Chapter One #3
Samuel sat in one of the chairs, a book open in his lap, though Serena suspected he was not truly reading it.
He was a handsome boy, dark-haired like his elder sister, with features that hinted he might one day grow into the sort of man who turned heads in ballrooms. But there was a stillness to him that was unnatural in an eight-year-old—a watchfulness that spoke of too much seen, too much lost, too early learned about the world’s unreliability.
He did not look up as they entered. His gaze remained fixed upon the page, his body tense and unmoving.
And then there was Rosie.
She was curled into the corner of the window seat, small and delicate as a china doll, clutching something to her chest. A doll, Serena realised—a rag doll with yellow yarn hair that had clearly seen better days.
The hair was missing in patches, as though tugged away by anxious fingers, and one of its button eyes hung loose upon a thread.
Rosie herself was the image of her mother from the portrait—fair hair, blue eyes, a rosebud mouth that ought to have been shaped for smiles. But there were none upon her face now. Only wariness, and something that looked very much like fear.
“Children,” Mrs McConnor said, her voice softening in a way Serena had not yet heard, “this is Miss Collard. She is to be your new governess.”
Neither child replied.
Serena waited a moment, then crossed the room and settled into the chair nearest Samuel—close enough to seem approachable, yet far enough away not to crowd him.
“Good afternoon,” she said pleasantly. “I am very glad to meet you both. Miss Ella has already told me a great deal about the household, though I suspect there is much more yet to learn.”
Samuel’s eyes flickered up from his book—only for an instant—before dropping again. But it was long enough for Serena to glimpse what lay behind them: grief, certainly, but also something harder. Distrust. The quiet conviction that this new person would, like all the others, eventually disappear.
She did not take it personally. She could not afford to.
“I understand you enjoy reading,” she said, nodding towards the book in his hands. “What are you reading?”
For a long moment, she thought he would not answer. The silence stretched between them, heavy with all the things he could not, or would not say.
Then, so quietly she almost missed it, “Robinson Crusoe.”
“An excellent choice. I read it myself when I was about your age. I remember being particularly fascinated by the footprint in the sand. Do you know the part I mean?”
Another flicker of those dark eyes. A tiny nod.
“It terrified me,” Serena confessed. “I had nightmares for a week about being alone on an island and discovering that I was not, in fact, alone. My father had to hide the book until I recovered.”
Something shifted in Samuel’s expression—not a smile, nothing so dramatic, but a slight loosening about the eyes. As though he had expected condescension and received something else instead.
Serena turned then to Rosie, who had not moved from her corner of the window seat. The little girl watched her with the wide-eyed wariness of a rabbit that has sighted a fox, but is not yet certain whether it should flee.
“And you must be Miss Rosie,” Serena said, keeping her voice gentle. “What a lovely doll you have. Does she have a name?”
Rosie’s arms tightened about the battered doll, drawing it closer to her chest. For a moment, Serena thought she would not answer at all.
Then, in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “Marianne.”
“Marianne,” Serena repeated. “What a beautiful name. Is she a good companion?”
A nod—small, but certain.
“I am glad. Everyone needs a good companion.” Serena made no attempt to move nearer or to touch the doll; she had learned that, with children like Rosie, patience was far more valuable than enthusiasm.
“I hope that perhaps we might become companions too, in time. There is no hurry. We have a great deal of time to become acquainted.”
Rosie did not speak, but she did not turn away either. Serena counted it as a second small victory.
Mrs McConnor, who had been observing the exchange from the doorway, cleared her throat.
“I will leave you to settle in, Miss Collard. Your room is through there—” she gestured to a door at the far side of the sitting room “—and dinner will be brought up at six. If you require anything, ring the bell and someone will come.”
“Thank you, Mrs McConnor. You have been most helpful.”
The housekeeper inclined her head, her expression still reserved, but perhaps a shade less forbidding than before. “Welcome to Greystone Hall, Miss Collard. I hope you will be… comfortable here.”
It was not, Serena noted, quite the same as hoping she would stay. But it was something.
***
The afternoon passed in a curious state of suspended animation. Serena unpacked her belongings in her new room—which was, as promised, comfortable and well-appointed, if somewhat impersonal—and attempted to begin establishing a rapport with her new charges.
Ella, predictably, proved the most challenging.
She returned to the nursery shortly after Serena’s arrival and spent the ensuing hours observing her every movement with the sharp-eyed attention of a barrister examining a witness.
Everything Serena said was met with polite scepticism; every gesture of warmth received with careful neutrality.
“You needn’t pretend to be interested in our well-being,” Ella informed her during a brief discussion of the next day’s lessons. “We know you are being paid to be here. It is not as though you have chosen us.”
Serena considered several possible replies, ranging from the diplomatic to the devastatingly honest, and settled upon something in between.
“You are quite right,” she said. “I am being paid to be here. That is how employment works, Miss Ella. But I would point out that I chose this position from among several available to me. I might have accepted a post in London, with a family possessing twice as many servants and three times as much consequence. Instead, I am here—in Derbyshire, in a house said to be impossible to manage, with children described as difficult beyond all reason.” She paused, allowing a faint smile to curve her lips.
“Either I am extraordinarily foolish, or I have my reasons for being here. You may decide for yourself which seems the more likely.”
Ella’s brow furrowed, as though she were attempting to solve a particularly complex mathematical problem. “What reasons?”
“That, Miss Ella, is a conversation for another day. For now, I believe it is nearly time for dinner, and I should very much like to wash my face before the meal arrives. Travel leaves one feeling distinctly grimy.”
She withdrew to her room before Ella could press the point further, though she suspected the girl would return to the subject at the earliest opportunity. Ella was not the type to allow a mystery to remain unsolved.
Dinner, when it arrived, was simple but well prepared—roast chicken, vegetables from the estate’s kitchen garden, fresh bread still warm from the oven.
Serena ate in the sitting room with the children, a choice that seemed to surprise them; apparently, previous governesses had preferred the solitude of their own rooms.
Samuel ate in silence; his gaze fixed upon his plate.
Rosie picked at her food without enthusiasm, occasionally tearing off small pieces of bread and feeding them to Marianne when she thought herself unobserved.
Only Ella ate with any real appetite, though she maintained her watchful silence throughout the meal.
It was not, Serena reflected, the most comfortable dinner she had ever experienced. But it was not the worst either, and for a first day, that would have to suffice.
Afterwards, she supervised the children’s preparations for bed—helping Rosie into her nightgown when the little girl’s fingers proved unequal to the buttons, ensuring that Samuel had washed behind his ears, which he had not, and reminding Ella that reading by candlelight would ruin her eyesight—a warning which was met with the scepticism it likely deserved.
By the time all three were settled in their beds, Serena was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion. It was the particular weariness born of maintaining careful control over every word, every expression, every gesture—the fatigue of being perpetually on display.
She returned to her own room and sat heavily upon the edge of the bed, allowing herself, for just a moment, to let the mask slip.
The children were wounded. That much was evident.
Ella had armoured herself in premature adulthood; Samuel had retreated into silence; and Rosie had curled about her grief like a small creature guarding an injury.
They were not difficult children, whatever Lord Greystone might believe.
They were simply children who had learned, through the cruellest of lessons, that love was not permanent, and that those upon whom one depended could vanish without warning.
Serena understood that lesson. She understood it far better than she would ever admit aloud.
She had been ten years old when her mother died—old enough to grasp what death meant, young enough to believe, in some secret corner of her heart, that if she were very good and very quiet and very perfect, she might somehow bring her mother back.
She had been sixteen when her father followed, leaving her alone in the world with nothing but a modest education and the necessity of earning her own living.
Governesses, she had learned in the years since, occupied a strange liminal space—too educated to be servants, too dependent to be family.
They were invited into households and then, inevitably, dismissed from them.
They watched children grow and change and become people, only to see those children move on to lives that no longer required a governess’s presence.
She had loved the children she taught. She had loved them despite knowing she ought not to—that attachment led only to pain, that every farewell would tear away another small piece of her heart.
And she had sworn, after her last position—after the Ashworth children had hugged her and cried and promised to write, only to cease after three months, as children invariably did—she had sworn she would not make that mistake again.
She would be competent. She would be kind. But she would not love.
It was the only way to survive.