Chapter Two
“I think it is time to face facts.” Miss Prentice glanced at the latest rejection letter lying on her desk with a pained expression. “Interviews are not your forte, Georgina.”
Unfortunately, that was a statement Georgie could not argue with. Eighteen months after graduating as a fully-fledged protégé, thirty-three interviews, and thirty-three similarly depressing rejections, it was looking increasingly likely that she would never secure a position as a governess anywhere decent. Or anywhere at all for that matter, as the current curt but cruel missive on her beloved mentor’s desk was testament. The Steadman family weren’t particularly good ton and didn’t even reside in London, but desperate times had called for desperate measures, so Miss P had put her forward for the job in the hope that they wouldn’t be too picky.
While that was humiliation enough, the uppity Lady Steadman hadn’t tried to be polite in her rejection either. Instead, she had stated plainly that she hadn’t given Georgie the job, not because there was a better candidate who had pipped her to the post, but because “regrettably, and despite her glowing references from the school, Miss Georgina Rowe had too much to say for herself and did not pass muster at all.” The at all had been underlined.
Twice.
“What on earth did you say to upset this family?” It was clear Miss P’s legendary patience was wearing thin.
“I am not entirely sure…” Which was a lie because Georgie had felt the palpable and frigid change in the wind the moment Lady Steadman had brought up the touchy subject of discipline early in the interview. “I very definitely did try to bite my tongue, exactly as you cautioned.”
Two wily blue eyes locked with hers. “You tried.”
“I most definitely did. I tried really hard to curb my regrettable and rash inbred tendency to speak my mind.” The eyes were relentless now, boring into her soul to get to the whole, unvarnished truth. “I genuinely tried my best this time.” Which she had—right up until the moment that she hadn’t and the real Georgie had spoken.
But the most galling thing was that she had been working hard on suppressing that rebellious aspect of her character because there really wasn’t a need for it now that the sanctimonious colonel and all his ludicrous rules were very much in her past. Georgie hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her stepfather since the day he had dispatched her to Miss Prentice’s, and she had no reason to rebel. Here, within these calming walls, were reason and affability. Voices were rarely raised because they did not need to be, and everyone treated everyone else with respect, no matter their age. Yet still, Georgie could not tolerate unfairness. She abhorred injustice, ignorant stupidity, and pointless rules. The slightest whiff of any of that and, as her friend Lottie was so fond of saying, she instantly turned into Joan of Arc. Fully armed and ready to march into battle.
“Tried implies that you tried—then failed.” When Miss P glared, it was too potent a weapon to ignore. Georgie instantly began to wither beneath it until she could stand it no more.
“All right… we had a minor disagreement about the phrase ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’” An overused quote of the colonel’s, usually before he threw something at her, which never failed to raise her hackles.
“Not again.” Miss P’s palm slapped her forehead before she huffed out a sigh of resignation. “How many times must we have this same conversation, Georgina? How many times do I have to tell you that vocalizing your principles aloud and acting upon them quietly in the background are two entirely different things? When the simple truth is a family hire a governess to keep their offspring from being underfoot and frankly do not care what methods that governess employs to keep the little dears quiet while she does it.”
She could feel herself bristling again in zealous rebellion, because “children should be seen but never heard” was another one of the unimaginative colonel’s lecturing mantras and yet another old adage she fundamentally disagreed with. Children should be both seen and heard. Listened to. Engaged with. Their rampant curiosity about everything nurtured and encouraged. Fed with all the answers and then emboldened to ask all the questions, even those that had no answers yet. Because, if history had taught the world anything, it was that independent thought was something to be celebrated, not oppressed.
Where would civilization be if some unique thinker hadn’t invented the wheel? Or spread forbidden knowledge to the masses via the printing press? Or the brave souls through the ages who had drawn a line in the sand and stood up to the rampaging tyrants intent on taking what wasn’t theirs? They would still be oppressed serfs living in the Middle Ages! Independent thinking and progress went hand in hand and…
Georgie almost groaned aloud as she wrestled St. Joan back into her box so that she could temper her answer. “Respect always commands more discipline than the rod ever could, and makes for a much better and more sustainable environment for learning.” Georgie believed that to her core. “You have never been one for draconian punishments or rule by fear either, so I know you agree with me, Miss P. At least on the fundamentals.” Even after seven years, Georgie still chafed against the rigid stricture of the Four D’s. Decorum and discretion, especially, had never come easy to her. “I politely tried to explain my ethos to Lady Steadman but—”
Her mentor stopped her with a lackluster raised palm. “An untried and untested governess has no right to claim an ethos, Georgina. Until you have put it into practice outside of these walls, and reaped the rewards of it, it is still a theory. An unproven one at that. That it is an ethos that I also happen to subscribe to is by the by in this instance. I have a reputation as a successful educator with decades of experience, and you do not. Not yet at least, and you will never achieve that reputation unless you actually get a job doing it, dearest.”
“So I must pretend that I shall beat my charges within an inch of their lives if they dare to put a foot wrong to placate their disinterested parents? Pretend that I subscribe to all those silly old doctrines and archaic, nonsensical customs during an interview simply to get hired? Lie to a potential employer’s face from the outset? Be disingenuous and dishonest?”
Miss P glanced skyward as if seeking strength from the heavens. “There is an ocean of difference between lying and tactful diplomacy, dear. When Lady Steadman suggested that you should not spare the rod or spoil the child, you could have nodded and said that you firmly believe that good discipline forms the foundation of a good education—because it does and you wouldn’t be lying. No child will learn anything if they are allowed to run riot or swing from the chandeliers. Whether you use the rod to keep them in check or your yet-untested ethos will make no difference so long as the children learn. And so long as the chandeliers remain unswung on, and all appears on the surface to be running precisely as they envisage it, their parents are unlikely to ever set one foot into the nursery, so how you intend to run that is a moot point. Once you have their confidence, the nursery shall be your kingdom to rule over as you see fit. That has always been the way of things.”
“Just because something has always been done a certain way does not necessarily mean that way is right.” She believed that to her core too. How on earth could one embrace all the potential possibilities if one plowed the same old furrow day after day? Obviously, there should be rules and boundaries—but surely they, too, should have the capacity to bend and change according to circumstances. Change was always four-fifths for the better, especially when the march of progress was relentless.
“Of course it doesn’t. However, the purpose of an interview is to make those parents see you as employable, Georgina. Taking issue with them during it is never going to get you the job—as this is proof.” She picked up the letter and waved it. “You are an excellent teacher. The best I have ever trained—canny, adaptable, unflappable, intuitive, imaginative, and always top of every class. You possess that rare and unique talent of getting the best out of your students. That is a gift. A miraculous gift that I envy because I was not blessed with it. With your talent, you should have your pick of positions. Employers should be beating a path to your door, begging you to deign to work for them and weave your phenomenal magic on their children, yet you are the only one of my protégés who has never been offered a single position. In the decade since this school was founded, thirty-three consecutive rejections is a record, young lady, and not one that you should be proud of.”
Miss Prentice had her there. If anything, Georgie was mortified by her abysmal record. Since she had technically graduated almost two summers ago, she had watched all her classmates secure positions and leave the school for better things. Her best friends, Lottie, Portia, and Kitty, had all been employed within weeks of their graduation. Lottie and Kitty had even been dismissed from their posts in the last eighteen months—in Kitty’s case, repeatedly—and they still managed to quickly find reemployment simply because they were protégés.
Georgie had been forced to watch all the protégés from the year below her do the same. Soon she would watch the next cohort flap their wings and flee the nest and, if Lady Steadman’s assessment was correct, she’d be left behind again because she did not pass muster at all. Which all rather suggested the fault for Georgie’s persistent lack of employment lay squarely at her door. Or, more precisely, at her outspoken flapping jaws.
“I will get the next job, Miss P, I promise.” She had to, because she couldn’t impose on Miss P’s charity forever despite her mentor never once telling her that she felt imposed upon. She also had to start her own life. Find her own place to belong. Not romance and family, of course, because impoverished governesses rarely left the station they had been forced into and hardly ever married, so she never tortured herself with those unattainable dreams, like her friend Kitty did. But there were other routes to happiness and fulfillment; nurturing other people’s children to be the best version of themselves was hers. If only she was given the chance. “Even if it means biting my wayward tongue so hard I snap it off.”
The older woman smiled kindly across her desk as she rang the bell for tea. “We can always live in hope, dear, can’t we? In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful by taking today’s geography class.”
Despite leaving for the Admiralty at the crack of dawn, it was close to midnight by the time Harry’s carriage dropped him back home in Hanover Square. But it couldn’t be helped. Not when he had work coming out of his ears and not enough hours in the day to do it all. The current bane of his life and the root of his growing dissatisfaction with it, if one ignored keeping each of His Majesty’s ships stocked with enough supplies to keep them sailing, was the HMS Boadicea.
Construction of the one-hundred-and-twenty-gun first-rate ship of the line was running behind schedule. Grossly behind schedule. It should have set sail on its training maneuvers two months ago, and they had been postponed twice. If the shipbuilders continued to drag their feet and they were postponed for a third time, he’d have no choice but to visit the dockyard in Plymouth himself to give the lazy landlubbers a swift kick up the backside.
Just the thought of heading back to Devon made him shudder.
Oh, how he loathed that place! It was filled with nothing but bad memories, which he much preferred to forget, and his biggest humiliating mistake, which he couldn’t. Every time he heard fresh news of the bloody Boadicea, the specter of Plymouth loomed on the horizon to taunt him, and it never failed to sour his mood.
He wouldn’t have to think of any of those memories at all if it weren’t for the bloody Boadicea. Those work-shy shipwrights had shilly-shallied long enough that if that troublesome ship wasn’t leading the fleet by summer, he might well be the one to bring back keelhauling! A nice dunk in the Channel might encourage those slothful slackers to step lively. They’d had four years, for pity’s sake, which was surely enough to build a whole flotilla of gunships? When he became admiral of the fleet, those who did not do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay would have no place in his navy.
But as the great military philosopher Sun Tzu said, victory comes from finding opportunities in problems, and that was Harry’s particular skill. That was what the Admiralty paid him handsomely for and would soon, if he continued to impress them, promote him handsomely for too. Where others saw only the insurmountable, he always found a way around, even if he had to resort to blasting his way through! Or venturing to blasted Plymouth and the hornet’s nest that awaited him there!
Annoyed, he bounded up his steps and then had to stand there because nobody came to open the front door. Harry was forced to hammer on the door until Polly, the young scullery maid, finally let him in.
“Begging your pardon, Captain, sir. I was tidying the drawing room and did not hear you.” She bobbed an apologetic curtsy as he stalked inside, then stopped dead again at the haphazard mountain of mismatched luggage littering his hallway.
Instantly, his shoulders slumped because there was only one person on the planet capable of making this much mess—and that was his only sibling, Flora. The sheer size of the pile also suggested she wasn’t alone.
God help him.
As a harried Simpkins finally made an appearance on the landing, his butler’s tight, ever-so-slightly beaten expression confirmed his suspicion.
“Please tell me this is just a fleeting visit, Simpkins, as I’m still not fully over the last.” When he had, once again, found a million excuses not to venture back to Devon at all last year, Flora and her chaotic brood had stayed for two weeks at Christmas, and it had, for want of a better phrase, been pure, unmitigated torture. Harry loved his older sister. Adored her, in fact, because Lady Flora Pendleton was as sharp as a tack, had a heart of pure gold, and a sparkling personality that lit up a room. Unfortunately, along with those admirable traits, she was also as undisciplined and disorganized as their bohemian artistic parents had been, and he could only ever cope with that amount of chaos nowadays in small doses.
Exceedingly small doses.
“Lord and Lady Pendleton are bound for Egypt until July, Captain, as his lordship’s latest quest is to find the source of the Nile.”
“Hallelujah! Somebody has to, so it might as well be him.” Harry didn’t give two figs where the Nile started, or where it ended for that matter either, but he was over the moon that an expedition to the land of the pharaohs guaranteed him several months of blessed peace from his family’s unexpected and frequent invasions. Flora on her own was a nightmare. When you added her nomadic, scatterbrained, academic husband and her three practically feral children into the mix, that nightmare always turned into all-out Armageddon. The children, in particular, ran him ragged. Probably because the little Machiavellis knew that all they had to do was stare up at him with their wide, soulful eyes and he was basically putty in their manipulative, grubby little hands. They had made him read them so many stories over Christmas his voice had been hoarse for weeks afterward, and his left knee was still a trifle stiff from all the crawling around on the floor they made him do when he had stupidly allowed them to climb on his back so they could ride him like a bloody horse.
An irony which wasn’t lost on him.
He’d slept on the cold, hard floor under the desk in his office at the Admiralty for two nights over New Year’s simply to get some peace. “When do they leave?”
“I am afraid they have already left, Captain Kincaid. Your sister waited all morning to say her goodbyes to you, but had to leave several hours ago as her ship departs Tilbury on the dawn tide.”
Harry stared at the scruffy pile of luggage in resignation.
How typical of Flora to leave for an ocean voyage without her baggage.
“Fetch someone with a large cart and pay the fellow whatever he needs to drive this lot overnight to Tilbury.” He checked his left pocket watch and did some quick calculations in his head. Assuming high tide was in around four hours, and they could find a cart quickly—and the wind was behind it, the road was good, and they all prayed for a miracle—it might just get there in time. “Although knowing my sister, she’ll pass it on the road when she realizes she left everything here, and we’ll be stuck with her for days while she waits for the next ship to leave because she’ll have missed the first.”
Because of course she would.
That was Flighty Flora all over, and yet she would still find the wherewithal to laugh about it. His big sister found humor in every single catastrophe she created, whereas he would be having palpitations if he ever failed to make a sailing. Not because the Royal Navy did not take kindly to one of its most trusted officers going absent without leave—the top brass would have his guts for garters if he ever contemplated that again—but because he personally could not cope with tardiness in any way, shape, or form. Where the rest of his family would be late for their own funerals, and thanks to a rogue April blizzard, his father had been, Harry would have to arrive at least two hours early. Probably even six, just to be certain, as time had a habit of filling itself and his was always all accounted for.
That was precisely why he always carried two pocket watches with him wherever he went. Just in case one stopped ticking and he momentarily lost track of the time and missed doing something important. As Nelson had so aptly once said, time was everything and five minutes could make the difference between victory and defeat.
Or words to that effect.
It wasn’t so much the exact words of the great military minds of the past that enthused him so, it was more the sentiment, and old Horatio’s were on the nail regarding time.
He sincerely doubted Flora, like their mother before her, had one working clock in her anarchic home on the Devonshire coast, or even owned a clock at all, for that matter. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to wind the blasted thing because she’d have lost the key, and any and every subsequent replacement. He and Flora had always been chalk and cheese despite the scant and unseemly nine months of difference in their ages.
It never ceased to amaze him that two children who came out of the same womb in such quick succession could be so different. Harry had always been an ordered, neat, and logical individual exactly like their grandfather, the admiral, had been, whereas Flora and her offspring were as different to that as it was humanly possible to be. She was all the worst bits of their mother and father combined. Scatterbrained, impulsive, and bohemian. With no respect for rules, routines, time, or boundaries.
No wonder the poor maid hadn’t heard him when he had arrived. If the Pendletons had been in his shipshape drawing room for so much as ten minutes, it would be a miracle if it wasn’t a scene of total and utter carnage.
He was too blasted busy to deal with all that malarkey now. He barely had time for dinner, let alone uninvited, unruly houseguests.
Uncharitably, he immediately contemplated how much it would cost to charter a vessel at Tilbury to take her to Egypt to save him the inconvenience of hosting them for a single night. Probably an arm and a leg, but it would be worth it. For the sake of his blasted sanity alone, it would be worth mortgaging this house if he had to, simply to be shot of her…
Something about Simpkins’s agitated manner set a distant alarm bell ringing. His normally unflappable butler had a distinctly odd look about him. A look of foreboding which Harry had never witnessed before in the decade he had known him. They had sailed the seven seas together, for pity’s sake, so he knew all of Simpkins’s expressions well, and this new one made him panic. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“Your sister has her luggage, sir, and so does her husband. This…” He wagged a nervous finger in the direction of the baggage heap. “… belongs to your nieces and nephews who, I was reliably informed by a most insistent Lady Pendleton, will be staying with their favorite uncle for the duration of her trip abroad.”
“I’m sorry?” That raised every single one of Harry’s battle-honed hackles. Surely he hadn’t heard Simpkins right?
“Did you not get the urgent express I sent this morning stating as much, sir? The one where I asked you how you wished me to proceed?”
“Do I look like I know what the blazes you are talking about, Simpkins!” Although now that he came to think upon it, there had been an urgent express, he now remembered. An express his clerk had brought to him the second it had arrived, and instead of opening it, as he patently should have, he had put it to one side. In his job, there were always expresses and most of them were storms in teacups which sorted themselves out before he needed to intervene, so Harry had ignored it. Had intended to read it in a free moment. Except there hadn’t been any free moments thanks to the bloody work-shy layabouts who were supposed to be building the bloody Boadicea and all the other insurmountable problems the Admiralty kept sending his way. When he became admiral of the fleet, he would ensure there were at least ten men employed to do his job. Harry was spread too thin and stocking all those ships should not have rested on the shoulders of just one man!
Simpkins wrung his hands and began to pace, and that was yet another new and worrying behavior Harry had never witnessed before. Even under heavy American bombardment at the ill-considered and ill-fated Battle of Baltimore when he had been an exasperated lieutenant on the verge of mutiny and his butler had been the ship’s quartermaster. “It was all in the message, Captain. I assumed you would come home to deal with it the second you received my missive as there really was nothing I could do to dissuade her. Lady Pendleton not only outranks me; she was resolute. She did not think it was prudent to drag them all over Africa at this time of year, especially with malaria so rife and with all the crocodiles, so she has left her children with you, sir.”
“What!” It was a bloody miracle the top of Harry’s head didn’t explode with the volcanic fury of his anger. “Suddenly, after thirty-one years of possessing absolutely no common sense whatsoever, my sister has the gall to become prudent?” He began to stomp in outrage. “What was she thinking?” Before Simpkins answered that, he stayed him with an abrupt raised palm. “She wasn’t thinking, was she? Because Flora doesn’t bloody well think! At least not rationally.” One of these days, he was actually going to kill her. “I have a job, Simpkins! A career! People depend on me at the Admiralty, and I have a promotion to secure!” One which was long overdue but well earned. “I don’t have time to look after her blasted children until blasted August!” No matter how much he loved the little monsters. Being a doting uncle whenever he saw them was one thing. Being left with them all alone, quite another.
“I said as much sir, but she said that she was due an adventure.”
“Well, I suppose that makes this gross inconvenience all right, then!” His sarcasm came out high-pitched because blasted Flora and her bloody adventures had always been the bane of his life.
As children, she had insisted on dragging him on them too. Which was why he knew what it felt like to be trapped in a pitch-black cave overnight while the tide lapped at his toes. Why he had fallen thirty feet out of the oak tree she had insisted they build a treehouse in and had broken his arm. Why he had lost both his eyebrows during a failed alchemy experiment to turn a lump of pilfered lead pipe into gold. “I shall drop everything, let down everyone who depends on me, simply because my irresponsible sister is due another adventure! Does she not know that it is my job to feed the blasted fleet?”
“I did mention your enormous responsibilities, sir, but Lady Pendleton was confident that if anybody could juggle so many things in her absence, it would be you. She also thought the experience would be good for you.” His butler instinctively backed away, in case Harry threw something in temper, to tell him the next bit. “Practice, she called it. To encourage you to get back in the saddle.” Simpkins winced in apology because they both knew that hideous topic was totally out of bounds—to everyone, apparently, except blasted Flora. “Seeing as it has been four and a half years since your last fateful gallop…”
Before his head actually exploded in outrage under the fresh assault of those bad memories, the maid chose that moment to leave the drawing room. Much like him, she appeared to be at her wit’s end. “I still can’t get the jam out of the Persian rug, Mr. Simpkins. I’ve tried everything we have, but it’s going to take more than soap to get that black currant off. But I did manage to scrub it out of the curtains.”
“Which idiot gave them jam and allowed them to take it into my drawing room?” Harry stared first at the maid and then at Simpkins. “And please tell me that somebody is currently in the drawing room with the little vandals.”
“In the absence of any alternative orders, I took it upon myself to put the children to bed, sir. Just before you arrived home. After the long journey here, they were exhausted and after several hours of trying to keep the unruly scallywags entertained, so was I.” Simpkins squared his shoulders, a most stubborn glint in his eye. “If you had read my missive, the black currant could have been avoided and your sister would have been sent away with a flea in her ear and her children. Instead, she is already on board her ship and her children are now our problem until she returns in the summer.”
“Over my dead…” The plaintive howl of what sounded like a wolf coming from the direction of the kitchen cut him short, and this time both Simpkins and the maid cringed as it continued unabated. “What the hell is that?”
“That would be Norbert, sir. The Pendletons’ new dog.”
“She’s left me with a bloody puppy too!” If the reminder that he hadn’t so much as fallen off the saddle as been kicked off it four and a half years ago hadn’t been incendiary enough, then this was the last straw. Harry stalked down the hallway toward the howling as his butler scurried behind.
“Actually, sir, Norbert isn’t…” Harry flung open the kitchen door and something gray, shaggy, and as big as a cow almost knocked him over in its haste to get out. “A puppy.”
The hound’s nails clattered across the parquet at speed, skidded at the staircase, then bounded up it in search of his owners, howling all the way.
As Harry gaped open-mouthed, the butler shook his weary head, all the fight in him gone. “Her ladyship said Norbert doesn’t like to be left alone, mustn’t be fed chicken as it makes him gaseous, and told me to tell you that he will need a decent walk at least twice a day somewhere with trees, as he will refuse to do his business otherwise.”
“She has gone too far this time!” The understatement of the century. Harry’s fury was so incandescent his fists clenched, but instead of unleashing it unfairly on Simpkins, he snapped open one of his pocket watches, then snapped his fingers. Time was tight, but he was a man on a mission with only one hope left.
“Have the carriage and a cart readied and put this pile of rubbish on it quick sharp, then go wrestle that devil-dog in behind it!” In the absence of his sister’s neck to wring, he kicked a battered trunk. It had been packed so badly, the latch popped, and his two nieces’ dresses exploded onto his mirror-polished floor alongside a battered cricket bat. “I’ll fetch the children! I don’t care what bloody time it is or how exhausted they are, their favorite uncle is driving the uncivilized, black currant–covered little rascals and their wolf to Tilbury and giving them all back to his infuriating bloody sister himself!”