Chapter 16
“Interesting,” Sarah said, tapping her fingers on the table between them. Iris was abed, and Letitia had asked her friend to join her for a late-night cup of tea in her bedchamber.
“What’s interesting?” Letitia asked suspiciously.
Sarah waved vaguely with her handless arm. “It’s only that I never before took you for an idiot, Letitia Knightley.”
Letty had been midway through a sip of tea, which turned her squawk of outrage into more of a hacking cough of outrage.
“I am not!” she protested when she had regained her composure.
Sarah raised an eyebrow. “What else would you call someone who has a good position with good pay with an employer that is kind and a child that is about as sweet as a little girl can be—and yet, despite that, wants to throw away that position because the kind employer dared to ask if she had any secrets?” Sarah paused pointedly.
“Which you do, even though none of that is your fault?”
Letty narrowed her eyes. “I assume these questions are rhetorical,” she said pertly.
“Don’t use your fancy governess words with me, Letitia,” Sarah countered. “Why would you tell me everything if you didn’t want me to speak my mind?”
In fairness, Letty had not told her everything. She loved Sarah like a sister, but even sisters didn’t need to know certain intimate details.
Besides, Letitia was the tiniest bit embarrassed that she had let herself be so thoroughly overtaken by her passions. She was a sensible woman most of the time. So what on earth had happened to her cool head?
Ezra Swifton happened, that is what.
She covered up these confusing emotions with sarcasm.
“Well, I thought you might want to know that I was leaving before you woke up one day, entered this room, and found an entirely different woman living here. I thought it might give you a fright. Next time, I shan’t be so considerate.”
Sarah gave her a look of utter disapproval.
“See reason, Letty,” she urged. “So the man is eager to keep you here. That’s good. That’s how it is supposed to go, when you are good at your job.”
Letitia was already shaking her head.
“I… I just can’t,” she said. Even the idea of staying made her muscles go rigid with fear.
“I can’t work for someone who feels entitled to me.
” She wasn’t certain that the words were right, not after the way Ezra had shown her that he was far from immune to her, but she didn’t have better ones.
“That’s how it starts, you know. And then, by the time you realize the trap is even there, it has tied itself so tightly around your neck that you nearly kill yourself getting free. ”
She remembered those weeks of planning to escape Peter’s control all too clearly.
It had been frightening. She’d been sure he would discover her before she could get away, that he would do something—her imagination conjured up increasingly terrifying possibilities of what that something might be, the thoughts keeping her awake at night, preventing her from sleeping.
There were so many times when she’d thought it would all end for her.
When she’d put in her notice. When Peter had approached her on that very last morning, even in those early days after she’d left his house, she’d been utterly terrified that he would come for her, that he would seek revenge, that she would turn a corner and find him waiting.
When he didn’t do any of the things that so filled her with worry, she had dared to hope she had gotten away clean. Until she received his letter.
Sarah’s eyes had gone soft. Letty knew that her friend loved her and meant well. But the expression smacked of pity.
“Don’t,” Letitia said, holding up a hand before Sarah could say anything.
Not that it worked, for pity’s sake. Sarah just waited with that same look on her face until Letitia gave up, rolled her eyes, and dropped her hand.
“I just think,” Sarah said as if there had been no interruption at all, “that maybe, just possibly, you are taking the events of the past and perhaps applying those expectations to the future a bit too much.”
“Yes,” Letty responded, “because that is how life works! The reason I expect the sun to rise tomorrow is that it rose today and yesterday and all the days before that.”
“I feel like those two things aren’t the same, actually,” Sarah countered. “Just like perhaps the Duke of Rutley, a man who has been nothing but kind and generous—both to you and Iris, I might add, not to mention me—is not actually the same as Viscount Dugley.”
“Don’t say his name,” Letty hissed. Belatedly, she realized that did not do much for her defense against Sarah’s accusation that she was being unreasonable.
But there was just something about Peter’s letter showing up here just when she’d started to feel safe that made her feel like she might about invoking a devil—like speaking the name could summon the man.
Sarah went back to tapping her fingers. It took very little time before the sound began to drive Letitia to madness.
“What?” she asked wearily.
Sarah stopped tapping. “I just think…” She sighed. “What if Peter does come back?” Letty flinched. “Wouldn’t it be better to have a powerful duke to protect you? I don’t like the thought of you unprotected, Letty. You will not even have me with you.”
Sarah said this as if it were a bad thing, but the only thing that scared Letty more than having Peter come after her was having Peter come after both her and Sarah.
“What if he actually wants to protect you?” Sarah asked quietly.
Oh, it was so very tempting to believe it. But Letitia could not afford that way of thinking. If she started to believe that maybe Ezra would protect her, she would be that much more disappointed when she was inevitably reminded of the lesson that had been the story of her entire life.
She could rely on herself and herself alone.
Certainly, she could not trust a nobleman to come and save her.
After all, she wasn’t some high-born lady.
She didn’t have a dowry or a good name or the kind of fragile constitution that made men want to fawn over her.
She was a servant. She was nobody at all.
“It is best this way,” she told Sarah firmly. “At the end of the week, I will go. And everything will be fine.”
Now the only thing she had to do was learn to believe it.
* * *
“And what would you do with a child who is reluctant to speak, Miss Pamfrey?” Ezra asked.
The woman across from him resembled nothing so much as a stalk of asparagus. She was tall and thin, wearing a very sensible frock of sage green. She had a close cap of curls that came to a point at the top of her head. He’d almost called her Miss Asparagus twice.
Miss Pamfrey blinked owlishly at him.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace, but I do not understand the question. Children, I have always held, are best seen and not heard. It is an old adage for a reason, you see. Or do you mean a child that is not speaking out of some form of stubbornness?”
This was going so very, very poorly. She was the third candidate he had interviewed that day, and she wasn’t even the worst. The worst had been a stout, sour-faced woman who had insisted that all children needed the switch sometimes, and those soft-hearted reformers who said otherwise would send the country into ruin within a single generation, if they were not stopped.
“No, miss,” he corrected politely, stifling a sigh. “Iris is just somewhat reserved.”
Her face creased in sympathy, and Ezra felt a faint spark of hope.
“Oh, a simpleton,” she said sadly. “Well, children like that should likely be packed off to the countryside. Their weak nerves cannot handle London, Your Grace. They need to be taken for long walks daily.”
Taken for walks, Ezra thought despairingly, that hope dying as quickly as it had come. As if Iris were a dog.
“Right,” he said. There was no point extending this wretched display. “Well. Thank you very much, Miss Pamfrey. That will be all.”
She straightened even taller in her seat. “Shall I be starting soon, then?”
“I am afraid not,” Ezra replied, too weary to be gentle about it. “Thank you for your time. Goodbye.”
The woman let out an audible sniff as she departed. If that was all it took to soothe her wounded pride, he would let her have it, and gladly. All he wanted was for her to leave.
And possibly a very large glass of scotch.
The problem, he knew, was that nobody would ever possibly compare to Letitia. Oh, all the women he’d interviewed had been qualified. They all had references. Some of them had questionable approaches to child-rearing, it was true, but they were all accomplished professionals.
And yet none of them had even come close to Letty. How could they? Iris adored her and even he…
Ezra rubbed the back of his neck. He only had a few more days before she would leave, and he could scarcely bear to think of it.
For Iris’ sake, of course. Obviously. Just Iris.
Ezra had worked himself into a proper lather by the time he wandered down to dinner, where—oh of bloody course—he was immediately faced by Letitia and Iris giggling, their heads bent together over a scrap of foolscap.
For a moment, he just watched them and let his chest ache with the sight.
All too soon, Iris spotted him.
“Uncle Ezra,” she said, her eyes going bright in a way that made his chest ache in a completely different fashion. “Miss Knightley has taught me to write my name!”
Ezra glanced at Letty, who nodded her confirmation. He bent over the paper and saw it, right there, in slightly wobbly letters. IRIS.
“That’s marvelous, sweetheart,” he said, ruffling the girl’s dark hair as she beamed up at him, pride practically pouring out of her. “But what is this?”
He pointed to a… lump? Frankly, he didn’t know what to call the thing on the side of the paper.
Iris and Letitia dissolved into giggles again.