CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
But she heard her name.
Not “Miss Grace.” Her name. Mel, and she stopped, despite herself, in the shadowed corridor outside the drawing room door, which was not quite closed.
“…simply explain to her,” Benedict was saying.
“Tell her what actually happened.”
“I’ve tried. She won’t listen. She called me ‘Your Grace’ at dinner and looked at me like I was a stranger.” Rhys’s voice was raw in a way she had never heard it.
“She’s put up walls I don’t know how to breach.”
“Perhaps she needs time.”
“Time for what? To convince herself that every terrible thing she believes about me is true? To decide that I’m not worth the trouble of hoping for?”
There was a pause, and Mel pressed herself against the wall, her heart pounding madly, knowing she should leave but unable to move.
“What exactly did she say to you? In the garden, before all this.”
“She said I hide behind my worst self because I’m afraid my best self will fail.” Rhys laughed, though there was no humour in it.
“She was right. The moment I got back to London, I proved her right. Drinking too much, letting Mrs. Hartington drape herself on my arm, acting exactly like the rake the gossip sheets expect me to be.”
“But you didn’t actually do anything. You went home alone.”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is how it looked.
What matters is that she read about it and saw exactly what she expected to see.
” Another pause, longer this time. “I can’t enter into matrimony with a governess, Benedict.
You know that. The scandal would be… Society would never accept it.
My daughters would suffer for my choices. ”
Mel stopped breathing.
She had known, of course she had known. She had told herself this exact truth a hundred times since the garden, had reminded herself of the impossibility of the situation every time her heart tried to hope for something different.
But hearing him say it, hearing the casual dismissal in his voice, the matter-of-fact acknowledgment that she was beneath his consideration for anything permanent, was different from knowing it herself.
“The scandal would be manageable,” Benedict said. “Serena and I would support you. Others would follow.”
“It’s not about scandal. It’s about what’s right for Anna and Viola and Thistle. They’re already illegitimate. They already carry that burden. I cannot add to it by entering into a matrimony so far beneath my station that society would use it as another weapon against them.”
So far beyond what propriety allowed.
The words landed with the particular precision of a knife finding its target. Mel had always known what she was: a woman of no family, no fortune, and no position beyond what she had earned through work. She had never pretended otherwise, never aspired to anything beyond her reach.
But she had thought, foolishly, that he saw her differently.
That when he looked at her, he saw something more than her circumstances.
That the connection they had built, the conversations and confidences and quiet moments of understanding, had meant something beyond the boundaries of class and station.
She had been wrong.
She turned from the door and walked toward the stairs, her footsteps silent on the carpet, her face composed into the mask she had spent a lifetime perfecting. She did not hear what else was said. She did not need to.
She had heard enough.
In her room, she lit a single candle and stood for a moment, looking at the space that had become her home over the past four months.
The narrow bed with its practical coverlet.
The small desk where she wrote her lesson plans.
The wardrobe that held her few dresses, all of them grey or brown, all of them suitable for a woman who worked for her living.
The shell on the windowsill, gleaming in the candlelight.
She crossed to the window and picked up the shell, turning it over in her hands. Viola had given it to her as a gift. Viola had trusted her, had chosen her over her own father to receive this precious thing.
But Viola was a child, and children did not understand the rules that governed adult lives.
Children did not know that affection was not enough, that wanting was not the same as having and that the distance between a governess and a duchess could not be bridged no matter how much either party might wish it.
Mel set the shell back on the windowsill. Then, moving with the deliberate precision that characterised all her actions, she went to the wardrobe and pulled out her travelling trunk.
It was a small trunk, battered from years of use, large enough to hold everything she owned. She had packed it when she came to Hartfell and had not touched it since, had allowed herself to believe that she had found a place where she might stay.
She had been wrong about that too.
The packing took less time than she expected.
Dresses folded and placed in careful layers.
Books stacked along one side. The few personal items she possessed arranged in the spaces between.
When she was finished, the room looked exactly as it had when she arrived: impersonal, temporary and ready for the next occupant.
She did not take the shell.
It belonged here, with Viola, with the children she was about to leave. She could not take it with her, could not carry that particular weight of memory and loss into whatever came next.
The trunk closed with a soft click. Mel sat on the edge of her bed and looked at it, feeling the full weight of what she was about to do settle onto her shoulders.
She was leaving. She was breaking her promise to the children, the promise she had made on her first day and had renewed every day since.
She was abandoning them to a father who cherished them but could not be trusted to stay, to a house that would feel emptier without her, to a future she would not be part of.
It was the right thing to do and she could see that clearly now. Staying would only prolong the pain, would only make the eventual separation more devastating. Better to leave now, while the children were young enough to forget her, while the wound was fresh enough to heal cleanly.
It was for the best to leave before she had to face him again, knowing what he truly thought of her.
So far outside the boundaries of his world.
She would wait until morning and she would say goodbye to the children she would make up some excuse about a family emergency or a position elsewhere, would leave them with the impression that she was departing for reasons beyond her control rather than reasons that would break their hearts.
And then she would go, find another position, another household, another set of children to cherish temporarily before circumstances forced her to leave them too.
It was what she did. It was what she had always done. Surviving, adapting and moving on before the losses could accumulate into something unbearable.
She lay down on the bed without undressing, too exhausted to manage buttons and laces, and stared at the ceiling until exhaustion finally dragged her into sleep.
Her last thought, before consciousness faded, was of Rhys’s voice saying words she would never be able to unheard.
I can’t enter into a matrimony with a governess.
She had always known that, but knowing and hearing were different things and the difference was sharp enough to cut.