Chapter 14
“‘Three dozen eggs at one and six the dozen,’” Nancy read aloud, squinting at the wobbly script in the household ledger. “Which, multiplied by… Mrs. Tullock, is that a four or a nine?”
Nancy sat at the long table with an ink-stained thumb and a personal grudge against the account books of Scarfield Manor.
“Four, Your Grace.” Mrs. Tullock’s answer was dry enough to crack porcelain. “It is always a four. The cook has not managed a nine in this house since the invention of the egg.”
Nancy blotted her forehead with the heel of her palm, leaving a faint comma of ink above her brow. She reset the abacus, this time managing to launch two beads directly onto the floor. “I see. So, four. That is… seventy-two?”
“Seventy-two eggs, yes.” Mrs. Tullock inspected the tally as if searching for counterfeit currency.
“And at one and six the dozen, that’s…” Nancy attempted to align her sums, but the number mutated mid-column and she had to start again. “That’s… It’s not important. Next item.”
A sound, somewhere between a sigh and a snort, escaped the housekeeper.
Nancy forced a smile. “This is going remarkably well, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Tullock neither agreed nor denied, but arranged her spectacles with a look that suggested she had already updated her will to account for Nancy’s mathematical crimes.
The lesson limped onward. Nancy tackled the meat account next, then the candles, then a short but nasty skirmish with the laundry bill.
Each new calculation seemed to breed errors by division, and every page of the ledger bore silent witness to her defeat.
By the time she reached the coal delivery, Nancy’s head buzzed with a migraine’s worth of misplaced decimals.
She leaned back and massaged the bridge of her nose. “It cannot possibly be so complicated to keep a house running. How does anyone survive it?”
“Most young ladies learn before the wedding breakfast,” Mrs. Tullock observed, with the faintest suggestion of charity.
Nancy bristled, then caught the edge of humor in the housekeeper’s eyes. “Is that so? Well, perhaps I am only a slow learner.”
“Perhaps her Grace is very stubborn,” Mrs. Tullock said, “which is the next best thing.”
Nancy allowed herself a laugh. “Thank you, Mrs. Tullock. I shall take that as encouragement.”
She bent over the ledger, tongue caught between her teeth, and squared her shoulders.
For the next twenty minutes, she wrote numbers, erased them, wrote them again.
She dipped her pen too deeply, and ink pooled in a perfect black circle on the table.
She mopped it up with the corner of a handkerchief, then promptly knocked the entire ledger off the desk with her elbow.
It landed spine-down, scattering receipts and a single dried pansy across the floor.
Mrs. Tullock watched her collect the pieces. “You needn’t master it in one sitting, Your Grace.”
“I would rather die than let this book defeat me,” Nancy replied, stacking the pages with a soldier’s precision. “I have survived Greek, Latin, and my mother’s Scottish temper. I refuse to be bested by arithmetic.”
She found her place, copied the numbers, and felt—slowly, to her great annoyance—that they finally began to make sense. Patterns emerged; what once looked like gibberish now resembled a system. It was, she realized, simply a matter of learning the shape of the thing, then forcing it to obey.
She looked up to see Mrs. Tullock regarding her, not with skepticism, but a sort of grim pride. “You’re getting it.”
“I am?” Nancy tried to sound only mildly desperate.
The housekeeper nodded. “You’ll make a proper mistress of this house yet.”
Nancy smiled, for real this time. “That is the plan.”
Mrs. Tullock gathered her skirts and moved toward the door. “I’ll leave you to your battle, then. But do call if you require a medic.”
When the housekeeper was gone, Nancy sat very still for a long moment, pen poised above the figures.
She could not have named the feeling, but it was somewhere between triumph and fear. She wanted, fiercely, for everything to be perfect—for the children, for the house, even for Oscar, though she would die before confessing it.
She wrote her sums again, careful and slow. She checked them twice. She straightened the stack of ledgers, set her cup on its saucer, and wiped the ink from her brow. Then she whispered to the empty room: “I will get this right.”
And this time, she believed it.
Nancy lasted precisely twelve minutes before the urge to see the twins overwhelmed her better judgment.
She excused herself from the endless parade of lists, left the ledger stacked with numbers as neat as her pride could muster, and bounded up the stairs.
The nursery door stood ajar, admitting a buzz of small voices and a rising tide of giggles.
Nancy stepped inside and was instantly hailed by a volley of throw pillows, two raucous children, and the sweet, musty perfume of the room’s afternoon sunlight.
“Did you conquer the dragon?” Clara demanded, rolling off her makeshift tower of cushions and landing at Nancy’s feet.
“I tamed it,” Nancy said, offering her hand to the girl. “And then I bribed it to do my bidding. Dragons respond very well to bribery, as it turns out.”
Henry, lurking behind a fortress of blankets, popped his head up. “Did you bring sweets?”
“Not today. Today is for stories,” Nancy announced, advancing into the territory of their blanket fort and deliberately collapsing onto the floor beside them.
Her skirts ballooned out, nearly engulfing both children.
“What shall it be? Wild tales of Scotland, or a new chapter in the Adventures of the Tiny Fox?”
Clara didn’t answer, simply wedged herself into Nancy’s lap and buried her face in the folds of her dress. Henry followed, burrowing in with the caution of a woodland creature, half-expecting a trap. Nancy tucked them both in, heart pulsing with an emotion she refused to label.
She opened the book—one of Peter’s old favorites, she guessed from the chewed spine—and began to read.
The story was nonsense: a hedgehog who outwitted highwaymen with the power of arithmetic, and a badger who solved every problem by reciting history in reverse.
The twins listened, spellbound, faces tipped up to her as if she might conjure the rest of their lives from the page.
Nancy was three chapters in, and Henry had just declared war on the neighboring village, when a shadow blocked the light from the door. Oscar stood at the threshold, arms folded, an air of skepticism radiating from him in steady waves.
He cleared his throat, but Clara only gripped Nancy tighter. “We are busy,” she said.
Henry seconded this: “We’re having a story.”
Oscar entered anyway, and, after an awkward survey of the available seating-one rocking horse, a miniature chair, and a pile of cushions already claimed- he crouched on the rug. Clara eyed him, then gestured at his legs.
“You must cross them,” she instructed. “Like this.”
Oscar regarded his own limbs as if they belonged to someone else, then—carefully, with the air of a man disarming an explosive—folded them in a parody of repose. He sat, knees jutting, hands clamped to his shins.
Nancy smirked. “Welcome to the nursery, Your Grace. Do you require a scone to complete the experience?”
Oscar’s glare was a force of nature. “I am here to observe.”
“Then observe quietly, if you please,” Nancy said, and turned a page with great ceremony.
She continued the story, giving the hedgehog an accent she had never attempted before and making the badger sound suspiciously like Mrs. Tullock. The children were enraptured, giggling and nudging each other with every silly voice or wild plot turn.
Oscar lasted exactly four minutes before he interjected.
“The badger is misusing the term ‘parliamentary procedure,’” he said, lips twitching.
“It’s a metaphor, Oscar,” Nancy replied. “One must allow for dramatic license.”
“The fox’s math is also incorrect,” Oscar added, eyes narrowing.
“That is the point,” Nancy shot back. “If the fox did proper math, he wouldn’t be in half as much trouble.”
Clara, emboldened, took up the cause. “You are not supposed to argue with the story, Your Grace.”
Oscar stared at her. “You are five years old.”
“You are a hundred,” Clara replied, “and still you do not listen.”
Henry giggled so hard he nearly toppled the blanket fort. Nancy had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from cackling.
Oscar shifted, then said, “If you must continue, at least allow me to read. I will correct the factual errors as we go.”
Nancy, not about to miss such an opportunity, passed him the book. “By all means, enlighten us.”
Oscar accepted it as if he were being handed the Treaty of Ghent.
He opened to the page, cleared his throat, and read:
“‘The hedgehog, valiantly resisting the temptations of sloth, deployed his abacus with an efficiency that put the village magistrate to shame.’”
Oscar paused, scanned the page, and looked up. “There is no mention of the abacus in the previous section. This is a narrative inconsistency.”
Henry blinked. “What’s an abacus?”
“A counting device. Ancient, but effective,” Oscar said.
Clara frowned. “We have never seen one.”
Nancy leaned in. “Perhaps the hedgehog borrowed it from the Duke. He has so many, you see.”
Oscar ignored her, resumed reading, and did so in a voice so flat and devoid of inflection that it seemed to suck the air from the room.
“‘And then, having completed his calculations, the hedgehog set out to…’” He glanced at Nancy. “This is preposterous. A hedgehog would not travel this far in a single day.”
Nancy, delighted, said, “You’re losing the audience, Oscar. Try to make it more… engaging.”
“I am not a nursemaid,” Oscar replied.
“You are our uncle,” Clara reminded him.
He bristled. “Yes. I am aware.”
“Then you must read like one,” Clara insisted.
Oscar closed the book with a finality that brooked no debate. “I have pressing business.”
And, in a movement so abrupt that even the badger would have been impressed, he rose, straightened his coat, and strode from the room.
The silence left in his wake was almost a physical force.
Henry watched the door, eyes huge. “Is he angry?”
Nancy considered. “No. He’s simply unused to being overruled by hedgehogs and children. Give him time.”
Clara wrinkled her nose. “He should practice more.”
“I will suggest it,” Nancy promised, tucking the children back into their fort and pressing a kiss to Clara’s forehead. “I must go see that he does not set the house on fire in his outrage. Will you be safe here without me?”
Clara nodded, brave as always. “We will protect each other.”
“Good.” Nancy rose, dusted off her skirts, and followed Oscar’s retreat.
She found him in the hallway, pacing in front of a portrait of his own father.
“Was my reading truly so terrible?” he said without turning.
Nancy, careful, said, “It was efficient. Thorough. But not… delightful.”
Oscar stopped. “I do not know how to be delightful.”
“You could learn,” Nancy offered. “The children adore you already, despite your deficiencies.”
He grunted. “They prefer you.”
“Everyone prefers me,” Nancy said. “But you are not competing with me. You are simply required to improve your performance.”
Oscar finally faced her. “I have run an estate, a realm, and a Parliament subcommittee. Surely I can master a children’s book.”
Nancy smiled. “You will, if you wish.”
“It is too taxing.”
“My, are you not a contradiction, Duke!”
He cocked an eyebrow, and she laughed.
“Very well, I shall show you if you will allow me.”
Oscar nodded, much to Nancy’s surprise. Then he mumbled something incoherent.
“You have already agreed,” she said. “There is no changing your mind.”
“I am not,” he grumbled, turning and striding down the hall.
Nancy watched him with a wide grin, feeling as though he was not so hopeless after all.