Chapter 4 #2
“You owe me an apology,” he said, “for presuming to know better than I do as to what is appropriate in my own house.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do owe you that, and I offer it genuinely. I should not have given him anything without speaking to you first.” She continued without hesitation.
“I am not sorry for the concern that came before it. Any adult finding two children hungry and frightened in a village would have done what I did. I will not apologize for that, though I understand the presumption.”
He let the silence sit for a moment. It was the most honest thing anyone had said to him in some months.
“I recognize the distinction,” he said.
Her posture eased by a fraction. Not relaxed, but calmer.
“The children,” he said. “What do you need from me?”
She looked mildly surprised by the question, which told him she had not expected it, which told him something he would think about later.
“An understanding of their routines as they currently stand,” she said.
“Anything you can tell me about what Maisie finds frightening, since she startles easily and I do not want to stumble into something that distresses her without warning. And time. I will not have a full measure of either child’s trust for some weeks, and I would ask that you allow for that rather than expect immediate results. ”
“I do not expect immediate results,” he said.
She said nothing to that. The silence was not disagreement, precisely, but it was not agreement either.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “If you have concerns about how I manage matters, I ask that you come to me rather than watch from a distance and form conclusions alone.”
He looked at her.
“I will keep that in mind,” he said, because it was true and because there was nothing else to say.
He rose, and she rose with him.
“You may speak with Mrs. Maggie about your room and your daily arrangements,” he said. “The schoolroom is prepared. You may begin tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
She gathered her papers, tucked the notebook under her arm, and crossed toward the door with the same unhurried directness she brought to everything. At the threshold she paused.
“The lesson plan,” she said, without turning. “If there is anything in it you find unsuitable, I would welcome the correction.”
“I will let you know,” he said.
She left. He waited until her footsteps had faded down the corridor before he crossed to the window.
He stared out of it, not looking at anything in particular.
He told himself that she was just another servant; one who, despite her firm backbone and determined eyes, would likely last no longer than the other governesses had.
He told himself that he did not care if that was the case, and that he would be glad to be rid of a woman who had spoken to him as harshly as she had over the children’s discovery in the village.
But his reflection in the glass showed him that he was smiling.
What was it about the young woman that intrigued him more than irritated him?
***
The grounds lay pale and gray beneath the morning light, and the schoolroom sat at the far end of the lawn, its windows dark and its door closed. He watched Miss Beauchamp cross the grass with her papers beneath her arm and her stride calm.
Duncan was already there.
Jamie had not expected that. The boy was standing outside the door with his hands in his pockets, and when he spotted the governess coming across the lawn, his posture changed in a way that was small but unmistakable.
He straightened, and one hand came out of his pocket, and he held up a piece of paper.
The puzzle.
Jamie stood motionless at the glass. Duncan was talking before she had fully reached him, with an animation and speed Jamie had not seen since before the funeral, since before any of it.
His face had opened. His gestures were quick and eager. He pointed at the paper, and Miss Beauchamp bent her head to look. He kept talking, and she listened as though every word mattered.
Jamie watched and felt his chest tighten with a feeling he refused to examine.
Mrs. Maggie appeared at his side without any warning, which was her custom and his lifelong complaint.
He did not turn. Neither did she.
They stood together in silence and watched Miss Beauchamp take the paper from Duncan’s hand and ask him something, and the boy’s face broke into the expression of someone rising to a challenge, and it was so unlike the boy who had sat in the corner of every room for the past year that Jamie felt the tightening in his chest become something sharper.
“He has not looked like that since before his mother died,” Mrs. Maggie said.
“I know,” Jamie said.
“She saw it. In one afternoon.”
He said nothing.
Mrs. Maggie remained silent for a time. Below them, Duncan had taken the paper back and was demonstrating his solution to Miss Beauchamp with considerable enthusiasm. Maisie appeared from around the corner of the schoolroom and tucked herself against the governess’s side without hesitation.
“She would have liked her,” Mrs. Maggie said.
Jamie turned from the window. “Do not.”
“Your sister,” Mrs. Maggie said, calmly and without apology. “She would have liked this young woman very much. She would have said exactly the same things to you. In approximately the same tone.”
Jamie set his jaw and said nothing.
“That is also why you agreed to take her on my recommendation,” Mrs. Maggie said. “You knew it without knowing it.”
“I agreed because I had no better option and you wore me down,” Jamie said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Maggie said, with the serenity of a woman who has no objection to being underestimated. “That too.”
She left him there. He stood at the window a moment longer, looking at the three figures below: Duncan still talking, Maisie still pressing close, and Miss Beauchamp standing between them in the gray morning light as though she had been expected all along.
He turned away from the window before he could think anything further about it.
***
That night, Jamie could not sleep, which was not unusual, and so he walked the corridor, which was also not unusual, and told himself the movement helped, which was not entirely true but was the kind of lie that gets a man through a sleepless night without too much damage.
He was passing the end of the children’s corridor when he heard it.
Crying. Soft, muffled, barely audible through the closed door, but unmistakably Maisie.
He stopped.
He stood outside the nursery door for a long moment with his hand raised toward it, and he knew what he should do, knew it clearly and without ambiguity.
He should knock. He should go in. He should sit beside her in the dark and tell her she was safe and that he was there.
That was what a guardian did. That was the minimum of what she needed from him.
He stood there, and he did not knock, and he hated himself for it with a thoroughness that surprised him even now, even after a year of practice.
The door did not require him.
From inside came a voice, low and steady, and it took him a moment to identify it as Miss Beauchamp’s because he had not heard her speak quietly before, only directly, and this was different. This was not the voice she used in his study or on the lawn.
This was a voice for small, frightened people in the dark, and it did the work he had been standing outside the door unable to do.
The crying did not stop immediately. It eased. Then it paused. Then it began again, softer and slower, and the voice continued beneath it, steady and unhurried, and then a melody came, simple and low, not a hymn and not quite a lullaby but something in between.
Jamie stood in the corridor and listened.
He did not know how long he stood there. Long enough for the melody to repeat itself twice, long enough for Maisie’s crying to slow to silence, long enough for the darkness beyond the window at the end of the hall to feel less like isolation and more like simply night.
He stepped back from the door.