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Jane, buttering her toast at Quinn’s right elbow with every appearance of placid calm, glanced at her husband. Quinn captured his wife’s hand and kissed her fingers, then let her go when she smiled at him.
How nauseatingly domestic.
Constance, sketching down at the corner of the table that received the first rays of morning light, pretended to ignore this exchange. She excelled at pretending to ignore anything she didn’t like or comprehend. She’d waft away to her studio after breakfast, though, and sketch joined hands and marital glances by the hour, her means of taking a mystery apart.
Stephen had no patience with such subtleties when a sibling’s well-being was at stake.
“We should do Althea the courtesy of respecting her decisions,” Quinn said, pouring Jane another half cup of chocolate. “If I could avoid Town in spring I would, but Parliament is sitting, and thus I am expected to bide here.”
Five years ago, Quinton, Duke of Walden, would have told Parliament to bugger itself. Now he chaired committees, directed charities, wrote reports, and hardly ever swore in the presence of ladies. Having daughters did that to a man.
Being an uncle was having a similar though muted effect on Stephen. “What if Althea is unwell?” he asked, hooking both canes on his left wrist so he could spoon eggs onto a plate at the sideboard. “She’d never say a word, and we’d go waltzing off to Almack’s, while our sister battled consumption or gout or some damned ailment with no family at her side.”
Quinn offered Jane a bit of ham on the end of a fork. “So you delighted in having family hover about as you contended with your bad leg?”
Stephen had wanted to murder anybody who showed him the least consideration. He still regarded pity as a deadly sin. Witness, he insisted on filling his own plate, and managing both the plate and two canes over the short distance to the near side of the table.
He made it to his chair without incident. “We cannot allow Althea to retire from the field in dishonor, Quinn.”
Jane took a sip of her chocolate. “While you were off larking about the Continent, Althea endured five London Seasons, Stephen. She’s been presented at court, she’s been fawned over by the fortune hunters. If Mayfair is not to her taste, she should be allowed to do as she pleases.”
I am related to a pack of nincompoops.“I spend enough time in London to know that the hostesses are cruel to her. They pair her with the worst dancers, the leering buffoons without fortune or manners. At all those lovely, formal dinners, they sit her beside the gouty barons with agile, naughty hands. The biddies and beldames gossip about her in the retiring room no matter how carefully she dresses or how correctly she comports herself. She’s not doing as she pleases by rusticating in Yorkshire. She’s admitting defeat.”
Quinn glowered over the rims of the spectacles he wore for reading the morning papers. “How do you know this?”
A silence grew, while Stephen anticipated having to verbally arm wrestle his older brother. Quinn would never attack him physically—more’s the pity—but he could cut with words more deftly than Stephen could wield a knife.
Constance put down her pencil. “How could you not know it, Quinn? It’s been going on for years.”
Jane peered at her cup of chocolate. “One strongly suspected. One did not precisely know and one did not want to insult Althea by prying. Then too, if Althea was seen to hide behind my skirts, matters could go even worse for her, though the hostesses are always pleasant to me. Who must I ruin?”
Constance got up to serve herself some coffee and tipped the contents of a flask into the hot brew before returning to the table. Both sisters imbibed spirits when among family, which was more cause for concern. Would Althea become a sot, gazing mournfully out across the bleak moors? Stephen occasionally flirted with sot-hood, and might yet succumb to its lures.
“Better to ask who has treated Althea decently,” Constance said. “The she-wolves mostly leave me alone because I hide behind my sketching and content myself with the company of wallflowers. Older sisters typically marry first, so Althea has borne the brunt of the matchmakers’ spite. Without her here this Season, I expect I will become the butt of more ill will.”
And yet, Constance had come south anyway, her version of sororal loyalty.
“It’s like this, Quinn,” Stephen said, holding his coffee cup out to Constance, who obliged with a meager serving of spirits. “When Jack Wentworth sent his younger children out to beg, Althea stood before me, so nobody could see me with my pathetic little crutch and twisted leg. If she got a few pennies for her humiliation, she made sure Con and I had something to eat before we returned home.
“When we did go home,” Stephen continued, “Althea went in first, to deal with Jack. If we’d earned little—or nothing, which was often the case—she endured his displeasure and she forbade us to go to her rescue, not that we could have done much.”
Quinn took off his spectacles, folding the earpieces slowly, right then left. “I knew Jack was dangerous, but why wasn’t I told that Althea purposely drew his fire? We agreed none of you three was ever to be alone with him.”
Constance held her coffee cup beneath her nose. “Tell you, so you could do what? Scold Jack into reforming? He would have killed you for trying. You were earning what you could, and that’s why Jack let you live. The problem with Althea isn’t that she’s accustomed to putting up with bullies, it’s that she remembers our mama.”
“Althea is very good with the girls,” Jane said. “She knew that Bitty was afraid of dogs when I had no inkling.”
Elizabeth—Bitty—was no longer afraid of dogs because Althea had jollied her niece past that fear.
“Althea wants a family,” Constance said. “She recalls what it was like to have a mama, she sees how happy a family can be, and she deserves that. She would never choose a spouse who’d bring gossip down on the rest of us—a sheep farmer or wainwright, no matter how lovely he was—so Stephen has the right of it: Althea has given up on the one dream she’s longed for.”
Quinn wrinkled a splendid ducal beak. “York has a few eligibles. She might simply be shopping in a different market or taking a breather between rounds.”
“Because for Althea,” Stephen said, “finding the right spouse must be akin to horse trading or pugilism? Is that how you think in-laws should be acquired, Quinn?”
“We don’t know why Althea has chosen to remain in Yorkshire this year,” Jane said. “Writing to her is of no use. She replies conscientiously, all platitudes and pleasantry. We must send a competent spy.”
Well, thank God for Jane’s common sense.
