Chapter 6 #2
“Ladies, I suspect you were both very good all year, because this coal shed is half full, and I see not one, but two shovels against the back wall.”
“We have coal?” Hope came closer slowly, as if unwilling to believe even the evidence of her eyes.
“We have a big pile of coal,” Holly said, “and we have gingerbread and butter and flowers. This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” She grabbed the trunk of the lemon tree and spun around it as if it were a maypole.
Coal, lots and lots of coal. Joshua had beheld larger piles of coal, but none so wonderful as the old mess in the coal closet before him now.
Hope slipped an arm around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. “Stinky, filthy, costly coal. A treasure indeed. Perhaps you were a good fellow all year too.”
Joshua had been a sad, dutiful fellow, but in that moment, sadness and duty were nowhere to be found. He’d done something right in Hope’s eyes, and the look she turned on him was the very best holiday token he could have asked for.
He kissed her cheek, a gesture of sheer rejoicing, and she beamed at him.
“Gingerbread with butter seems a fitting way to celebrate,” Hope said, holding up the plate.
Joshua took a slice—not the thickest—and held it up to Hope’s mouth. She nibbled, he nibbled, and they shared their slice while Holly bellowed about hark the harried angels singing, and Heifer curled up for a nap beneath the blooming camellias.
“Found him!” Ned’s triumph was spoiled by a subsequent sneeze. He produced a handkerchief, sneezed again, and came up smiling. “Our Joshua has gone to ground in the most obvious, least likely place. His own house.”
Quinn glanced at Jane, who was smiling as well, though his duchess was also clearly puzzled by Ned’s good news.
Her needle went still, and she put her embroidery on top of her workbasket. “I thought he sold that house when he married? Or, no… after that. The place stood empty for a time, but then he must have sold it. A family was living there. Perhaps he only rented it out?”
Quinn set aside his ledger and took off his glasses. “Jane, have you been spying?”
A conspiratorial glance flicked between Jane and young Ned. They were as thick as thieves—thicker, in fact, according to Ned, who knew of what he spoke.
“Keeping an eye on matters for a friend,” Jane said, rising from her wing chair. “Why hasn’t Joshua sent us a message, Quinn?”
“He’s hibernating,” Ned said, sparing Quinn an answer. “Going back to his hidey-hole. He has a fine old house to put him in mind of all the good times before he went and banished himself. He’s getting his land legs, and then we’ll hear from him.”
Ned was nobody’s fool, though Quinn still wasn’t sure how the boy he’d met in prison had grown so tall. When had Ned stopped dropping aitches, and how had he learned to dress like a perfect gentleman?
All very mysterious, though Jane had figured prominently in the metamorphosis. Most of the credit went to Ned himself, though. A more determined soul did not walk the earth.
“Why go to ground when we were expecting to host him for the holidays?” Jane asked, worrying a nail. “A house of any size takes days to heat and provision, and few people are in search of posts at a time of year when we all seek to be with family.”
“Not all of us have family.” Quinn rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Family worth acknowledging, that is.” The Wentworths were a family largely because Jane had made them so.
She had the tenacity and resourcefulness common to many a preacher’s daughter and a largeness of heart that Quinn marveled at regularly.
Ned settled in a corner of the sofa and picked up Jane’s discarded embroidery.
“I see it like this,” he said, freeing the needle from the fabric.
“Joshua hasn’t any family here in London.
But he did have family in New York. We’re his family, but we’re not that family.
Might be, he’s getting his courage up. When he greets us again, he says a little bit of goodbye—another goodbye—to the family he left in America. ”
The family he’d buried in America. Quinn still had the letter. Regret to relate that Maureen and young Eric were gathered to untimely rewards prior to Christmas. Influenza, then lung fever. A common progression. Your condolences are appreciated in anticipation. Penrose.
The shortest, saddest, most alarming letter Quinn had ever received.
“I should write him a note,” Jane said. “Welcome him home. Let him know we’re missing him, but content to leave the timing of a reunion to him.”
Ned minutely shook his head as he began a delicate line of green stitches on the white linen. His embroidery was technically the equal to Jane’s and creatively superior to it for never having been subjected to the guiding hands of governesses or nannies.
“Ned says we need to exercise patience,” Quinn observed.
“I agree with him. Joshua promised a return by the New Year, and we assumed he’d be our guest. Our holiday invitation might have slipped his mind.
He might be waiting for his luggage to be sorted.
Nobody wants to present himself as a holiday caller in his dressing gown and Hessians. ”
Jane made a face that belied her lofty social status. “I hate being patient.”
“But you do it so well,” Quinn replied. “Witness, the gentlemen whose company you keep in this room, who were once a pair of ruffians.”
Ned held up his handiwork, then resumed stitching. “I was an urchin, thank you very much. You were the ruffian. A ruffian banker. Now you are a ducal ruffian banker.”
Ned and Quinn had both been lost, and Jane had found them. Every instinct Quinn possessed bellowed that Joshua was now lost. He’d not be found with the usual holiday feasting and diversions. He’d have to navigate his own way home, and when he did, Quinn and Jane would rejoice loudly indeed.
“I am due to meet with Vicar regarding altar flowers,” Jane said, glancing at the clock. “That man can make shortbread and tea cakes disappear like some sort of street conjurer handed a shiny sovereign.”
“Goes with the profession,” Ned said. “Same with urchins and ruffian bankers. We adore our sweets. If Vicar brings up the choir again, you will inform him that I have lost my voice. I will not get it back until summer. His Grace has a fine bass, though.”
“Mind your tongue, Ned.” Once upon a time, that growl would have chastened Ned.
“I am an honest man,” Ned retorted. “Our duchess is contemplating a bit of mendacity, though. Jane wants to tell Vicar she has a megrim while she slips out the kitchen door and makes a discreet pass, or three, by Joshua’s house.”
“Four,” Jane said, “before I knock on the door and ask if anybody has seen any misplaced bankers fresh from New York.”
“Smoke is coming from two chimneys,” Ned said. “The kitchen and what I presume must be a bedroom, but not the largest apartment on the back corner of the second floor.”
Jane’s frown eased. “Smaller rooms are easier to heat.”
“The front and back walkways are shoveled clean,” Ned went on, “as is the whole street. I spotted footprints all over the back garden. Himself is cozy, and somebody is tending to his kitchen hearth. Other somebodies are bustling about the garden as servants do when passing between households. You need not fret that Joshua is shivering in his own garret.”
Ned, who had endured his share of shivering in garrets, had doubtless done that reconnaissance for Jane’s sake. Also for Quinn’s.
“Thank you, Neddy.” Jane kissed his cheek. “You have just condemned me to forty-five minutes of Vicar’s ruminations on the symbolism of stars in the night sky, but then, Cook will make her anise biscuits in the shape of stars, won’t she?”
“Speaking of biscuits…?” Ned turned on Jane his hopeful-little-lad look, which had at some point become his charming-young-fellow look.
“To blazes with you and that bottomless pit you call a tummy, Ned Wentworth. I am off to serve my penance with Vicar. You two reprobates can just go hungry until luncheon.” Jane kissed Quinn’s cheek and departed.
She and Vicar would do equal justice to the treats, and the symbolism of empty plates and full bellies would earn honorable mention in Vicar’s maunderings.
He and Jane were great good friends, though half the world seemed to enjoy that status where Jane was concerned.
She was no sort of duchess, in the opinion of some.
Quinn adored Jane’s brand of duchessing.
“What else?” he asked as Ned switched from green thread to blue.
“Something peculiar is afoot. The footprints in the garden are mostly too small to be adult, and there’s a cat making free with the property as well.
Go one or two streets over, and the walkways aren’t nearly as clear.
When I asked about that, I was told a gang of boys led by a gent in fine tailoring whipped through the whole job yesterday. ”
“Description of the gent?”
“Tall, well-spoken, blond, no gloves, no scarf, but a coat fine enough for Bond Street, despite boots that had seen better days.”
“Nobody shovels snow in his newest pair from Hoby’s. What do you make of it?”
Ned began on a line of fine blue stitches exactly paralleling the row of green he’d just finished.
“Joshua’s house has a conservatory, and rumor is that’s one of the places a lot of street boys go for makeshift shelter, but the fact is, there’s a widow and her little girl living in that house. The cat has house privileges as well.”
Ned’s gift for observation of details had been learned in a hard school from which Quinn had graduated as well. “Anything else?”
“Nobody has seen any trunks delivered to that address in the past day or two, but then, most of London is still shoveling out.”
“Or waiting for a thaw to come along. Do you know if Joshua sold that property?” Quinn and his partner observed a scrupulous mutual lack of interest in each other’s personal finances.
“You’re the banker. I don’t see how a widow who can afford to light only two fires in the whole house would acquire the place outright. Might be a private mortgage somewhere, or she could have inherited the property, but a bank mortgage is also a possibility.”
By damn, Ned was a credit to his upbringing—all of his upbringing.
Quinn slipped his glasses into a breast pocket and rose. “You’ll set a watch on the place?”
“Already done.”
“I’m away lest Vicar accost me to play a shepherd in his Christmas pageant.”
Ned’s needle went still. “Shepherd. Spare me. Where are you off to?”
“The bank.”
“I’ll come with you.” He tucked the needle into a corner of the fabric and got to his feet. “Of course, we’ll miss the tray Jane ordered for us.”
“We’ll depart through the mews by way of the kitchen. I paraded about in my dressing gown with a towel on my head for the amusement of the faithful two years ago. One does not forget such an ordeal.”
“And the lamb. You holding that squirming, bleating lamb and trying to look holy was the best part.”
“I still have the dressing gown, Edward Wentworth, and Jane can take it in to fit you.”
Ned made for the door. “Meet you by the pantries.”
Quinn beat him by two minutes, or two biscuits, as holiday timekeeping went.
All the way to the bank, Quinn considered who might be holding the mortgage on Joshua’s former residence.
He also wondered about the widow who’d taken Joshua in when he’d declined the hospitality of those who loved him, but who might no longer truly know him.