Chapter Seven #2
She turned one of the papers over and weighted it with an inkstand. “I shall try to keep moral improvement out of the dining room. It seldom sits comfortably there.”
He should have left. The matter was settled, and any further conversation was indulgence disguised as supervision. Instead, he crossed to the window and looked down at the page of copywork.
In uneven but legible script, Mary had written her sentence. I shall observe the world before I conquer it.
Edmund stared.
Miss Winthrop followed his gaze. “She wished to write only the second half. I insisted upon the first. We compromised.”
“You consider that a compromise?”
“For Lady Mary, yes.”
He looked at the jar of leaves. “And Declan?”
“Lord Declan corrected my drawing of the lower lawn, corrected my use of the word ridge, and then corrected Lady Mary’s assertion that moss grows out of spite. I counted it a productive afternoon.”
“He spoke?”
“Several times. Mostly to accuse us of geographical negligence.”
The answer should have pleased him. It did please him, somewhere beneath the irritation. That was the problem. Pleasure arrived tangled with resentment, and resentment had the stronger habit.
“You have made alterations,” he said.
Miss Winthrop stilled, though only for a breath. “To the lessons, yes.”
“To the household.”
She turned fully towards him. The late afternoon light touched the side of her face, softening the fatigue at her eyes and catching the stray brown hair that had come loose near her temple.
He had not noticed before that her hair warmed in the light.
Or he had noticed and had refused to store the information.
“That is a larger accusation, Your Grace,” she said. “I should like to know whether I am meant to apologise or take pride in it.”
“Do you deny it?”
“No. I only deny intent. I came to teach the children, not rearrange Wrenfield.”
“Yet the house is rearranging itself around you.”
“Then perhaps the house was waiting for someone to move first.”
The words were too near the truth. He disliked them immediately.
“Mary has not bitten anyone in several days,” he said.
“I am aware. Mrs Holroyd looks at me with the gratitude of a woman reprieved from military service.”
“Declan speaks more.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Miss Winthrop lowered herself into the chair behind the desk, not casually, but with the careful economy of someone who had been on her feet too long. “Because he is being answered without being examined, never inspected for symptoms.”
“You think he has been examined?”
“I think quiet children are often surrounded by adults waiting for them to prove they are better, worse, damaged, clever, ungrateful, or cured. Lord Declan notices the waiting. He does not enjoy it.”
Edmund’s jaw tightened. “You speak freely for someone so newly employed.”
“Would you prefer I speak uselessly?”
“I would prefer you remember that observation is not authority.”
She accepted the rebuke with a slight inclination of her head, but her gaze remained steady. “Then I shall say it differently. I do not know your son better than you do, Your Grace. I know him differently. That is all.”
It was, somehow, worse than an accusation.
Edmund turned away and examined the room as if he had come to inspect it. There was nothing to inspect. The fire was properly laid, the windows latched, the books stacked neatly. The new table had not yet arrived, which deprived him of even that subject.
“You are tired,” he said before he could decide not to.
Miss Winthrop’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that another accusation?”
“It is an observation.”
“Then I shall return one: so are you.”
He looked at her sharply.
She adjusted the copybooks into a straighter pile. “I beg your pardon. That was not my place.”
“No,” he said. “It was not.”
Silence settled. He had meant the words to end the conversation, perhaps to punish her for stepping too near. Instead, they hung between them with less satisfaction than he had expected.
Miss Winthrop rose. “The children have made progress. Not enough to flatter ourselves, but enough to continue. Lady Mary is testing whether a boundary remains a boundary after she has thrown herself at it. Lord Declan is testing whether speech remains safe after it has left him. Neither child is simple, and neither child is beyond reach.”
“And you?” Edmund asked.
She looked at him. “What of me?”
“Are you beyond reach?”
The question escaped before he could recall it. For a moment, even the room seemed to understand that he had asked something he had no right to ask.
Miss Winthrop did not blush. That might have been easier to dismiss. Instead, she looked surprised, then thoughtful, and at last faintly guarded.
“No one who must earn her bread can afford to be entirely beyond reach,” she said. “But I have learnt to decide who may reach and how far.”
He should have apologised. He should have turned the matter back to lessons, furniture, children, anything with straight lines and known boundaries. Instead, he found himself noticing that she was pretty.
Not pretty as women in London drawing rooms arranged themselves to be pretty, with lowered lashes and deliberate frailty.
Miss Winthrop had none of that. Her gown was plain.
Her hands were ink-stained. One cuff had been mended with thread that did not quite match.
Yet she possessed a liveliness no plainness could disguise, a mind visible in her face, warmth held under discipline, humour that appeared before she granted it permission.
Her beauty, if that was the word, was inconvenient because it did not ask to be admired.
It simply occupied the room until refusal became effort.
Guilt moved in him so swiftly that it was almost anger.
Eleanor had been dead six years.
Six years was not long enough for this.
No number of years would be long enough if the heart remained decent.
“The table may be moved,” he said abruptly. “The plain oak one. No beetles.”
Miss Winthrop blinked once at the change in subject, then recovered. “No dead beetles, Your Grace. I shall notify the scientific community of the limitation under which we labour.”
“See that you do.”
He turned to leave.
“Your Grace,” she said.
He stopped in the doorway.
“Thank you. Not only for the table. For allowing the children space to improve in their own untidy fashion.”
He did not turn around. “Do not thank me for sense I should have had before you arrived.”
“Very well,” she said after a pause. “Then I shall thank you only for the table.”
He left before she could see his face.
In the corridor, he walked too quickly, passed his own study, and found himself at the turn of the staircase before he stopped. His heart was beating as if he had been riding hard. Ridiculous. He had done nothing but speak with a governess in a schoolroom.
A governess with ink on her fingers. A governess who asked him for reasons. A governess who had made his daughter write a sentence about conquering the world and his son speak without retreating into silence.
He had survived funerals, Parliament, estate disputes, his own face in a mirror, and the raising of two motherless children.
Yet Miss Winthrop, at a schoolroom desk with one loosened curl and no idea what she was doing to his peace, had driven him from a room without lifting her voice.