The Bride He Never Expected (Era of Scandals #4)

Chapter 1

“You are not what I requested.”

The voice came from the window.

Cynthia Browne had been standing in the doorway of the Duke of Lavenham’s study for approximately thirty seconds, long enough to take in the cold fireplace, the papers stacked with military precision on the desk, the smell of cedar, and the fact that the duke himself had not yet deigned to turn around.

He stood with his back to her, hands clasped behind him, looking out at the gray Yorkshire sky as though it had done something personally offensive.

She had not yet been invited to sit.

“Your Grace,” she said, because one of them had to say something.

He turned. Cynthia found herself confronted not with something fearsome but with something altogether more unsettling: a man who looked exhausted.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with gray eyes that held no warmth whatsoever.

He had sharp features. A jaw set like a man expecting bad news and choosing to meet it standing.

Somewhere around thirty, though the shadows under his eyes added years his face had not earned.

His coat was immaculate, his cravat perfect, and every external surface announced: I am entirely in command.

The rest of him said something rather different.

“I asked the agency for someone plain, sturdy, and without sentiment,” he said. “You appear to be none of those things.”

Cynthia’s mouth opened. Then closed. She stood very still and took a slow, private breath.

He was watching her with the particular attention of someone waiting to see if she would wilt.

Several responses offered themselves to her: the dignified one, the clever one, the one her uncle would have called inadvisable.

She chose the honest one.

“I cannot speak to plain or sturdy, Your Grace,” she said. “But I would argue that the question of sentiment rather depends on one’s definition.”

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not warmth, precisely. More like the faintest acknowledgment that she had said something unexpected. He moved from the window toward the desk, gesturing with a brief inclination of his head at the chair opposite.

She sat.

***

Three days earlier.

The agency in York occupied a narrow building on Fossgate that smelled of damp paper and disappointment.

The clerk behind the desk was a thin man with an expression of mild regret, as though life had consistently failed to meet his modest expectations.

He looked at Cynthia’s letter of reference from her uncle, the late Reverend Thomas Browne, which was admittedly not the most robust endorsement a governess might produce, at her general air of being two and twenty and unconnected, and sighed.

“Your references are limited, Miss Browne,” he had said. “Your experience is theoretical rather than practical, and most households require at least two years of documented teaching.”

“Yes,” she had agreed. “I understand.”

“However....” He had opened a drawer and extracted a single letter, holding it between two fingers as though it might bite him. “There is one post available. I should warn you before I say anything further that it has been refused by four other applicants this fortnight alone.”

Cynthia had looked at the letter. “What is it?”

“The Duke of Lavenham requires a governess for his ward, a girl of eight.” There was a pause, weighted with significance.

“The duke has dismissed three governesses in as many months. His previous household, in the south, closed entirely after his brother’s death two years ago.

His reputation in the county is…” The clerk had chosen his next word with visible care. “Considerable.”

“Considerable how?”

“He drove his own brother to the grave, some say.” The clerk had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable delivering this.

“Others say less dramatic things, but the general opinion is that Lavenham Hall is not a cheerful posting. The child is reportedly very difficult, and the house is very remote. The wage is generous, but it has not, as yet, persuaded anyone to stay.”

Cynthia had reached across the desk and taken the letter.

The clerk had stared at her. “Miss Browne, I don’t think you quite heard me.”

“I heard you perfectly,” she had said. “May I have a pen?”

Two days earlier.

The mail coach from York rattled north with the enthusiastic disregard for its passengers that all mail coaches shared.

Cynthia sat in the corner with her trunk wedged against her feet and her hands folded in her lap, and tried not to listen to the man across from her, who had been talking since Tadcaster about his business dealings in wool and showed no sign of stopping.

They had been on the road for an hour and a half before he noticed where she was going.

“Lavenham?” He had repeated the name the way people repeated the names of battlefields.

“May Heaven help you, miss. The duke is a brute, they say. He drove his own brother to an early grave. His previous governess left in tears, or so I heard, and the one before that didn’t even make it through the first week. ”

Cynthia had looked out the window at the passing moors. They were an extraordinary landscape: vast, wild and utterly indifferent to human opinion, which she found, in that moment, rather comforting.

“Thank you for the intelligence,” she said, which was her uncle’s phrase and served equally well for situations where one meant it and situations where one very much did not.

The wool merchant had subsided, and she had returned to watching the moors.

She was frightened, but she was very good at not showing it.

One day earlier.

The cart driver had taken her as far as the estate gates and then stopped the horse, clearly reconsidering something he had agreed to.

“I’ll not go closer, miss,” he said.

Cynthia had looked at the gates, which were iron and tall, and then she had looked at her trunk, and at the sky, which was doing something unpleasant with the light.

“Is there a particular reason?” she asked.

“You’ll understand when you see the place,” he said, infuriatingly confident that the observation alone would suffice.

She had climbed down with her trunk and thanked him, which he seemed to find slightly alarming. The walk was a quarter mile. Her trunk bumped against her leg, and the wind off the moors struck at an angle, as if it objected to her coat. Lavenham Hall rose ahead against the darkening sky.

It was very large, built of dark stone that seemed grown rather than built.

Ivy sprawled unchecked across the east wing, and tall windows caught the failing light without reflecting it.

Behind it, the moors stretched for miles in every direction, less a landscape than an opinion.

You are very small. And very far from anywhere.

She stopped at the end of the drive and looked up at the house.

Somewhere inside, a child she had never met was frightened, she suspected, of nearly everything. Somewhere inside, a man society called cruel was waiting to dismiss her before she had properly arrived.

She picked up her trunk and walked through the servants’ entrance.

Mrs. Poole, the housekeeper, met her in the passage.

She was a compact woman of about fifty with sharp gray eyes, who carried a bunch of keys at her waist. Her gaze settled on Cynthia for three seconds, assessment, calculation, odds on survival, and then moved on.

Not unkind, exactly, but efficient. There was a difference.

“The duke will see you tomorrow,” she said, taking Cynthia in from head to foot, noticing her brown hair and hazel eyes.

“The child is on the third floor. You are not to go to the east wing under any circumstances. His Grace is not to be disturbed before noon or after dinner. The kitchen serves at six, and the staff takes its meals separately from the family.”

“Of course,” Cynthia said.

“You will find that this is not a conventional household.”

“So I understand.”

Something flickered in the housekeeper’s expression. Not quite approval, more like a recalibration. “You’ll want to change,” she said. “You have mud on your hem.”

As Cynthia was being shown up the stairs, she heard two housemaids in the corridor below whispering. She caught only fragments: …another governess. Won’t last a month, will she… and the low commiserating murmur of the other’s reply.

She climbed to the third floor.

***

The Duke of Lavenham had a way of listening that was almost aggressive in its completeness.

He sat behind his desk, fingers laced together, and he watched her.

Not with the polite glaze of someone already composing their next thought, but actually looking.

It was, Cynthia decided, simultaneously the most attentive and the most uncomfortable experience she had had all week.

“Your qualifications,” he said.

“I was raised by my uncle, Reverend Thomas Browne,” she said, “who was educated at Cambridge and believed that the best thing one could do with knowledge was give it away. He taught me French, Greek, natural history, music, and some mathematics. I have no formal training as a governess, Your Grace. I have not been employed as one before.” She paused.

“I thought it better to tell you directly than to wait for you to discover it.”

He regarded her. “The agency was aware of this?”

“The agency was aware that I had limited references, considerable theoretical knowledge and no other prospects. They sent me anyway. I suspect because no one else would take the post.”

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile. It was more like the involuntary twitch of a man suppressing one, which in Cynthia’s experience was significantly more interesting than an actual smile.

“The previous three governesses left at intervals of two, three, and six weeks respectively.” He let that sit there. “The child is not easy.”

“So I have heard.”