The letters in Quinn’s pocket felt as if they weighed twelve stone, something Jane would have understood. These epistles had likely put him in Newgate and put his neck in a noose. Better, as Jane advised, to forgive and forget. To move on and appreciate the joy of marriage to a woman who didn’t live life in anticipation of the next ambush.
Jane Wentworth was the bravest woman Quinn knew, and she was his.
As Quinn strode down the Mayfair walkways, other gentlemen nodded to him. Two ladies he might have recognized from the bank smiled, and, without thinking, he tipped his hat to them. The flower girls all waved to him, and if he weren’t on his way to put a certain countess out of his life once for all, he’d have bought a bouquet from each one.
Ned’s absence also carried a weight, so accustomed had Quinn grown to the lad’s chattering and swearing.
The tow-headed young man following Quinn was yet another weight. He’d appeared intermittently after Quinn’s return from York, his attempts at subtlety only making his presence more obvious.
A country lad, would be Quinn’s guess, agog at London’s size and busyness, but willing to do anything to keep the approval of his mistress. Quinn turned down an alley from which there was no exit. Afternoon sunshine didn’t reach into this corner of Mayfair, though the stench of rotting food did. As a boy, Quinn had considered that odor an omen of good fortune, because where some discarded food rotted, other discarded food might yet be edible.
He didn’t even have to crouch down. He merely took up a lean against a wall beside steps that led to a basement. In somebody’s kitchen, an argument had broken out about missing muffins.
The quarry knew enough to pause at the mouth of the alley, but Quinn had chosen this place carefully. The alley angled around a turn before it came to a dead end, and the unwitting youth took the blind turn at a casual stroll. Quinn stepped out of the shadows and boxed the younger man in.
“Looking for your blue and silver livery?” Quinn asked. “I don’t think you’ll find it here. Perhaps ye might look under her ladyship’s bed.”
The man turned slowly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir. Let me pass.” His accent proclaimed him to be a Yorkshireman, as plain as the sheep on the dales.
“I can’t do that, lad,” Quinn said. “You’ve been content to ride my coattails from a polite distance until this week, and now you’re making a pest of yourself. Sooner or later my duchess or my family will notice, and they’ll raise worrying about me to an art form. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
The young man’s gaze darted left and right. If he were clever, he’d also look up. Wash lines, trellises, drainpipes, and balconies all created options when flight was imperative. Instead he held up his fists, protecting his face and angling his stance with scientific precision.
A pugilist, then. God help the lad.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he spat. “Living like a swell, when everybody knows you’re a baseborn gutter whelp who deserved to be hanged.”
Turn the other cheek, Jane said. Such sound advice, though Jane had never told Quinn what to do with his feet.
The old reflexes would never leave him, and that made Quinn almost as happy as the notion of handing the countess’s letters back to their author. He casually—joyfully—snaked out a foot and tripped the budding prizefighter onto his skinny backside.
“Thanks, my boy. I might never get to use that maneuver again, being a swell and all.”
The youth stared up at him, gaze surprised. Then the pain of banging his head on the cobbles set in, and his eyes closed.
A sudden acquaintance with London cobblestones was the very devil on a man’s skull.
“Now here’s what I need you to do,” Quinn said, crouching over the fallen swain. “You’ll take this coin, which I did earn most honestly, and toddle off to the nearest pub. You’ll want to put ice on the back of your head, for it will be troubling you severely by nightfall. When the countess asks you how I slipped through your clutches, you’ll tell her that a baseborn gutter whelp has ways that a decent young man can’t fathom.”
Quinn held up a sovereign, a fortune to a young fellow in service, and let the lad have a good long look.
“We shall let bygones be bygones, agreed?” Quinn said, allowing the fellow to sit up.
The footman took the coin with one hand while he rubbed the back of his head with the other. “Agreed, but I don’t work for the countess.”
He had the wheat-blond locks of a northern boy far from home. Quinn tousled his hair gently.
“Of course you don’t work for her. Have an ale or two while you’re cooling down that manly temper, though don’t overindulge. You’ll only make the headache worse.”
The fellow remained sitting on the cobbles, rubbing his head and clutching his sovereign, while Quinn went in search of a countess whom he was determined to forgive and—ye gods, what a lovely notion—forget.
* * *
Papa was examining a white porcelain knight that usually graced the mantel in the family parlor. He didn’t even bother to put the figurine down when Jane entered the room, Ivor and Kristoff on her heels.
“Jane Hester, good day.”
The day had been good, then it had turned awful. “Put that back where you found it, Papa.”
He turned the statue upside down, peering at the horse’s belly. “Meissen. You have quite an eclectic collection, Jane Hester, or your husband does. Will he be joining us?”
That is none of your business. “His Grace is not at home. Was there something you wanted?”
Papa set the horseman on the windowsill. “Send one of those handsome fellows for a tea tray, why don’t you. You there.” Papa waved a hand at Kristoff. “Fetch some comestibles. To keep a guest waiting is inconsiderate, to deny him the hospitality of the kitchen rude. Your mother did not raise you to be rude, Jane Hester.”
Papa smiled, a patiently chiding elder tolerating an oversight.
Ivor and Kristoff both remained by the door, staring straight ahead. Jane would ask Quinn to raise their wages, if she ever spoke to Quinn again.
“I am on my way out,” Jane said. “Now is not a good time to entertain you.”
“You don’t have time for your old papa? My, how haughty you’ve become. Pride goeth before a fall, Jane Hester.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jane said. “If you’re quoting Proverbs, then the passage says that pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Papa ran a finger down the length of the mantel, scowling at the lack of dust on his fingertip. “You presume to instruct me regarding scripture, young lady, when I’ll have the rearing and education of your firstborn child?”
Jane was half tempted to placate her father, to cajole and appease, to stuff him with sweets as if he were a spoiled toddler.
But no. She’d done exactly that on too many occasions, which was why Papa could make such a nuisance of himself now, when she had pressing matters to see to.
“Stop talking nonsense, Reverend. You haven’t the independent means to support yourself, much less a child. You can wave all the documents and sermons at me you please, but the truth is, you’d rather extort money from my husband than minister to a legitimate congregation. You should have apologized to your bishop months ago, but you’re too stubborn, proud, and—”
One of the footmen had growled, but they were standing immediately behind Jane, so she didn’t know which one.
Papa had raised his hand. Raised his hand as if he’d deliver a slap to Jane’s face, a form of discipline he hadn’t attempted since Jane had put up her hair.
He reached behind himself, smoothing a hand over the back of his head, as if violence hadn’t been his intention a moment before.
“You are overset,” he said, retreating to the window. “Your condition has made you prone to fits of temper, and you are doubtless regretting the hasty union that has separated you from your only family.”
“Get out,” Jane snarled, and that felt good. “Get out of my house, and don’t come back until you can support yourself in the profession to which you claim the Almighty Himself has called you.”
Papa drew in a long breath, clearly filling his sails for some discourse on Jane’s many shortcomings. “Jane Hester, surely—”
“Tutor the sons of squires,” Jane said. “Manage a Magdalen house such that its inmates aren’t worked to death. Take up the chaplaincy at a hospital or herd a lot of stinking sheep, for all I care. You will no longer come around here spouting scripture while you appraise the porcelain and empty the larders.”
“Come now, daughter. You don’t mean these unkind words. I admit the past months have been difficult for you, and that grief can derange the best of us.”
For an instant, a bewildered widower stood in the boots of a bombastic conniver, but the moment was so fleeting as to be nearly imaginary. Papa drew himself up like an aspiring actor preparing to deliver his few insignificant lines of dialogue.
“Sorrow notwithstanding,” he said, holding up one finger, “Christian decency counsels us to magnanimity of spirit, Jane Hester, and I am willing to overlook your ungracious attitude and judgmental words. We are family, and turning the other—”
“Out!” Jane bellowed. “I have turned the last other cheek I intend to turn in your case. Get out of this house now or you will be shown the door.”
One of the footmen cracked his knuckles, a rude, nasty sound that Jane heard like the pealing of cathedral bells.
“Her Grace said now.”
Papa sniffed, he glowered, he tried to draw out a dramatic silence, but Jane stepped aside, giving the footmen a clear path to him, and thus did Papa march past her to the door.
Ivor and Kristoff followed him out of the room, and when the front door closed, Jane felt as if she’d been given a royal pardon. Slow applause came from the direction of the corridor, and Jane whirled to see Althea, Constance, and Stephen crowding in the doorway.
“I was right,” Jane said. “Shouting at an opponent can be salubrious. Enjoyable even.”
She nonetheless sank onto the sofa, because ejecting one’s father from the premises apparently left one weak in the knees. Weak with relief, perhaps.
Stephen wheeled into the room ahead of his sisters. “Next, we’ll teach you to curse. Constance and I can both curse in French, and I have enough German to get you started. Do you suppose the old windbag will stay gone?”
Althea and Constance chided him for disrespecting an elder. Stephen sensibly argued that no respect was due a man who insulted his hostess, much less his own daughter. Ivor and Kristoff returned, smiling shamelessly, and somebody ordered a bottle of cordial.
Jane was returning the white knight to the mantel when a movement outside the window caught her eye.
“Why is Ned pelting across the garden as if the press gangs are after him?” she asked. “And where is Quinn?”
“Shall I fetch Ned from the kitchen?” Ivor asked, as Kristoff brought the bottle of cordial in on a tray with several glasses.
The moment recalled for Jane the day she’d met the Wentworth siblings. They’d been drinking cordial then too, tossing quips back and forth, subtly teasing each other as they welcomed Jane into their midst. She’d been exhausted, bewildered, famished, and so glad that Quinn was alive.
“No need to summon Ned upstairs,” Jane said. “I can interrogate him just as easily in the servants’ hall, and don’t anybody try to tell me that I’m not permitted to breach that fortress. I’m a Wentworth and a duchess. I go where I please.”
As Quinn had apparently done, alone, blast him to perdition.
“We’re coming with you,” Althea said. “Don’t tell us you’re planning something rash without us.”
“I am Her Grace of Walden. I’ll be rash if I deuced well choose to be.”
“Then we’ll be rash right along beside you,” Constance said. “Pity Duncan isn’t underfoot. He could do with some excitement.”
The Jane who’d turned too many other cheeks did not want any excitement. The Jane who’d married Quinn Wentworth was learning that sometimes excitement, even confrontation, was necessary.
“There you are,” Ned said when Jane arrived to the kitchen, the siblings trailing behind her. “Idiot Davies said you wasn’t to be disturbed.”
The boy glowered at his compatriot, who glowered back. “Himself said herself wasn’t to be disturbed, Idiot Neddy, and now herself is here in the kitchen, where she isn’t supposed to be.” Davies stood before the wide hearth, the one where the fire was never allowed to die out.
“Why aren’t I supposed to be in the kitchen?” Jane asked. “His Grace comes through here every time he uses the tunnel.”
“Now you done it,” Ned muttered.
Davies blushed, his fair coloring going scarlet. “The duke was planning a surprise.”
He stepped to the side and Jane’s gaze fell on a small wooden chest.
“Been combing the pawnshops,” Davies said, “buying back what he could, making offers for what’s been sold on. He’s still hunting for one more shawl—has doves on it, I think. He sent a regimental sword and scabbard off to the silversmith for a cleaning and polishing.”
A cool ripple passed over Jane’s arms and nape. “That is my mother’s chest. That is Mama’s…that is the chest Mama left to me.” She knelt on the kitchen’s hard plank floor and opened the lid. The scent of cedar wafted up, along with Mama’s signature lemon verbena fragrance.
“Her mirror…” Jane held up the mirror only long enough to assure herself that the tarnish and speckling were as they had been when Mama had owned this same mirror. “Her Sunday shawl, her earbobs, her jewelry box. Quinn did this?”
“Nigh run me ragged,” Ned said. “Dragged me to half the pawnshops in London. Man knows how to haggle.”
Jane closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of her mother’s love. Quinn had done this. For her, without being asked, without mentioning a word of his plans…
“That man…” That wonderful, pigheaded, stubborn, lovely, lovely man. “He’s been at this for weeks, and I never suspected.” She dabbed her eyes with the edge of her mother’s shawl, and fell in love for the third time that day with the husband she never intended to speak to again.
“If you start bawling,” Ned said, “himself will sell me to the French Vikings. Are you having a difficult adjustment?”
Jane nodded. “Yes, so please bear with me a moment.”
Davies helped her to her feet. Ned, Constance, Stephen, and Althea were all watching her as if she was supposed to know what to do. Quinn had gone to confront the lunatic, idiot countess, and, Quinn-fashion, he’d neglected to bring along reinforcements.
“Ned,” Jane said, “perhaps you know where His Grace has got off to?”