Nothing helped.
Not reading, though how many times had Quinn promised himself he’d read all the classics his lordly customers were always quoting? He’d been beguiled by numbers, while words were simply a means to an end: Pass the salt. Can’t you see I’m busy? The bank is not in a position to make a loan to you at this time.
Showing Davies how to play chess did not help. He was a clever young man, but impatient, and chess wanted nothing so much as patience. To teach Quinn chess, Cousin Duncan had needed patience without limit and a Wentworth’s full complement of strategy.
Teaching Ned to read did not help, because the boy would never be able to afford books, and in his own words, he couldn’t eat books or use them to stay warm unless he burned them.
Which he would do without a qualm.
Training Plato, Ned’s favorite mouser, to shake paws did not help. Only a bedlamite tried to train a cat—even a hungry cat—to do anything. Plato doubtless knew this and occasionally performed the desired waving of a front paw, likely out of pity. The beast was all black with yellow eyes that never seemed to close or blink in the presence of food.
When Plato appropriated a place on Quinn’s lap and commenced rumbling, that truly did not help. Purring when death was less than a fortnight away made Quinn want to pitch the cat out the window, and that reminded Quinn that every window was stoutly barred.
A knock sounded on the door, which was open only a few inches.
“Come in.” Even in Newgate, a man didn’t have to be home to callers, one of the many odd dignities the prisoners granted one another.
Miss Winston—Quinn forgot her first name, something that began with a J—peeked around the door. “Do you have a moment, Mr. Wentworth?”
All he had were moments. “I can fit you in to my schedule.”
She was attired in the same gray shroud of a cloak, the straw flecking her hems up to midcalf today.
“I won’t take up much of your time,” she said. “Ned should be warned to remain alert on Wednesday. These situations are always subject to change—routines shift, people fall ill—and Wednesday is the next opportunity.”
Less than a week away, but before Quinn’s scheduled departure, as it were. “Then you need the ten pounds. Could I interest you in some lemonade and gingerbread?”
He’d given Ned all the strawberries. The boy had lined them up on the windowsill in order of size and consumed them from smallest to largest, one at a time. He’d sniffed each berry before popping it into his mouth, and Quinn had added another regret to the list:
I wish I’d taken the time to enjoy all the sustenance I consumed so absentmindedly, a pencil in my left hand, a column of figures absorbing my attention.
Figures would wait, while strawberries rotted all too soon.
Miss Winston pulled off her gloves. “Lemonade? You have lemonade?”
“And butter. My sister sends me a daily basket of provisions and one for the guards, as well. Theirs includes a bottle of port, which they immediately consume, so mine finds its way to me.”
“She sends a decoy,” Miss Winston said, taking a seat at Quinn’s table. The legs of the table were uneven, so that it rocked when anything was placed upon it. A month ago, Quinn would have had the table burned for firewood.
“I would…give a lot for gingerbread with fresh butter,” Miss Winston said.
I would kill for gingerbread with fresh butter, she’d been about to say. The poor thing was blushing. In light of her familiarity with the criminal element, that blush charmed Quinn.
He set the pitcher of lemonade on the table along with two clean tankards. The gingerbread was wrapped in plain linen, as was the butter dish. Such ordinary fare, and yet Miss Winston was clearly pleased with it.
She used the penknife to cut thick slices of bread and slathered both with butter.
“No plates,” Quinn said. “The chophouse uses pewter, because the ceramic kind can be broken and used as weapons. I send my plates back across the street with each meal.”
Ned had explained that to him. No ceramic, no porcelain, no glass. Wooden bowls or beakers, metal flasks, pewter mugs. Nothing sharp, heavy, or too valuable. Cravats were frowned on, because they had been used to strangle both guards and inmates.
The boy had stoutly ignored the pitcher and basin sitting on the washstand as he’d delivered his tutorial.
“Aren’t you having any?” Miss Winston asked, licking her thumb. “The gingerbread is quite good.”
She’d barely sipped the lemonade—sweet, as lemonades went—while the gingerbread was rapidly meeting its fate.
“Of course,” Quinn said, taking a bite from his slice. “I woolgather now almost as consistently as I used to dwell on bank business.” At Davies’s urging, he’d purchased a quantity of opium, but the considered wisdom of the house was to save the opium for the day Quinn was…the day he died.
The effect would be greater that way when an effect was most needed.
“Have you contacted your sisters?” Miss Winston asked. “Getting Ned out of here is only half the battle.”
“I have written a note to my business partner, Joshua Penrose, and having conferred with you, I’ll have it sent. I’ll tell Ned on Tuesday night.”
Ned would spend a day hiding among a pile of straw so vile even the rats avoided it, and then by night he’d be carried off to freedom. A simple plan, though it required that the escapee fit into the charwoman’s muck cart, which could accommodate only a child or a very small adult.
The warden knew better than to allow the women to use larger carts, and his books would doubtless reflect the sorry truth that children died behind Newgate’s walls all the time.
“I take it Davies can’t be freed.” A true injustice in Quinn’s opinion. Davies had been an innocent bystander when a pickpocket had done a toss and jostle. The victim had set up a hue and cry, and the thief had taken off through a crowd, depositing the stolen money not in his accomplice’s pockets, but in Davies’s. The accomplice had decamped hotfoot, after pointing at Davies and implicating him loudly.
Merry Olde London indeed.
“Mr. Wentworth, I have asked you twice who Davies is. For considerably more than ten pounds, he might be able to improve his circumstances.”
“He’s innocent. Stolen goods were essentially thrust into his hands, but the judge did not believe him.”
Plato sauntered around the door, tail up, not a care in the world. He’d doubtless smelled the butter.
“You have another visitor,” Miss Winston said. “What a fine specimen.”
Plato squinted at her—approvingly, Quinn thought. “He has a reputation for favoring the company of the condemned. Davies and Ned won’t touch him.”
“Now that is ridiculous.” Plato leapt onto the table, and Miss Winston aimed her nose at the cat. Plato treated her to an almost-nose-kiss, then rumbled like thunder when the lady used her left hand to scratch behind his ears.
A sense of sweetness stole over Quinn, of innocence in the midst of insanity. Miss Winston was fond of cats, apparently, and Plato was fond of the butter he’d soon try to lick from the fingers of Miss Winston’s right hand. For a moment, everything—the stink and noise of Newgate, the reality of death a week from Monday, the vague worry about what Ned and Davies were up to—receded as woman and cat charmed each other.
“He’ll get hair all over your skirts.”
She sat back. “Do I strike you as a woman who has the luxury of taking exception to cat hair?”
Well, yes, she did, or she should have. Miss Winston should have had a maid brushing out her hair every night, bringing her chocolate first thing in the day, and fretting over her wardrobe. Not her two gray dresses, her wardrobe.
Quinn went to the sideboard and extracted twenty shiny coins. He took them to the table, tied them up in his last monogrammed handkerchief, and slid it across.
“A bit extra,” he said, “in case any of the parties involved require additional remuneration. Any excess you may keep for yourself.”
She put the cat on the carpet and set about untying the bundle. “That is not necessary, Mr. Wentworth. I’d free every nonviolent offender on the premises, every child, every—” She fell silent until she’d worked the knot loose and spread the coins on the square of linen.
“This is twenty pounds.” Miss Winston struck Quinn as a woman of great self-possession, and yet she was agog at the sum on the table. Once upon a time, twenty pounds would have been a fortune to him too.
“You said ten pounds would see Ned free. That means a great deal to me.” Though Quinn wasn’t about to examine why Ned’s freedom meant anything at all. A last gesture of defiance, perhaps, or a sop to a conscience past redeeming.
“But that’s ten pounds too much.”
“Is it? Complicated sums have ever defeated me.”
She looked up sharply. “Do not mock me.”
“Never disdain money, Miss Winston. The coin is innocent of wrongdoing, and you can use a new pair of gloves.”
Quinn brushed a few crumbs from the table and dusted them onto the windowsill. Birds would feast on them, and Ned would delight in the birds.
“What are you doing?” Miss Winston asked.
“Feeding pigeons. And you?”
As Quinn had swept the crumbs into his palm, she had done likewise with the coins, then tied them up in the handkerchief.
“I should not take your money,” she said. “Not more than the ten pounds agreed to. One behaves charitably and properly for the pleasure of doing the right thing.”
She believed that twaddle, which was a sign of either great integrity or a weakness of the mind.
“So allow me this small, final pleasure.” That was bad of him, bringing death into the conversation. Doubtless the Almighty had added another year on to the eternity Quinn would spend regretting a life largely wasted.
Miss Winston stuffed the coins into a pocket of her cloak. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because a week from Monday, I will hang from my neck until, gasping, choking, and soiling myself, I die. I would like to be recalled as something more than a fine show for the guards on a Monday morning.”
She put a hand to her throat, the first indication that she wasn’t impervious to the brutality of Newgate.
“You haven’t eaten your gingerbread,” she said.
He broke it in two and held out half the slice. Miss Winston looked at the treat, then at him, then at the treat. She must have had a fondness for gingerbread, because she took the proffered sweet.
They ate in silence, while Quinn studied his companion. Was she pale today? Tired? Resentful of her father? Or had arranging Ned’s escape taxed her composure? Something about the lady was off. If he’d met her at the bank, he would have put her in the category of customers about to explain a late payment but not yet in default.
“I apologize for my remark about your gloves,” Quinn said. “You have gloves. Mine were among the first casualties of the local economy.”
She took a considering sip of her lemonade. “But you have coin.”
“I do now. That took some time and ingenuity.” How that had stung, to be a banker without coin, without anything of value. Then old skills had reasserted themselves, and Quinn had bartered his way into a private cell and regular meals. The rest had been common sense and the inertia of a population for whom ingenuity was the difference between life and death.
“This lemonade is quite sweet,” Miss Winston said, wrinkling her nose. “Or perhaps I’ve grown unused to anything made with sugar.”
“Are your father’s circumstances that limited?” Preaching and penury did not necessarily go hand in hand.
“His tolerance for anything other than necessities is limited. We were comfortable once. We’re on appallingly good terms with the pawnbroker now.” She put her hand to her throat again. “The lemonade is disagreeing with me.”
Sickness was rampant at Newgate. Jail fever, consumption, venereal diseases, bad food…Misery concentrated here, and it spread.
Quinn came around the table and put the back of his hand to Miss Winston’s forehead. “You’re not fevered. Does only your digestion trouble you?”
“I’m sure it will pass.” She rose and braced herself against the table, but made no attempt to reach the door.
“If you’re unwell, then you’re better off staying here.”
She wasn’t coughing, wasn’t hot to the touch, didn’t appear chilled, though many illnesses began slowly and gathered momentum until suffering reached a crescendo that made death welcome.
“I’m not ill.” She hunched her shoulders and leaned over, as if winded. Her weight was on one hand, while the other hand pressed to her belly.
No. Not her belly. Lower.
Her hand pressed against her womb, which bulged slightly, now that she’d smoothed the billowing folds of her cloak.
“Sit down.” Quinn nudged the chair closer with his foot. “Sit down, and tell me who the father is.”
She didn’t sit; she swayed into him. Quinn wrapped his arms around her, and for the first time in years, embraced a woman of his own free will.