Chapter Six
“I do not care if the ladybird we found had five spots.” Marianne slapped her brother’s meddlesome fingers away from the red collage insect she was decorating with black buttons. “I want my ladybird’s wings to be symmetrical.”
Georgie smiled as she gently wagged her finger at the more pedantic Felix, who was adamant that his sisters record nature accurately or not at all, pleased that Marianne had just relieved her of the need to teach the pair of them symmetry. “You leave Marianne to her ladybird and concentrate on the finishing touches to your shield bug.”
Not that Georgie was entirely sure what a shield bug was. But the boy had known the name of every other creepy-crawly they had spied in the garden, so she had no reason to doubt that the green, iridescent shield-shaped insect they had discovered on the hawthorn bush was indeed a hawthorn shield bug exactly as he’d claimed. That there were apparently several different species of shield bug was also news to her, but even teachers learned something new every day. It was one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.
More enlightening, however, was Felix’s talent for drawing. The meticulousness of the details he was currently recording on his perfectly proportioned and cleverly colored sketch suggested he had potential as an artist. “Will you be illustrating your Insecta Britannica when you get around to writing it, Felix? Only I really think you should. That drawing is magnificent.”
His chest swelled with pride. “Of course I shall be, Miss Rowe. I fear that I will have to as I do not trust anyone else to do it correctly.” He used that as an excuse to jab Marianne with his elbow. “A less diligent illustrator might take artistic liberties and that wouldn’t be scientific at all. Some people aren’t interested in science or truth and prefer to indulge in pointless pastimes as they are all show and no substance.”
“Substance, like science, is boring,” was the unbothered middle sister’s imperious retort. “Much like Felix and his pointless obsession with stupid insects.” A comment that earned her a glare from her brother, and which made little Grace’s eyes roll subtly as they locked with Georgie’s in a Lord-give-me-strength kind of way before she selected the final chalk to complete her much more interesting picture of a bumblebee.
“Ballet isn’t going to change the world, Marianne! But science is.”
“The world would be a dull place indeed without ballet. Almost—but not quite—as dull as you, big brother.”
That was another thing she had learned about the children this afternoon. Felix and Marianne bickered constantly, mostly about nonsense which came in a steady stream of jibes and insults, so she knew to ignore it exactly like little Grace did. Running interference would be as pointless as trying to turn back the tide. It was obvious that they had niggled one other all their lives and likely would until their dying day. No amount of her nagging would ever change that.
Over the years, when she had been invited to spend her holidays with Lottie at her family’s farm, she had watched her friend spar constantly with her four brothers. It hadn’t been because they didn’t love one another, because they clearly did in a way that had made Georgie yearn all the more for a family of her own. More that it was the way the bond of love between them all manifested itself. “I choose to interfere only when there is blood involved,” was their father’s sage advice when she had initially been so shocked by all the fighting, and that sage advice seemed prudent here. Especially when, to an untrained eye, it looked as if Felix was the main antagonist when Marianne quietly did everything in her power to rub him up the wrong way first.
The ladybird’s spots were a case in point, as Marianne had originally counted out five buttons until a quick glance at her brother had prompted her to grab another. She had made it six purely to vex him and, being oblivious of that, Felix had happily complied. Now, he was wound tighter than a spring at her lack of respect for the truth while she was silently enjoying his outrage.
But then girls were always much cleverer than boys at manipulating a situation to serve their own ends, and Georgie already suspected that Marianne enjoyed getting her big brother into trouble almost as much as she delighted in riling him. There had been an incident earlier when she had used all her acting skills to fall over and had loudly proclaimed that Felix had pushed her.
Georgie had ignored that, too, because Felix had quietly taunted her with a slimy snail beforehand, so he was no innocent in the proceedings either. Rather than get sucked into the futility of mediating their never-ending but harmless war, she pretended she hadn’t seen or heard either indiscretion. Instead, she had distracted them by suddenly decreeing that the first Pendleton who could race to the end of the garden before the others would be the one who chose tonight’s story.
Thankfully, as she had anticipated, it was their furry brother Master Norbert Pendleton who won, making the decision moot and thus avoiding another altercation or any accusations of cheating. However, it had not gone unnoticed that the pair of them had resorted to all sorts of unsportsmanlike tactics in that short, mad dash up the lawn to sabotage the other. But in the reassuring absence of any blood, she had pretended to ignore all those, too, as she cheered them on. As Shakespeare had the victor of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry IV, say, discretion was always the better part of valor.
Wise words to live by—even if they did purport to come from a military man. Especially for a governess. And especially this close to supper time.
“I cannot believe what a good job the three of you have done with these sketches.” Georgie beamed at them all in turn in awe and wonder. “We must display them. Where shall we hang them?”
“What about under the clock?” Marianne turned to the empty wall behind them where the blackboard had been.
“A splendid idea. But how do we hang them up without putting pinholes in your uncle’s pristine wall?” Georgie looked to Felix for the answer to include him in the decision and thus deftly avoid another bickering session between the eldest two siblings.
He pondered the problem for a moment, then grinned, all previous irritation with his sister forgotten. “If we string the pictures together, we could hang them from the clock.”
“Once we’ve all tidied up, why don’t you three do that, then we can hang up the first acquisitions for our new gallery together before supper, which is…?” For the first time Georgie glanced at the imposing clock and realized that it was already five minutes to five. The tidying could wait until the children were eating. “Better still, rather than be late for Mrs. Rigsby, hurry up and find where the string lives in those boxes and we’ll hang your masterpieces now.”
The moment the children rose, so did Norbert, and as they pulled down box after box to riffle through them, he assisted while Felix and Marianne bickered. Or at least the dog thought he was assisting by burrowing his nose in all the contents as they jostled one another, his big tail wagging as he got completely in the way. The moment Felix’s hand shot in the air in triumph, clutching the ball of string, the dog grabbed it, then, assuming it had been produced so that he could play a spirited game of ball, decided to run around in circles with it while the children chased him.
Within seconds, the ball was no more and the string was tangled around everything, including the legs of the blackboard. It wobbled ominously for a moment. Georgie managed to lunge sideways to prop it up before it fell, but not before all her new sticks of chalk flew hither and thither until they shattered on the floor. A moment later, Norbert ran straight over them and ground several nubs into powder beneath his big paws, and suddenly there were paw prints everywhere too. Enormous white smudges on the once-polished parquet that she would also now have to tidy up along with everything else.
“What the blazes has happened here?” Still clutching the blackboard, Georgie jumped at the sound of the captain’s unimpressed voice. Then winced at the thoroughly appalled sight of him filling the doorway.
Harry blinked at the carnage in disbelief as anger bubbled.
All his carefully considered order was gone. Willfully and purposefully destroyed.
In its entirety.
The three desks and chairs no longer sat in a neat row facing the blackboard because the blackboard had been shoved in a corner. Nothing had been written on it, apart from the blatantly ignored schedule he had put there the night before. The desks now rested in a haphazard arc around the periphery. To make way, no doubt, for the huge mess on the floor which was littered with so much chalk, string, paper, and other stuff he could only imagine the children—or their clearly useless governess—had opened up all the boxes and tossed the contents about like confetti.
To add insult to injury, the mad dog chose that precise moment to deposit the remnants of what once had been a ball of string on the toes of his boots before he sat, tail wagging and eyes expectant as if he was waiting for Harry to throw it for him, smearing the glossy leather of his favorite pair of hessians in a slimy coating of drool in the process.
“My apologies, Captain.” Still standing in the middle of the mess, Miss Rowe bent to begin scraping all the detritus within arm’s reach into a pile. “We lost track of time.” Her cheeks had colored in obvious embarrassment, and he couldn’t help thinking that her embarrassment was the least he was due when she should be mortified to have been caught red-handed. Ashamed at her lack of control in his classroom. Utterly repentant that she had clearly fallen at the first hurdle and wasn’t much of a governess at all and that he had indeed been hoodwinked into hiring her!
“We went hunting for bugs!” Grace threw herself at him, waving a piece of paper. “Do you like my bee, Uncle Harry? I’ve called him Boris. Boris the Bee.”
He gave the picture a cursory glance, conscious that his current displeasure had nothing to do with the little girl who really wasn’t to blame for any of this anarchy. “It’s very… nice.” Except poor, sensitive Grace shriveled at his frigid tone and took two wary steps back, her big eyes blinking rapidly as she tried to comprehend his uncharacteristically cold response.
“We’ve had a splendid afternoon, Uncle Harry.” Sensing his disapproval, Felix decided to defend the indefensible. “The best we’ve had since we’ve got here.”
“That I can see.” He had to clench his jaw to stop the furious bellow which wanted to escape. Clearly aware that Harry’s temper was barely controlled, Norbert’s ears drooped before he maneuvered his big body behind Felix’s in the hope that it would render him invisible. “It looks as if somebody has tossed a grenade in here.” He had seen shipwrecks in a better state than his morning room.
“It’s only a little bit of mess, Uncle Harry.” Marianne brushed it all away with a theatrical flick of her wrist. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” To prove that, she set about helping Miss Rowe scoop goodness knew what off his once clean and seasoned oak floor, and with a pointed look at her two siblings, snapped them into doing exactly the same.
“Your supper is ready, children.” He tried to infuse less anger into that choked, staccato sentence because he didn’t want them to hate him. “You had best run along while it is still warm and before Mrs. Rigsby has a conniption that all her hard work on your behalf has been in vain.” Which, in a nutshell, was precisely what Harry wanted to do. For surely this… pandemonium deserved nothing less than a full-blown conniption at the very least. This—this—willful, disrespectful, ungrateful mayhem felt like a betrayal. “Miss Rowe can fix it.”
“Yes. Run along.” With a sunny smile for them and a breeziness that bordered on arrogance for him, Miss Rowe took control. “It is entirely my fault we are late. We were all having far too much fun.” Her eyes flicked to his defiantly as if she genuinely considered fun to be more her remit than discipline and real learning. “So be sure to give Mrs. Rigsby my apologies for your slight tardiness this evening.” There were no apologies for him, he noted, and the dismissiveness of her tone and flagrant disregard of all his efforts to accommodate her classroom in his space almost sent steam shooting from his ears.
He waited until they were gone before he allowed the anger to vent and was about to give her a piece of his mind when she preempted him, her expression more condescending than contrite.
“I am sure, to you, this all appears as if we have wasted an entire afternoon on triviality. However, I can assure you that nothing could be further than the truth.” She didn’t even do him the courtesy of stopping what she was doing or acknowledging the mess that had occurred on her watch. “My first three hours with the children were very productive and most enlightening.”
Harry couldn’t wait to hear whatever codswallop she came up with to explain away her negligence. “Really?” Because his arms wanted to wave about in abject fury while his feet wanted to pace, he folded them and leaned against the doorframe to anchor them in place. “Do tell?”
“Well, for a start, I discovered that the children have no experience of traditional education at all.”
Of course they hadn’t! That was because blasted Flora was in charge of it. “You don’t say?”
Miss Rowe frowned at his sarcasm. “If you already knew that, Captain, it would have been helpful to have informed me of it before today. That would have saved me from having to scrap all my plans for our first lessons and avoided me having to think on my feet.”
She called this—this vandalism—thinking on her feet! “I suppose I should be reassured that there were some plans, albeit short-lived ones, before they descended into chaos.” Harry allowed his gaze to scan the untidy room again in disgust. “Although I am intrigued to understand how you thought this amount of chaos was a fitting educational substitute for a valuable afternoon of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Only it doesn’t appear to me that you managed much of that in the three hours you had for lessons but wasted on fun.”
Rather than wither under his righteous indignation, she did quite the opposite. “As you are a man who appreciates quotes, Captain, my favorite comes from Confucius. Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.”
“And your labored point is?”
She went for a smile, which flattened when he failed to do anything but frown back. “That there are better ways of learning than sitting behind a desk. I learned more in your garden about the children in a single afternoon than I ever could have in the formal confines of a classroom in a week.”
When he failed to look anything but unimpressed at that convenient excuse, she sighed as if he were the one who had gotten this afternoon’s shambles so spectacularly wrong, preferring to focus on collecting up the buttons instead of him as she spoke.
“Both Felix and Marianne can read at a level one would expect of children several years older. Both can spell difficult words with ease, likely because they have read, and been read to, extensively from a young age. Thanks to his love of insects and the Romans and Greeks, your nephew has an impressive grasp of Latin. Marianne prefers Marlow, Fielding, and Shakespeare to Cicero and Homer, and I suspect she knows every word of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by heart. She can certainly recite all of Byron’s She Walks in Beauty, in both English and in French, which I am not sure is appropriate for a girl so young. Although that’s more to do with my personal reservations about Lord Byron in general than his poem, so I shall reserve my judgment because I do approve of poetry in the main.”
All the buttons now collected, she rose to return them to a box without glancing his way. Harry had no idea if it was the right box, or if she even cared that there was a right box as she did not bother consulting his alphabetized list on the front of it. “Marianne also has an excellent head for figures”—she bent to unravel the clump of string wrapped around the legs of the blackboard—“which is probably why she dances so well. But then again, it is often the case that those that are musical make the best mathematicians. She knows all of her multiplication tables—and by know, I mean your niece can use them rather than regurgitating them simply from memory. Grace knows her two-, five-, and ten-times tables, can count to at least two hundred, can do better than simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication in her head or on her fingers; however, she struggles a little with division. But as that is always the trickiest mathematical skill to master before one hits the horrors of algebra, I am not the least bit concerned about it at this stage.”
She gave up on the string and grabbed a handful of feathers instead. They briskly made their way into the same box as the buttons, proving that she had abandoned his meticulous, alphabetical list of contents with the same lack of respect as she had the location of all the new classroom furniture he had been forced to pay double for at such short notice. “Felix, on the other hand, is an expert at avoiding all mathematical problems. I am yet to discover if that is because he finds everything else more interesting or if, as I suspect, he struggles with numbers as much as little Grace seems to struggle with her letters. He draws with impressive aplomb, though.” She snatched up a piece of paper and turned as she held it up. The accomplished sketch of an insect was as impressive as it was detailed. “As this Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale—or the common hawthorn shield bug to the rest of us who aren’t as entomologically well informed as your nephew—is testament. His talent and his eye transcends what is expected from a child of ten. Young Felix is an artist to his core. Perhaps even a budding prodigy in the discipline.”
“Well… er…” Where he had expected blatant cluelessness, she had given him a thorough summary of the children’s educational prowess, which surprised him, as he had no idea that the theatrical Marianne was a mathematician or that Felix could draw better than most adults. Or that blasted Flora had taught them anything of any substance at all. But what surprised him more, and horrified him to his core, was that the waning late afternoon sunlight did delectable things to her copper hair, which fascinated him. It warmed it from within and made it shimmer as if the kiss of sunset was all it took to give it actual life, highlighting the flecks of gold, bronze, and ruby woven in her curls. Colors so vibrant against the beguiling curve of her alabaster neck and so seductive they put all of Titian’s efforts to distill a redhead’s hair to shame. Worse, his fingers itched to touch it, so badly Harry had to uncross his arms and clasp his hands tightly behind his back in case they did. “Um…”
Good heavens above, what was the matter with him!
He hadn’t been so effortlessly beguiled by a woman since his unfaithful former fiancée taught Harry the important lesson that losing his head only ever resulted in catastrophe. He had learned it so well, or so he had thought, that his sensible, logical head hadn’t once been inclined to get itself lost in all the years since. It might turn occasionally, because he was a hot-blooded man in his prime and not a monk, but even if he dallied, it still stayed firmly screwed in place. It was easy to keep it so, too, because aside from the fact that he was still nowhere near to achieving the lofty career heights he had been groomed for, he hadn’t particularly liked himself when he had fancied himself head over heels in love with Elizabeth.
The blinkered and bewitched Harry who had fallen too fast and too hard had been a blithering idiot who had completely lost interest in the navy. Convinced—or more likely bewitched—that his destiny suddenly lay elsewhere, he had messed so many things up while they were together that he hadn’t only lost his first ship—he almost scuppered his entire career. Worse, he hadn’t been in control of either himself or the situation during those heady few months of what turned out to be nothing more than a short-lived affair. He had abdicated all the power and control to Elizabeth for the duration, however, and lived to rue the day.
Once he had recovered from the body blow of her betrayal, regrouped, and refocused on what really mattered, he went, cap in hand, to the admiral to ask for help to resurrect his tainted career from the ashes. That hadn’t been an easy time either. The old man had warned him repeatedly that he was making a huge mistake to even contemplate marriage so young. The admiral had been living proof that naval marriages didn’t work and had always drilled into Harry the need to avoid such permanent entanglements until he was at least a vice admiral and the bulk of his sailing career was done. He had taken his grandson’s foolish decision to fall in love as a personal slight and never ceased to remind him of his stupidity forever after.
In fairness to the admiral, once Harry’s heart had mended and he was levelheaded enough to analyze everything that had transpired with Elizabeth dispassionately, he was relieved to rediscover that he was a much better officer and gentleman without all that destructive yearning and pining nonsense cluttering his life. He preferred order over chaos and always had, still had a mountain of rigging to climb in his career and so, with hindsight, also knew without a shadow of a doubt that the beguiling, charming, fickle, but oh-so-passionate Elizabeth had ultimately done him a favor when she replaced him in her bed.
Exactly as the admiral had predicted from the outset.
Elizabeth would have made his ordered life a living hell if she’d have waited that short month until he’d sailed home to marry her. Marrying her would have been a mistake he would doubtless have regretted every single blasted minute since those rose-tinted, self-destructive, lust-fogged blinkers came off. When he next risked his heart, which wouldn’t be until he was at least a vice admiral, it would be his head and not his emotions which pragmatically chose his mate, and he would go in levelheaded or not at all.
However, his unwelcome, fanciful, and unpalatable reaction to Miss Rowe just now had felt dangerously similar to the way he had always reacted to Elizabeth from the very first moment he had set eyes on the fair-weather temptress. His usually focused attention had always wandered when the sun had caught her hair just so too. His nerve endings had always fizzed whenever she was near, exactly as they were currently doing so close to his useless governess. Then his body inevitably got ideas that would consume him and he would lose sight of the truth. Just as he had with Elizabeth when his foolish, misguided heart got overexcited and over-romantic. He’d overlooked all her flaws and all the overabundant warnings everyone else saw, and then catastrophically overruled every single rational thought that existed in his head.
Although he was buggered if he knew why Miss Rowe, of all women, possessed the eerily similar Elizabeth-like power over him when the two women were in no way alike. Elizabeth had been a tall, willowy blonde. A traditional beauty who knew it and never failed to use it to her advantage. All easy charm and easy grace and the single most flirtatious creature he had ever met. Whereas Miss Rowe was curvaceous and petite. Freckled and, truth be told, slightly awkward in her skin. There was also a primness about her. She was dashed pretty, of course, with those sultry, green, intelligent eyes and all that scandalously tactile copper hair—but she was the complete opposite of flirtatious. Where Elizabeth’s expression always suggested “come hither,” Miss Rowe’s reliably radiated “get lost.” She was prickly, sarcastic, disdainful, standoffish, and… disrespectful… and therefore should be nothing but unappealing.
Except she wasn’t. She called to him—to all of him—and that was frankly unacceptable.
He wrenched his wayward eyeballs away and forced them to behold the carnage around him in the hope that it would reignite his anger enough that her outrageous hair, like the woman who owned it, would irritate him rather than bewitch him. It didn’t, and that just rubbed salt into the still-gaping wound. “I am glad to hear the afternoon gleaned some minuscule educational benefit.”
His eyes wandered to her hair again. Drank in the glorious sight of it while his imagination tried to consider what it would all look like unbound. In a sizzling contrast against her soft, smooth, ivory skin. Against his will, exactly as it had always done with the unworthy siren Elizabeth, his mind began to mentally undress her. To peel away all the layers until nothing but her lightly freckled flesh remained. It was torture, made worse by the regrettable fact that she had her back to him, so his stupid mind flatly refused to show him anything more titillating than its concocted image of her naked back. The merest flashes of skin poking through her riotous tumble of improper hair, which his suddenly uncooperative imagination decided ended too far below her sweet peach of a bottom for him to discern much of either rounded cheek—
“More importantly…” Her sanctimonious voice snapped him out of his terrifying reverie—thank goodness! Just in the nick of time because she sighed again as she placed the lid on the box before she spun to face him, forcing his rampant, possessed mind and his wayward eyeballs to quickly behave. “I got to know the children this afternoon, Captain Kincaid, and they got to know me.” Her chin tilted, defiant, making her pretty green eyes sparkle in the most disconcerting fashion as they locked with his. “Furthermore, thanks to our ‘splendid’ afternoon, I now have a clear idea of where to start with them.”
Thankfully, she gestured to the mess still to be tidied, breaking the hypnotic hold her gaze had on his, leaving him oddly shaken by the experience. Shaken and ashamed and still so hideously beguiled he could barely think straight. “So you see, while I appreciate that this all looks as if no learning has occurred here today, I can assure you that in the midst of chaos, there is always opportunity.”
Did she just quote Sun Tzu?His mind was so cluttered that he wasn’t entirely sure what she had just said. It wasn’t sorry, though. For bewitching him. For the mess. For her lackadaisical attitude to teaching or her flagrant lack of respect for him.
That he did know without a doubt.
The gall of the woman was staggering. How dare she treat him and his property as if neither mattered? How dare she… get under his skin and heat it until he could barely string two cohesive thoughts together? And without even trying. It infuriated him when he thought he had conquered that unfortunate, reckless, irrational part of himself.
“I can also assure you that not all of our lessons will look like this, so there really is no need to worry.” There was a flippancy to her tone now that just added insult to injury. “I am a protégé of Miss Prentice, after all, so you can trust me to do a good job.”
His temporary and uncharacteristic lapse of gentlemanly thoughts aside, he was damned if he was going to leave it at that. Not when there was chalk and string and detritus everywhere and he could see no evidence, for all her canny insights, that the children had done any meaningful schoolwork at all.
The tail did not wag the dog.
The tail never wagged the dog. Not while he was around! Exactly who the blazes did this minx think she was? Half a day on the job—and half a day doing a very bad job, to boot—did not give her any right to tell him to mind his own bloody business. Because this was his business, damn it! His family! His house! And his bloody rules!
“I am pleased to hear it, however…” Harry was about to elaborate by outlining his expectations for tomorrow after this afternoon’s debacle, but she didn’t give him a chance.
“If you will excuse me, I have a great deal of planning and preparation to do before tomorrow’s lessons, where I can assure you a great deal of valuable reading, writing, and arithmetic will take place.” She sailed out the door herself—as if she owned the place—effectively dismissing him and laughing at him in the process. “But first, I must fetch a mop to swab this deck. Enjoy your supper, Captain. And the rest of your evening.”
Then all at once, she was gone and he was left with the mess and the intoxicating waft of her perfume, which was apparently all it took to send his usually level head twisting toward the unthinkable all over again.