Chapter 3 #3
“I told you to wear a pelisse yesterday, lovey,” the nurse said. “It is still just spring, even if the sun does shine. You will never get rid of your chill if you don’t take care of yourself.”
“Don’t fuss, Nanny,” the duchess said crossly. “I have had this cough since winter, even though I always bundled up warmly then, as you told me to. Do you suppose he will come home if he hears?”
“I daresay he will, lovey,” the nurse said. “He usually does.”
“He does not like me to have any enjoyment or company,” her grace said. “I hate him, Nanny. I really do.”
“Hush,” the nurse said. “Not in front of Lady Pamela, lovey.”
The duchess looked at the child and touched one soft dark ringlet. “Send her down to my sitting room, then,” she said, “this Miss Hamilton. Adam may have hired her, Nanny, but she must be made to see that she will be answerable to me. After all, Adam—”
“Hush, lovey,” the nurse said firmly.
The duchess kissed her child’s cheek again and swept from the room, her morning robe flowing out behind her.
Her daughter watched her go wistfully. “Do you think she liked my picture, Nanny?” she asked.
“I’m sure of it, lovey.” The nurse bent to hug her. “Mama adores you and everything you do.”
“And will Papa like it?” the child asked. “Is he coming home?”
“We will keep it carefully until he does,” Mrs. Clement said.
WHEN FLEUR WAS USHERED into the duchess’s sitting room a short time later, it was empty.
She stood quietly inside the door and waited, her hands folded before her.
It was a small room, but quite exquisite.
It was oval, with a painted dome for a ceiling and slender gilded Corinthian columns supporting the entablature.
Decorative panels on an ivory-colored ground in pale reds, greens, pinks, and gold leaf made the walls delicate and feminine.
She did not have a long wait. The door at the other end of the room opened to admit a small and dainty lady in a delicate blue muslin dress, her silver-blond hair piled in soft curls and ringlets on her head and about her face.
The duchess was extremely beautiful and looked younger than her own twenty-three years, Fleur thought.
“Miss Hamilton?” the duchess asked.
Fleur curtsied. “Your grace.”
She found herself being openly surveyed from head to foot by the duchess’s light blue eyes.
“My husband has sent you here as governess to my daughter?” The voice was sweet and breathless.
Fleur inclined her head.
“Do you realize that at the age of five she is not yet in need of teaching?” her grace asked.
“But there is a great deal even so young a child can learn without actually sitting over a book all day long, your grace,” Fleur said.
The duchess’s chin came up. “Do you presume to disagree with me?” she asked, both her voice and her face pleasant and somewhat at variance with her words.
Fleur was silent.
“My husband sent you,” the other said. “What was your relationship with him, pray?”
Fleur flushed. “I have not met his grace,” she said. “I was interviewed at an employment agency by Mr. Houghton.”
The duchess looked her up and down once more.
“As you will have gathered,” she said, “I am in disagreement with my husband on my daughter’s need of tuition.
She is a young and delicate child who needs only her mother’s love and her nurse’s care.
You will not tax her brain with useless knowledge, Miss Hamilton, and you will take your orders from Mrs. Clement, Lady Pamela’s nurse.
You will consider yourself one of the servants of this house and keep to your own room or the servants’ hall when your presence is not needed in the schoolroom.
I do not expect to see you on this floor of the house unless expressly summoned by me. Do you understand me?”
All was spoken in a light, friendly voice while large blue eyes regarded her from a fragile, beautiful face. An adoring mother afraid of releasing her child from babyhood, Fleur thought with some sympathy despite the imperious nature of the words themselves.
“Yes, your grace,” she said.
“You may leave now and spend half an hour with my daughter under the supervision of Mrs. Clement,” her grace said.
But as Fleur turned to leave, her grace spoke again.
“Miss Hamilton,” she said, “I approve of the way you are clothed this morning and of the way you have dressed your hair. I trust that your manner of dress will always meet with my approval.”
Fleur inclined her head again and left the room.
And since she was dressed in a severe gray cotton dress, one of her new purchases, with a small white lace collar, and had her hair combed entirely back from her face and confined in a heavy bun at her neck, she thought she understood the duchess perfectly.
Was the duke the type of man to harass his younger servants, then? Was that why her grace had asked about her relationship with him in London? She hoped fervently that he would keep himself there for a long time to come.
Well, she thought, thinking back, with a slight chill, to the duchess’s words and manner, she had been warned that neither her grace nor Mrs. Clement would be pleased to see her.
And she must not complain. Neither of them had been openly hostile to her.
They would come around, surely, when they realized that she had no intention of standing over Lady Pamela with a stick all day long in a stuffy schoolroom.
MR. SNEDBURG WAS AT the end of a long day’s work. He had unbent enough to take a seat in the parlor on St. James’s Street and even to accept a glass of port.
“Much obliged, sir,” he said, taking the glass from the hand of his host. “The feet get sore from so much walking and the pipes dry from asking so many questions. Yes, indeed, Miss Fleur Hamilton. Too much of a coincidence not to be the same young lady, would you not say? And she fits the description.”
Mr. Snedburg did not add that both his informants, Miss Fleming and the young woman’s landlady, had described Fleur Hamilton as a very ordinary-looking young lady with very ordinary-looking reddish hair.
He understood that his client rather fancied his cousin even if she was a murderer and a jewel thief.
And men in the throes of an infatuation were to be forgiven if they occasionally waxed poetic.
Sunshine and sunset tangled all together, indeed.
It was enough to make the Runner want to toss up his victuals.
“And?” Lord Brocklehurst was watching him keenly, his own glass of port halfway to his lips. It had taken the Runner well over a week to make his first report, despite his reputation.
“And she has been hired as governess to the daughter of a Mr. Kent of Dorsetshire. By”—the Runner paused for effect—“a gentleman who waited four whole days at the agency just for her, for a red-haired Fleur. She has left on her way already.”
Lord Brocklehurst frowned. His glass was still stranded several inches from his mouth.
“There can’t be that many Kents in Dorsetshire,” Mr. Snedburg said. “I shall look into the matter and see if we can’t nail our man to one single spot on the map, sir.”
Lord Brocklehurst drank, deep in thought. “Kent?” he said. “Not the Ridgeway Kents, surely?”
“As in the Dook of Ridgeway?” the Runner asked, raising one hand to scratch the back of his neck. “Is he a Kent?”
“I knew his half-brother,” Lord Brocklehurst said. “They lived in Dorset. Willoughby Hall.”
Mr. Snedburg dug into his ear with his little finger. “I’ll see what I can find out for definite, sir,” he said. “We will run her to ground in no time at all, take my word on it.”
“Fleur,” the other said, gazing into the swirling contents of his glass. “She used to have tantrums as a young child because my mother and father would not call her that. Apparently it was the name she went by until her parents died. I had forgotten.”
“Yes, well, right you are, sir,” Mr. Snedburg said, downing what remained in his glass in one gulp and getting to his feet. “I’ll see what I can find out about this dook and his governess.”
“I want her found soon,” Lord Brocklehurst said.
“It will be soon, or sooner,” the other said briskly. “My word on it, sir.”
“Well,” Lord Brocklehurst said, “you were recommended to me as the best. Though it has taken you precious long to find out this much.”
The other chose not to comment on either the compliment or the criticism. He saluted in almost military manner and hurried smartly from the room.