CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“The curriculum requires restructuring.”
Mel sat at her desk in the schoolroom, speaking to no one, making notes in the ledger where she tracked the children’s educational progress. It was early morning, before breakfast, before the household stirred and she would have to face the day along with everything the day contained.
The curriculum did not, in fact, require restructuring as she had restructured it thoroughly upon her arrival and had refined it continually since then.
It was as sound a program of study as any governess could devise for three exceptional children with widely varying temperaments and learning styles.
But if she was restructuring the curriculum, she was not thinking about the garden.
If she was redesigning lesson plans and adjusting reading lists and planning new approaches to arithmetic instruction, she was not remembering the way he had stepped closer in the moonlight.
The way her breath had caught. The way she had almost, almost, forgotten every practical consideration that made such moments impossible.
She had walked away, she had done the right thing. She had named the impossibility clearly enough that even a duke could understand it.
And now she could not stop thinking about what might have happened if she had stayed.
The days after the garden were agony.
They passed with excruciating slowness, each hour stretching into an eternity of careful distance and studied professionalism.
Mel and Rhys spoke only of necessary matters: the children’s lessons, the household accounts, and Viola’s nightmares, which had begun three days ago and showed no sign of abating.
“What do you see in the dreams?” Mel had asked, sitting on the edge of Viola’s bed in the darkness, smoothing hair back from a damp forehead.
“I don’t know,” Viola had whispered. “Something is wrong, something is going to happen. I can feel it, but I can’t see it.”
“Nothing is going to happen. You’re safe here.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
But Mel knew, even as she made the promise, that it was one she could not guarantee. Because things did happen and people did leave, the world was full of wrong things that could not be prevented, no matter how carefully one tried.
The matter of the garden remained untouched, as though the very mention of it might shatter the fragile glass of their composure.
They maintained a most scrupulous distance, never permitting their gaze to dwell upon the other a moment beyond what the dictates of their station demanded.
Yet, this unyielding propriety was a far more strenuous burden; for the ignorance that had once shielded them was gone, replaced by a shared and heavy understanding.
Mel busied herself with work with desperate intensity, seeking escape in work in pursuit of it.
She taught Anna the rudiments of French, which Anna attacked with the same organisational fervour she applied to everything.
Within three days, Anna had created a system for tracking her vocabulary acquisition, complete with charts and tables and a colour-coded scheme for categorizing words by difficulty level.
“Je suis Annabelle,” Anna announced at breakfast on the fourth day.
“J’ai six ans. Je suis très intelligente.”
“Modest, too,” Rhys observed, not quite meeting Mel’s eyes across the table.
“Modesty is a performance,” Anna said, with the confidence of a child quoting a trusted authority.
“Accuracy is useful. Miss Grace taught me that.”
Mel felt her cheeks warm slightly and fixed her attention on her tea.
She coaxed Viola into reading aloud, a project that had seemed impossible when she first arrived at Hartfell and now seemed merely difficult.
First whispers, barely audible even in the quiet of the schoolroom.
Then sentences, spoken in a voice that trembled but did not break.
Then whole paragraphs, read with increasing confidence to an audience of her sisters and, sometimes, her father.
Rhys had been there for one of those reading sessions, sitting in the corner of the schoolroom with a book of his own, pretending to read while actually listening to every word his daughter spoke.
When Viola finished, stumbling only twice over difficult words, he had looked up with an expression of such raw pride that Mel had to turn away.
She took Thistle on nature expeditions that exhausted them both.
They tramped through fields and along cliff paths, cataloguing every beetle and butterfly and interesting rock they encountered.
Thistle’s specimen collection grew to alarming proportions, and Mel found herself spending evenings helping to label and organise finds that included three varieties of moth, a shed snake skin, and what Thistle insisted was a fossilised dinosaur tooth but which Mel suspected was merely an oddly shaped pebble.
“It could be a dinosaur tooth,” Thistle argued.
“Miss Grace says we should maintain scientific openness to unexpected possibilities.”
“I also said we should verify claims through evidence and expert consultation before accepting them as fact.”
“But what if the experts are wrong?”
“Then we revise our understanding based on new evidence. That’s how science works.”
“I think my dinosaur tooth is new evidence.”
Mel did not have the energy to argue. The exhaustion she was cultivating through constant activity had begun to catch up with her, settling into her bones and making everything feel slightly distant, slightly muffled, as though she were experiencing her life through a pane of glass.
She knew Rhys was watching her, she could feel his attention even when she was not looking at him, a constant awareness that prickled along her skin and made it difficult to concentrate.
He was still here, still in Cornwall. His extended visit had stretched past any reasonable duration, and still he showed no signs of departing.
Letters arrived from London with increasing frequency, bearing seals that suggested important matters and important people requiring his attention.
He read them and set them aside and remained at Hartfell, attending his daughters’ lessons and eating meals with the family and filling the house with his presence in ways that made it impossible for Mel to forget, even for a moment, that he was there.
She wanted him to leave, but at the same time she wanted him to stay.
The evening conversations had not stopped, but they had changed.
They still met in the study after the children were asleep and they still discussed matters of educational importance and household management.
But the conversations were shorter now, more focused, stripped of the wandering philosophical discussions and personal revelations that had characterised their earlier exchanges.
They spoke as employer and employee. They maintained the distance that propriety demanded and they pretended that nothing had changed, even though everything had changed, and the pretending was exhausting for both of them.
One week after the garden, Viola’s nightmare was worse than any that had come before.
Mel was in her room when she heard the scream, muffled by walls and doors but still audible enough to bring her instantly awake. She was out of bed and moving before she had fully processed what she was hearing, her feet finding the familiar path to the nursery in the darkness.
By the time she reached the nursery door, Viola was sitting up in bed, tears streaming down her face, her whole body trembling with the force of whatever she had seen in her dreams. Anna was awake as well, sitting up with the alert expression of a child who was assessing whether this situation required her intervention.
Thistle, remarkably, was still asleep, though Brutus had hopped from his terrarium to the edge of her pillow, apparently awakened by the commotion.
“Shh,” Mel said, crossing to Viola’s bed and gathering the child into her arms.
“I’m here. You’re safe. Nothing is going to hurt you.”
Viola clung to her with desperate strength, her small hands fisting in the fabric of Mel’s nightgown.
“Don’t leave,” she whispered. “Please don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
It took nearly an hour to calm her. Mel held her and rocked her and hummed the lullabies her own mother had sung, the ones she had not thought about in years but which emerged now from some deep place in her memory.
Eventually, Viola’s trembling subsided and her grip loosened, and Mel was able to lay her back against the pillows and smooth the hair from her face.
But Viola would not let her leave.
“Stay,” she whispered, her eyes still bright with tears.
“Please. Stay until I fall asleep.”
Mel stayed. She sat on the edge of the bed, holding Viola’s hand, watching the child’s breathing slowly deepen into the rhythms of exhausted slumber.
The nursery was dark around them, lit only by the faint moonlight filtering through the curtains and the glow of a single candle Mel had brought from her room.
When Viola was finally, truly asleep, Mel eased herself off the bed and made her way downstairs.
Her hands were shaking slightly, whether from cold or exhaustion or something else entirely, she could not say.
What she needed was warm milk, the remedy her own mother had always provided for childhood terrors, and the quiet of the kitchen where she could gather herself before attempting to sleep.
The kitchen was dark when she entered, and she moved with the ease of long familiarity, locating the milk and the pot and the matches for the stove. She worked in silence, the small sounds of her activity the only break in the midnight stillness.
The milk was warming when she heard footsteps in the corridor.
She knew whose footsteps they were, she knew before she turned, before she saw his figure appear in the doorway, before their eyes met across the dimly lit kitchen.