Reaching a Grieving Duke

Chapter One

“You are not the nurse I requested.”

The voice came down the staircase ahead of its owner. Elinor turned from the puddle spreading at her hem and watched Nathaniel Vale, the Duke of Rothmere, descend the last six steps without hurry, in the manner of a man unused to being kept waiting and disinclined to begin now.

“I am not a nurse at all, Your Grace,” she said. “I am Miss Wrenfield. The governess.”

“I did not request a governess either.” He frowned at her.

“Then I regret to inform you that one has arrived, and that the rain came with her,” she said, unable to help the sardonic lilt in her voice. She dropped a curtsy measured to the inch, no lower, and water slid from her bonnet brim down the back of her neck as she rose.

Somewhere above them, a door rattled hard against its hinges, and a man’s voice cracked on the words: “Open this door at once.” The duke did not look up.

“That,” he said, “is Mr Crane. He has been my son’s tutor for eleven days.”

“He sounds distressed.”

“He is locked out of the nursery. My son holds the key.” He stopped an arm’s length from her, near enough that she caught the trace of gold on his coat.

He looked her over as he might look a delivery made in error.

“I wrote to the agency for a tutor. A man of firm discipline and unsentimental character. I was specific.”

“You were, Your Grace. I read the letter myself.” Holding his gaze cost her more than she let him see. “It described a post requiring firm discipline, unsentimental character, and the education of a boy of seven. The agency sent what the post required.”

“The agency sent a woman.”

“The agency sent a governess. Lord Theodore is seven, Your Grace, not ten and seven. He does not need Greek forced into him by a man with a cane and a grievance. He needs teaching, which is a different trade.”

“You presume a great deal about what my son needs, for a woman six minutes inside my hall.”

“I presume nothing, Your Grace. I am listening to what eleven days of the other method has produced, two floors above our heads.”

The rattling upstairs stopped. A moment later Mr Crane appeared at the head of the stairs with his coat over one arm, his hat in his hand, and his dignity left somewhere behind him on the nursery floor.

“Your Grace, I must speak plainly.”

“You generally do, Mr Crane. Loudly, as well.”

“The boy is ungovernable.” Crane’s neckcloth hung loose on one side, the linen creased where small fingers might have gripped it.

“He locked the schoolroom on Tuesday. He locked it again on Thursday. Today he fed my Cicero beneath the door one page at a time, so that I might appreciate the loss properly. I have taught the sons of a bishop and two baronets, Your Grace. I have never before been besieged.”

“You had never before met my son.”

“No, Your Grace, and I shall arrange never to do so again. I resign the post.”

“You are the third man to resign it.”

“Then I am in growing company, Your Grace, and I wish the company joy of it.” Crane bowed, glanced at Elinor’s dripping bonnet, and decided against wasting a warning on a woman already doomed.

Elinor watched him leave. “Three tutors in how long, Your Grace?”

“Four months.”

“And before the tutors?”

“A nurse. She remained from his mother’s death, seven years ago, until January this year, then left to care for her own mother.

” He delivered it evenly, a man reciting an account that refused to balance.

“Since January, tutors. You now know the history of the post. It does not improve with the telling.”

“It rarely does.” She drew off her gloves, one finger at a time, because her hands had gone stiff with cold and she wanted them capable if she was to be interviewed. “May I ask what the agency told you of me?”

“Nothing. The agency told me a tutor was engaged and travelling. I was expecting Mr Edward Marsh.”

“Mr Marsh accepted a post in Shropshire with a family whose son had not yet driven off three predecessors. The agency judged that the situation wanted a governess and that I was equal to it. I concurred.”

“You concurred.” He let the word sit between them. “On what grounds, Miss Wrenfield? You have answered nothing of your training.”

“Music, with visiting masters. Drawing and watercolour. French and Italian, both grammar and conversation. History, geography, arithmetic, the globes, dancing, and plain and ornamental needlework. I have taught for six years in two households, and I left both with written characters, which are in my trunk, which your footman abandoned by the door when the shouting began.”

“Fetch Miss Wrenfield’s trunk.” He did not raise his voice, and the footman by the doors departed at speed. “You will forgive me if I read the characters tonight.”

“I would think less of you if you did not. The first is from a baronet’s widow in Kent, who will tell you I am exacting. The second is from a family in Bath, who will tell you I am stubborn. Both are correct, and both households parted with me, regretting it.”

“Confidence is not a qualification, Miss Wrenfield.”

“No, Your Grace. It is a symptom of them.”

“Italian,” he said. “Conversation, you claim.”

“Yes, Your Grace, though I have never been to Italy.” She replied in perfect Italian.

“Your accent is bookish.”

“My accent is honest. It has never been nearer Italy than a circulating library.”

Some flicker of interest crossed his face and was gone, upon hearing Italy named by a woman who had only read of it. “And in those six years, did you have experience with difficult boys?”

“No child is difficult without reason, Your Grace.”

“In this house, Miss Wrenfield, even the air has had difficulty with him.”

“Then the air and I will come to an understanding.”

“You are very certain of yourself.”

“I am very tired, Your Grace. The two read alike from a distance.”

“And up close?”

“Up close, I am certain of one thing only. A boy who drives off three tutors in four months is not wicked. He is working very hard at something, and no one has yet troubled to discover what.” She folded the wet gloves into her palm. “What was done about the locked door, before today?”

“Mr Crane’s predecessor had the lock taken off. My son barricaded the door with the schoolroom table instead, and the carpenter who came to remove the table required a guinea above his fee for the bruise. The lock was restored as the cheaper arrangement.”

“Good.”

His attention sharpened on her, the first wholly unguarded movement he had made. “Good, Miss Wrenfield?”

“A locked door is the only power that boy possesses in this house. Take it from him and he will find a worse one. I would leave him the key and make him willing to turn it, which is slower, and lasts.”

“And how long does your method take?”

“As long as the boy requires, Your Grace. He set the pace the first time a tutor raised a cane. I can only better it.”

“Mr Crane was instructed to be firm.”

“Mr Crane was firm with a seven-year-old in an empty wing, and the seven-year-old won. Firmness is not strength, Your Grace. Children can tell the difference long before adults learn to.”

The hall had gone very quiet around them. The footman returning with her trunk set it down with the care of a man determined to hear everything.

“You may dine and sleep here tonight,” the duke said. “The carriage will return you to the posting inn after breakfast, and I will write to the agency for a man.”

“Before you write, allow me ten minutes with Lord Theodore.”

“To what purpose?”

“He is seven, and he is holding a fortress alone at the top of your house, and the only adults sent up to him in four months have been men paid to break the siege.” She kept her voice level, the tone she used for spooked children and unpaid tradesmen alike.

“Ten minutes, Your Grace. If he will not have me, I shall leave in the morning.”

He looked at her a long moment, rain ticking against the tall windows. She had heard that he weighed art dealers and frauds the same way, gave them time and let them feel the weight of it.

“You have not once apologised,” he said. “For the agency’s presumption, or your own.”

“It was not presumption, Your Grace. It was a judgment, and I believe it was correct, and apologising for correct judgments is a habit I cannot afford.”

Behind his eyes something moved and was governed before it could be named. “Ten minutes. I will take you up myself. The household has largely stopped climbing those stairs.”

The nursery stood at the end of the east corridor, behind a door of honest oak with a brass plate worn bright around the keyhole. The duke stopped six feet short of it, keeping to terms of truce he had never spoken aloud.

“He will not answer,” he said. “He has not answered a knock since February.”

“Then I shall not knock.” Elinor went to the door, gathered her wet skirts, and sat down on the corridor floor beside it with her back against the wainscot.

“Miss Wrenfield.”

“Your Grace?”

“You are sitting on the floor.”

“I am. It has been a long journey, and sieges are conducted seated.” She arranged her gloves on her knee to dry, fixed her brown curls that had come loose and spoke to the door panel.

“Good evening, Lord Theodore. My name is Miss Wrenfield. I am not a tutor, I have no cane, and I have never read Cicero for pleasure, so you have already destroyed nothing I shall miss.”

Silence answered her, the particular listening silence of a child holding his breath on the other side of two inches of oak.

“I am told you hold the key,” she went on. “That seems sensible to me. A commander does not surrender the gate because someone new arrives at it. I would think less of you if you opened this door.”

The duke shifted his weight behind her.

“I am going to sit here a while, because I am tired and the floor is dry, which is more than can be said for me. You need not say anything. I shall know you are there by the quality of the quiet.”

The corridor clock carried them through a minute. Nothing moved behind the oak, and so she went on at the same unhurried pitch.