, dirty laundry, and winter damp, even in spring. The windows were seldom clean, which Althea attributed to London’s coal smoke, and if somebody recalled to put flowers in the front foyer, just as often, the bouquet was left to disintegrate before it was replaced.
As if the squalor of the Yorkshire slums had followed Quinn hundreds of miles south, and would follow him all the way to the grave.
In the past week, the house had been thoroughly aired.
The windows sparkled, the flowers were fresh. The carpet in the formal parlor had been taken up, and the oak parquet floor polished to a high shine. Jane had done this—Jane had known how to do it—and she’d softened the pointless order of Quinn’s home.
He’d first noticed her efforts in his apartment. The afghan folded over the back of the sofa was now laid at an angle, the pillows piled at one end rather than arranged symmetrically. The windows weren’t open to the same degree, and the decanters no longer stood in order of height.
Jane was making his house a home, and he was helpless to stop her, for she apparently needed to domesticate and organize to be happy, and he needed for her to be happy. His penance for all transgressions past, present, and future was that one day—if he survived the next attempt on his life—she’d realize what manner of man she’d married, and look at Quinn with either pity or disgust.
Or turn her gaze from him entirely.
“Do you know how long it has been since Althea read a novel?” Quinn asked the wife so agreeably occupying his lap.
“I can’t possibly know.”
“Althea has never read a novel, to my knowledge. She learned her letters kicking and screaming. I had to bribe her with music lessons.”
“Another stubborn Wentworth,” Jane replied, removing the pin from his cravat. “Why am I not surprised.”
“Stephen hates for anybody to watch him stand,” Quinn went on. “Hates that his left leg can barely hold his weight.”
Jane unknotted Quinn’s neckcloth. “I hadn’t realized that your brother is nearly as tall as you are. Has an impressive set of shoulders on him too. He seemed surprised when I remarked as much.”
When had anybody, any female, given Stephen a compliment for any reason? At his age, Quinn had been starved for female attention to the point of utter witlessness.
“Let him teach you how to use a gun, Jane, or let my sisters start you out with knives. Both take time to learn well.”
She drew his cravat away, making sure the linen didn’t abrade his neck. “You’re almost healed. Is your neck still sore?”
“I sleep more easily on my right side.” Facing Jane’s half of the bed rather than the window.
He was doomed.
“May I put a theory to you?” Jane asked.
“Could I stop you?”
“The household reflects its master.” She moved against him, or her belly did. Not a kick, something else. “You adhere to no schedule, so the domestics have no schedule. You barely notice what you eat, so Cook sends up the same menus week after week. Your version of loyalty involves violence more than discretion, hence your staff will defend your citadel, but gossip like dairymaids churning butter.”
As a boy, Quinn had loved the sound of dairymaids gabbling over their work. They’d often let him have a scraping from the churns, and nothing soothed hunger like a dab of butter.
“My household functions adequately for my needs.”
Jane cuddled closer on a sigh, a weary woman yet determined on her objective. “The household does not function adequately for the needs of a duke, Quinn. Cook should know your favorite desserts. I should know your favorite flowers. Althea might inquire as to which composers I prefer so she can learn a few airs to play for us after dinner. There’s no…I don’t know the word for it. We’re ready to repel boarders or send out pickets for the night watch, but that manner of being a duke ceased to be useful three hundred years ago.”
She traced her finger over Quinn’s lips. “You smile so seldom. I love your smile.” She kissed him on the mouth.
Desire mocked Quinn. Of all women to be drawn to…Jane was approaching her confinement, worried about his taste for mustard, and determined to reform a family sprung from the lowest gutters, all without so much as raising her voice.
“I’m off to York tomorrow, Jane. The press of business requires me in the north.” The lie stung as the rope had burned his neck. Quinn had survived the rope, and he’d survive to someday be the sort of husband Jane deserved.
She kissed him again. “Coward. Tear about all you like. If you miss the birth of this child I will name him something dreadful.”
Her kisses were ginger flavored. On her, the spice was luscious. “I won’t be gone long. Less than a fortnight.” And yes, when it came to his marriage, Quinn was a coward, though the child wasn’t due for months.
She drew away. “You needn’t run off, Quinn. If you can’t see your way to consummating the vows, then just tell me. I’m not at my best, and my charms are humble on a good day. A white marriage isn’t unheard of, even for a peer, but you had said…”
She tried to stand and succeeded only in pressing against Quinn’s half-aroused cock. He rose with her in his arms and set her on the bed.
“You should be thinking of the baby now,” Quinn said, kneeling to remove her slippers. “If I’m not putting demands on you, it’s because the time hasn’t been right. You didn’t marry me for that, and we have no reason to hurry.”
“I lack the nerve to ask your sisters if you keep a mistress, but perhaps your feelings are engaged elsewhere. I apologize for complicating your life, if so, though heirs do require the participation of both husband and wife.”
She ducked her head, and Quinn wanted to pitch himself out the window.
“No mistress, Jane. No time for that nonsense.”
“You’re lying,” she said, skewering him with a gimlet scowl. “Gordie could rise to the occasion in three minutes and be done in five. The problem isn’t time.”
“I’m glad he’s dead if that’s all the consideration he thought you were owed.” Quinn had any number of reasons to be glad Gordon MacGowan had gone to his reward.
“What consideration am I due from you?” Jane asked.
She would not give this up. Another stubborn Wentworth indeed. “You are due every consideration.”
“Then take me to bed, Quinn. Make me your wife in truth.”
Quinn didn’t understand his own reluctance, though caution was part of it, as was a backward lingering shame. He desired women in the abstract, and after he’d parted company with Beatrice, Countess of Tipton, he’d spent a good year desiring them in the flesh, proving something to himself.
Then Papa had broken Stephen’s leg, and Quinn had focused entirely on making money. Life had become simpler, and Quinn hadn’t looked back.
He held out his wrists for Jane to remove his sleeve buttons. “I’m leaving for York in the morning on bank business. The man I supposedly killed hails from York, and I thought while I was in the area I’d make a few inquiries.”
He hadn’t meant to tell her that. Hadn’t wanted her involved, and her glower confirmed she didn’t want to be involved.
She took his sleeve buttons, hopped off the bed, and dumped them into the vanity tray.
“Leave it alone, Quinn. Don’t borrow trouble. Let sleeping dogs lie, and let bygones be bygones. Whoever put you in prison failed, and you’re a duke now. Act like one. Go on about your life in a dignified fashion, and all will be well.”
She leaned into him, her arms about his middle.
She was very confident of her platitudes, though her naïve sermon confirmed that Quinn was right to spare her the details of his investigations.
So he’d offer her a platitude in return. “I’ve cheated the hangman, Jane. Nothing will happen to me.”
Her gaze promised argument, even now, even about this.
In exasperation—and desperation—Quinn kissed his wife.