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“Is his situation very bad?” he finally asked. “Bolderwood, I mean.”
Das folded Isaac’s letter. “Rumor is he borrowed the money for that investment. From a moneylender.”
“What?” Joshua skidded to a stop. “I told him only to risk what he could afford to lose.”
“I believe he remained optimistic.”
“The devil save us from optimists. Idiots, the lot of them.” He moved on again. “Send Cosway or someone to make discreet inquiries. Not that I want to bail that clown out. These young lords. Receive an estate as their birthright and they give it as much respect as they give their breakfast. To think that could have been me.”
He twirled the signet ring on his little finger. Would he have been like that? If his father’s first wife, Lady Susan Lightwell, had in fact died when Treyford said she had and hadn’t turned out to be living in an Irish convent all those years—if Treyford’s bigamous marriage to Joshua’s mother hadn’t been dissolved—if Joshua was still heir to the earldom as he had been for the first fourteen years of his life…Treyford was in excellent health, promising to be a blight on society for years yet, so would Joshua have been like Bolderwood? Fashionable, profligate, and utterly useless.
And also utterly bored.
What a waste.
“Bolderwood jilted Mrs. DeWitt, you know,” he said, and enjoyed that he had surprised Das. “Three weeks before their wedding. Which is why her father asked me to marry her.”
“Interesting.”
“No, actually. Not interesting at all.”
Das waved Isaac’s letter. “In that, Lord Bolderwood also claims you flirted withhiswife.”
“I what?” Joshua’s memory offered the image of a pale woman who kept tittering at him at Lady Featherstone’s card party and ruined his enjoyment of the game. As he recalled, he’d been rude to her. Clearly not rude enough. “Wives,” he said. “They disrupt everything. Never get one, Das.”
“I already have one.”
“You what? This a recent acquisition?”
“We’ve been married nearly five years.”
“You’ve worked for me for four years.” He considered this a moment. “Huh. Devoted woman. To follow you all the way to Britain.”
“Coming here was Mrs. Das’s idea, actually,” Das said. “There was some family opposition to our marriage, and I had a, ah, disagreement with a senior official in the East India Company, so it seemed prudent to make a home elsewhere. Padma thought Britain would suit us well enough, as the British had been interfering with my family for generations. She has an odd sense of humor, my wife.”
Joshua’s brain buzzed with questions but he shut them down. He did not want to know about Das and his wife, and why they wanted to be married so badly they left their whole life behind, and how Das had annoyed the East India Company and, no, no, he did not want to know. He knew nothing about his secretaries. They did their jobs and went home so he could forget about them.
“Huh,” was all Joshua said.
“Mr. Newell has a wife too, as well as six children.”
“That many.”
“Mr. Putney has a wife, as does Mr. Allan. And Mr. Cosway is courting Miss Sampson.”
Joshua rubbed his neck, aghast. His secretaries had seemed so sensible and reliable, when the whole time they’d been going around getting married behind his back.
“Work, Das,” he said, returning to more productive topics of conversation, as they strode into St. James Park. “We need a contract, patents, investors. We need to make the most of this finding. Electrical power!”
“It is exciting, but the inventor himself admits he sees no immediate practical application,” Das said. “This will not make any money.”
“I don’t care.”
Joshua stopped short, startled by his own words. He stared at Das, who stared back at him.
“I don’t care,” he said again, wonderingly. He looked away from Das, at the sky, at the gardens, at the horses and birds and people. “How would you say I make money, Das?”
“You observe what people will want in the near future and you act fast to invest in those things.”
