Chapter Eight
Harry could hear Norbert’s plaintive howling the second he turned onto Hanover Square a little before five. It was so loud he didn’t need Lady Flatman to flag him down to inform him of it, yet she did anyway.
“He hasn’t stopped for three hours, Captain Kincaid. Three. Whole. HOURS!” His most disagreeable neighbor clasped her hands beneath her ample bosom as she glared at him while he dismounted so he could be admonished on her level. “It is wholly unacceptable, sir, to expect the other residents in the square to be forced to listen to that commotion while you are off gallivanting.”
There was no point in clarifying that trying to get the bloody useless layabouts on the bloody Boadicea to finally finish boarding the deck so the rest of the urgent work on it could commence was not gallivanting. And the less said about the new and urgent situation with supplies in Portsmouth, the better. Lady Flatman wouldn’t care if a ship full of sailors set off across the Atlantic with nowhere near enough food to keep them alive until they arrived in Nova Scotia. She wasn’t a fan of men in general. Something she had made more than plain, repeatedly, ever since he inherited the house. They were all libertines, chancers, and despoilers as far as she was concerned, and nothing would shake her of that rigid opinion. But she had taken an instant dislike to him the day he had moved in simply because he had the affrontery to be not only a man, but an unmarried one, to boot. For apparently, bachelors were all in league with the devil and his very presence was enough to turn the genteel tranquility of this tiny corner of Mayfair into Hades.
“You are quite right, Lady Flatman. I will do my utmost to ensure that it does not happen again.”
He knew that was a promise he couldn’t keep, but he made it anyway. It had been a long day already, and Harry had only left the Admiralty for an hour so that he could check on his equally useless layabout governess. Incessantly wondering about her today had been more of a distraction than he needed, and she had invaded his concentration too many times in the worst possible way. Thanks to her, and blasted Flora’s blasted children, there was a mountain of work he still had to attend to when he returned. So tall it would be a bloody miracle if he saw his bed before midnight again tonight. If he wasn’t careful, at this rate, he would keel over from exhaustion before the month was out. A man in his prime wasn’t meant to survive on five paltry hours of sleep a night. When he was admiral of the fleet, he would issue a directive insisting that all sailors should get at least eight as standard. They’d be more efficient as a result, so that was hardly an indulgence.
“That dog is a menace, Captain Kincaid. A menace!” He nodded because he couldn’t argue with that—and because there was little point in doing anything but nodding. When Lady Flatman wanted to tear him off a strip, there was nothing to be done except take it on the chin, look contrite, and settle in for the duration. “My poor maids have still not been able to eradicate the stain of his mishap from my doorstep.” She pointed to it and Harry dutifully glanced that way.
“I apologize again for that… um… mishap. Sincerely.” The white stone looked spotless as far as he was concerned, and by his own admission he had higher standards than most, so he would have noticed any hint of a stain, but he composed his expression to one of penitent solemnity anyway. Then tried to maintain it without wincing as Norbert let rip again with a cry so tragic one would think he was in the midst of having his tail sawn off with a blunt blade.
“If that incessant howling wasn’t enough outrage for your unfortunate neighbors to have to endure, you also seem determined to bring the entire neighborhood into disrepute too.”
There was something about the way she said that with such a scandalized shudder that made him think that he was missing some vital piece of information. “Has Norbert done worse than howl today, Lady Flatman?” Because if Simpkins had fed him chicken again, or worse, let him near a pie man, Harry would not be responsible for his actions. Just in case, he scanned the pavement for the foul evidence until Lady Flatman jabbed him in the arm with her finger.
Hard.
“I am not talking about your disgusting dog.” She was bristling now, her face contorted in a scowl so fierce it would curdle milk. “For it is you that I find more disgusting!”
“Me?” Harry looked around again, although Lord only knew what for. “What have I done?” Apart from go to the Admiralty before the cock crowed, work until he was cross-eyed on nonsense not of his making, and return home exhausted. His day had been so full, he hadn’t even had time for any luncheon. He was pretty certain a man in his prime wasn’t meant to survive on two hasty slices of toast in the small hours any more than he could with just five hours of sleep. Thanks to tiredness and hunger, he could barely spell his own name.
For one futile moment, he hoped that he was hallucinating this entire conversation until Lady Flatman prodded him again.
“Have you no shame, Captain? I know that morals are lax in the navy and that a sailor has a girl in every port—” She dropped her voice to a hissed whisper. “But moving your fancy woman into your house, here in the genteel environs of Hanover Square, while decent families reside all around you, is beyond the pale!”
“I can assure you that I do not have a fancy woman, Lady Flatman!” The very chance would be a fine thing when he barely had the time nowadays to sleep in his bed, let alone have some recreation in it beforehand.
“I saw her!” His pious neighbor looked at him down her crooked nose as if he were the steaming mess Norbert had left on her doorstep. She pointed to the severe slate gray bun on top of her head. “Red hair and…” She flapped her hand in the vicinity of her bosoms, which sat significantly lower than the pert pair owned by the flame-haired vixen she was complaining about. “Let’s just say she looks the sort who would tempt.”
Harry didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or be affronted by the suggestion. He picked affronted purely because he thought it was the one his neighbor would find more acceptable. He figured it was better that she witness his outrage than to acknowledge his woeful lack of any whiff of a fancy woman or to admit that, for all her faults, there was no denying that his new governess was exactly the sort who tempted—damn her. The hair and bosoms alone were enough to turn his head. Add in the finer-than-fine green eyes, the tart, sultry mouth, and all that alabaster skin, and she was practically a siren. Thank goodness she had an objectionable personality and was atrocious at her job, as every idiot knew that sailors and sirens did not mix—as his last disastrous dalliance with a siren was testament. Elizabeth, Lord bless her treacherous soul, had quite put him off sirens for life.
“Miss Rowe is not my fancy woman, Lady Flatman, and I resent the implication both on her behalf and mine!” Sometimes a man had to stand up and be counted rather than nod—even if that meant locking horns futilely with the perennially outraged Lady bloody Flatman! “Miss Rowe is the governess I have hired to look after my nieces and nephew in my sister’s absence!” In case that wasn’t rebuttal enough, he felt compelled to elaborate. “And she is not just any old governess, Lady Flatman, she is one of the best. From Miss Prentice’s School for Young Ladies, no less, hired at immense cost because she was trained as one of the crème de la crème and with a string of impeccable references to prove it!”
None of which he had seen, nor would he believe after the shambles he had witnessed in her classroom yesterday, but still!
“So the shame is on you, Lady Flatman, for casting such egregious aspersions on her fine character and, I feel aggrieved to add, on mine!” It felt good to expel some of his pent-up anger at his objectionable and holier-than-thou neighbor. Pointless, of course, in the grand scheme of things, as it would only make the woman hate him more, but cathartic. It also couldn’t hurt to vocalize his vehement denial of any attraction he might harbor for the flame-haired, Confucius-quoting temptress, because he absolutely would not succumb to it.
Only an idiot stuck his hand in the fire twice.
“Shame. On. YOU!” He gathered up his horse’s reins and looked down his own nose in disgust as he stomped off toward his own front door while fresh but righteous anger bubbled in his gut.
Fancy woman!
As if he had any free hours left in his week to enjoy one! The last time he had spent time alone with a woman in the altogether had been…
He searched his mind.
Well… he almost had a passionate affair with a lusty Scottish widow when he had visited the Glasgow shipyard last autumn.
Or at least he assumed it would have been a passionate affair if it had got that far. The clandestine kiss he had enjoyed with her in an alcove at the Officers’ Ball had certainly felt promising until a crisis involving a shortfall of rigging had called him back to London. Which meant…
Good grief!
Could things really be more depressing? Was it really last summer that he had last taken a tumble between a willing woman’s sheets? That was almost a year! Or had it been last spring—in which case, it was over a year, and somehow, that depressed him further.
And more importantly, surely it wasn’t natural for a man in his prime to go without that for so long? No wonder his mood was so low and he had lost all the spring in his step. He had been blaming being overloaded with work at the Admiralty for his unsettling dissatisfaction with his life when his lack of a very different sort of satisfaction undoubtedly had a hand in it! It probably explained why he had experienced such a visceral and inappropriate jolt of lust for his useless governess yesterday too.
Instantly, his melancholy was replaced by relief, because it wasn’t natural!
It wasn’t natural at all—thank goodness! But it was easily fixed.
Which also meant that Miss Rowe wasn’t special in any way at all. Harry did not need to worry about having his head turned again by a dangerous siren because history was not about to repeat itself. His overwhelming reaction to her yesterday hadn’t been so much her as the fact that she was female.
A man in his prime wasn’t designed to go without for so long and despite all of Flora’s constant nagging that at thirty it was long past time that he stopped sowing his wild bachelor oats, got back in the saddle, and found himself a wife, she had a point. While he was a good decade away from being a high enough rank to consider marriage, the real problem was that since his promotion to the Admiralty, he had woefully neglected sowing any wild bachelor oats at all!
His field of oats was barren!
He had some serious catching up to do.
But where the blazes was he supposed to find the time when the blasted Admiralty and the bloody Boadicea currently took all of it?
He pondered that new worry while the groom relieved him of his horse and Simpkins relieved him of his coat, then banished it to add it to his list of things to do. Right now, he had a bigger problem to contend with. He jerked his head toward her classroom. “Dare I ask how today went, Simpkins?”
As his butler’s expression was taut thanks to all the howling and goodness knew what else, Harry braced himself to hear the worst.
“That blasted mutt will be the death of me!” He used a dusting rag to punctuate each word, clearly at his wit’s end as he was still wearing his brown polishing apron, which he would never usually be seen dead in to open the door. “He’s been caterwauling outside the kitchen door nonstop for hours now!”
As Harry really couldn’t do anything to solve the problem that was Norbert, he ignored that. “How did our new governess cope with her first full day with the hellions?”
“They haven’t killed her. Or at least they hadn’t when I last saw her at luncheon. She could very well be dead by now, of course. I certainly wish I was.” With that optimistic report, Simpkins marched off, muttering old sea dog obscenities about Norbert as he disappeared back to his polishing.
Alone, Harry allowed himself a few seconds of calm before he steeled himself to enter the lion’s den and behold the havoc that been wreaked today. Despite knowing it had to be done, and the inevitable carnage he knew he would be confronted with aside, after his peculiar reaction to her yesterday, he would feel much happier avoiding Miss Rowe today. And forever for that matter too.
He considered knocking on the classroom door, and was about to, when the door opened and there she was.
“Good afternoon, Captain.” She stepped to one side and ushered him in with a regal sweep of her arm. “The children will not be long—they are just finishing their penmanship practice.”
Which miraculously—unless he actually was hallucinating thanks to his lack of food, sleep, and oat sowing—indeed they were.
To his great surprise, all three of Flora’s hellions were not only seated behind their desks, which he noted still defiantly faced the opposite direction to his clock, they at least all had pens in their grubby hands. They were also using them in the way pens were made to be used.
More shocking was that the rest of the classroom was as neat as a pin. Instead of the chaos he had expected, there was glorious order. Almost as if she had done the impossible and completely conquered the children’s rebellious, uncivilized natures in just one day.
He would have been seriously impressed if she had also looked as neat as her classroom. Instead, Miss Rowe was undeniably frayed around the edges. Wisps of her pretty copper hair shot out like sparks from her head and the rest of her hairstyle was lopsided. Although bizarrely, and much to his chagrin, it suited her. However, there was also a tightness around her fine eyes, and her plump mouth was a trifle pinched. He also could not help noticing a tear in her rumpled dark skirt that revealed two inches of the frothy white petticoat beneath it. While his woman-starved, overworked, and sleep-deprived mind did not need the further distraction of a glimpse of her underwear, all the clues were there to suggest she was a woman who had been through an ordeal. One who was clinging to the fa?ade of effortless control and serenity by her fingernails.
Even so, Harry was still, begrudgingly, impressed.
He hadn’t managed coming anywhere close to serenity with the three lovable reprobates in the five days since they had arrived. Yet here they all were. Quiet, seated, and working. That was a bloody miracle of biblical proportions. As confounding and unimaginable as feeding five thousand with just five loaves and fishes.
He wanted to ask her how she had done it.
Take her hand and shake it.
But instead, he gave her a half smile of approval because something about the angelic scene before him seemed too inconceivable to be fully believed and raised his suspicious hackles.
Maybe even galled.
He was big enough to admit this ungracious, distrusting jealousy likely stemmed from the overwhelming feelings of inadequacy which suddenly swamped him because what she had achieved, in next to no time, was truly beyond him.
“Have you all had a productive day?” For some inexplicable reason, he was rocking on his heels, and because he had no earthly idea what to do with his hands, had clasped them behind his back like his grandfather the admiral used to do when he was inspecting the fleet. And maybe it was his imagination, but even Miss Rowe seemed to be standing to attention as if he were.
Which was progress indeed too!
“We have, Captain. Just look at their work.”
Shyly, Grace held up hers to show him lines and lines of smudged squiggles. “I have been learning to join my S’s.” Thankful for that explanation as it gave him a clue what to look for, he smiled.
“That I can see, poppet.” He couldn’t. “Well done.”
As the other two were now staring at him expecting similar praise, Harry took a few seconds to appreciate their work too. Felix wrote like the impatient boy he was. The hastily scratched prose and accompanying blots looked as if a nest of his beloved spiders had scurried through the ink and scrambled across the page. But Felix had written something at least, so he would be grateful for small mercies.
Marianne’s handwriting was exactly like her: all bold, artful, sloping strokes which reminded him a great deal of her mother’s handwriting. Flora’s letters were always a thing of beauty—to behold, at least—while the chaotic but chatty contents of them often made his hair stand on end.
The last one had described, in alarming detail, her short but eventful “adventure” with glassblowing. Although how she could find humor in setting her frock on fire and having to be sluiced with an emergency bucket of water before her hair went up in flames too was anybody’s guess. But that summed up his mad sister in a nutshell. Life was just one big lark for Flora. Any day, he expected to receive a cheery letter from the land of the pharaohs describing at length how she had been kidnapped by bandits while on a solo climb up the pyramids, or an essay on how she had accidentally found herself swimming with piranhas when the leaky boat she had decided to take rowing down the Nile, without oars, capsized.
His sister was as reckless as she was irresponsible—so was it any wonder her offspring were quite so… wild?
“Splendid work, everyone.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Miss Rowe’s stiff posture slump slightly in relief. The speed at which she corrected it once again suggested that something about the serene scene before him was off. Almost as if it had been choreographed. “Apart from handwriting, what else have you learned today?” Out of the corner of his suspicious eye, his new governess stiffened and that confirmed it.
“Well, we learned about this king who couldn’t cook,” said Grace with such excitement she almost fell off her chair, “but despite that he was still great.”
“We studied Alfred the Great in our history lesson.” Miss Rowe made a big show of glancing at the clock, doubtless as a ploy to get rid of him. “I am sure the children would be delighted to tell you all about him over supper.” With just a tilt of her delectable body and an authoritarian clap of her hands, she dismissed him and her class at the same time. “Clear away now, everyone. You do not want to be late for Mrs. Rigsby’s delicious repast tonight as I hear that treacle pudding is on the menu.”
Then with a flick of just her finger, she directed them to place the papers on her desk and the books they had been using onto the bookshelf Harry had almost given himself a hernia over by dragging it into the room. The shelves now sported labels according to the subject and appeared to be filled with books that he had no hand in buying.
As the tidying took seconds, they were all chivvied out of the classroom en masse and he found himself spirited toward the dining room as little Grace dragged him by the hand, doubly suspicious as to why she was in such a hurry to see him gone.
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask but Grace squeezed his hand to command his attention instead. “We were very good today, Uncle Harry.”
“I am very pleased to hear it.” He beamed down at his youngest niece, still marveling at the astonishing transformation of the three destructive and feral miscreants at such impressive speed regardless of his niggling suspicions as to how.
Perhaps he should be chastising himself for ever doubting Miss Rowe’s abilities? He wasn’t convinced, but he was supremely grateful that he at least still had a governess and that, on the surface at least, things were going better than expected. He would keep his beady eye on her until she had convinced him. After all, as Sun Tzu quite rightly said, it was always prudent to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Whichever Miss Rowe was would soon reveal itself.
“I am very proud of you all.”
And he was.
So proud he ruffled Felix’s hair, as he had fully expected the boy to be the first to lead the rebellion today. His nephew had a stubborn streak a mile wide and, like blasted Flora, had an allergy to being kept inside. “After all these years of barbarousness, who knew you had such restraint and dedication in you?” Harry hadn’t, but suddenly, everything in his garden was rosy again now that calmness had been, at least temporarily, restored to his house.
He wasn’t really beguiled by Miss Rowe, simply in dire need of a woman’s touch. Miss Rowe could both teach and discipline children exactly as Miss Prentice had promised and Flora’s little savages could behave! How bloody marvelous was all that?
All he had to do was find the time to eat, sleep, and sow some of those well-needed and well-earned wild oats, and his garden wouldn’t just be rosy—it would be in full bloom.
That warm, reassured, and relieved feeling lasted all of five seconds until Marianne ruined it.
“Of course we did you proud, Uncle Harry.” She whispered this out of the side of her mouth so that Miss Rowe could not hear. “Only a blithering idiot would ruin the chance of unlimited ice cream at Gunther’s before Saturday and not even Felix is that stupid.”