The Grieving Duke's Governess (Beastly Dukes of the Ton 3)

Chapter One

Elizabeth Mercer was going to find employment in the house of the man who had buried her husband.

That want was what had brought her here.

It had carried her up the Ravensmere drive in a hired gig and into a drawing room where the fire roared high enough to roast a goose, and where no one had thought to offer her a chair.

She kept her feet and let the missing chair tell her exactly where she stood.

“You come to us without gentry references, Mrs Mercer.” Lady Matilda Harrow occupied the best chair in the best light, and she had arranged the interview so that Elizabeth stood. “The agency was vague upon the point. I should like it a great deal less vague.”

“My references are from officers’ wives and a regimental surgeon, my lady. Not one of them keeps a fashionable address, and two of them are dead, which I find improves their honesty considerably,” she said.

“You make very light of your own want of connection,” said Lady Matilda.

“I find it lighter to carry than to apologise for, and I have carried it some distance. There are not many houses in England that will engage an army widow with no people to speak for her. I have written to a good many of them. They write back, when they trouble to write at all, that they require a gentlewoman, by which they mean a woman with relations who may be dined.”

“And you have no relations who may be dined,” she said.

“I have a father in a Kentish churchyard and a husband in a Spanish one, and neither of them will accept an invitation. I am, in the particular sense an agency cares about, alone in the world. I tell you so at the start because you will discover it within the week, and I would rather you had it from me than from a letter written by somebody who wishes me ill.”

“You are blunt,” said Lady Matilda.

“I am quick. There is a difference, my lady, and a house with a difficulty in it generally finds a use for the second sort of woman, whatever it tells the agency it wants.”

Lady Matilda turned a ring on her finger, once. “Soldiers.”

“My references, you mean. Yes. And the wife of a colonel of artillery, who ran a household of forty through three winters of campaign on requisitioned flour and her own reckoning. I kept her accounts for two of those winters, and they balanced to the penny, which is more than I can say of most peacetime houses I have since had the keeping of.”

“And what became of those peacetime houses,” Lady Matilda asked, “that you are standing in mine and not in one of theirs?”

“They discovered, on closer acquaintance, that they wanted a gentlewoman after all, or that an army widow at the table unsettled the other servants, or that a woman who says aloud what a thing costs is a sore trial to a household that would rather not be told what anything costs. I have been let go from three respectable houses, my lady, for the crime of being useful in an unrespectable way. I expect Ravensmere will contrive to bear it a little longer, having a difficulty large enough to require me.”

“You were with the army, Mrs Mercer,” she said.

“With my husband, for part of his service.”

“How unusual,” said Lady Matilda dryly.

“How necessary.” Elizabeth held her hands easy at her sides, where the mend across the knuckle of her left glove sat in plain view for anyone who cared to look.

“A captain’s pay would not stretch to two establishments.

I went where the pay went. And when the pay stopped, it left debts in the place a pension ought to have stood, which is the other thing you will learn of me within the week.

I would as soon you had that from me too. ”

Mrs Anstruther stood near the door with a ledger pressed to her chest, and at the word debts she shifted, the way a careful housekeeper shifts at the naming of money owed.

“You are very free with your disadvantages,” she said.

“I have laid them out so that we need not pretend to them later. It saves a great deal of everyone’s afternoon, and I have found that the disadvantages one names oneself do a good deal less damage than the ones a stranger finds for you.

” Elizabeth turned back to Lady Matilda.

“You have not yet told me the difficulty, my lady. And there must be one, or a duke’s household would not have written this far north for a soldier’s widow it cannot dine with.

I would rather hear it plainly than spend the afternoon guessing at its shape. ”

A silence opened across the warm room. A log shifted in the grate and threw up a small handful of sparks, and Mrs Anstruther’s gaze went to it and away.

Elizabeth had stood through silences laid by better tacticians than one old woman in a good chair, and she let this one go by without troubling to fill it.

“The child does not speak.” The words came flat, a thing set down on a table to be looked at.

“You may as well have the whole of it. Lady Iris has not spoken since her mother died, two years gone now. We have engaged four women to mend the want of it. Four have failed and gone, and the last of them left a letter that used the word unnatural.”

“Mend it,” she said. “As one mends a torn stocking.”

“As one corrects a fault in a child,” said Lady Matilda.

“A child who has buried her mother is not a fault, my lady.” Elizabeth kept her voice level and low, the voice she had once used in tents where men were trying to die without making a fuss of it.

“She is a child who has buried her mother. The two things may look near enough alike to anyone in haste, but they are not alike at all. A woman who cannot tell the one from the other has no business being the fifth to try.”

The ledger came down a full inch. Lady Matilda looked at her then in a way she had not before, less as a name on the agency’s list and more as a woman who had walked a long way to stand upon her carpet.

“The agency described you as respectable and reduced. It neglected to add opinionated.”

“The agency has never sat with the dying, my lady, and I have. A man at the end of himself tells the truth, because he has run clean out of the time it takes to dress it for company. I have kept the habit. I can wrap it in softer cloth, if soft cloth is what the post requires of me, but the bill comes to the same figure however one folds it.”

“And what would you do with her?” Lady Matilda asked. “This child you understand so completely from a chair you have not been offered.”

“Nothing, at first,” Elizabeth replied evenly.

“Nothing.” Lady Matilda’s brows lifted. “We are to pay a fifth woman for nothing.”

“You have been paying four women’s worth of correcting, and the correcting is the thing that has failed.

I would do nothing to her at all, not at first. I would sit in the room with my work in my lap, ask her for nothing, and wait.

Children come out when the room stops demanding that they come out.

It is not a method the agency can set a price upon, which is precisely why the agency keeps sending you women who ring bells. ”

“And if she never comes out?” said Lady Matilda.

“Then I shall have kept a lonely child company for a fortnight, my lady, which is more than the last four contrived between them, and you will be not one penny worse off than you were the morning I arrived.” Elizabeth let that sit.

“She will come out. They come out, in the end, if a person is patient and honest, and does not flinch at what the child carries with her. I have a great deal of practice at not flinching. It is the one trade the war left me fit for.”

“She hides,” Lady Matilda said. “Under the furniture, as you have already seen for yourself. In the wardrobes. Once, for the better part of a day, in the icehouse, in January, while the whole household dragged the lake for her. She will not eat unless she is watched. She tears up her own drawings the moment they are finished. The physician calls it a melancholy of the nerves and bleeds her for it, to no purpose that any of us has been able to discover.”

“You have bled a grieving child.”

“The physician has. I did not care for it either, if that signifies anything to you.”

“It signifies a great deal to me, my lady, and a great deal more to her.” Elizabeth’s voice stayed level, and the levelness of it carried farther than temper would have.

“There will be no more bleeding while she is in my keeping. A child who has lost the one person who made the world safe does not need a vein opened into the bargain. She needs to be told, by somebody who will not lie to her, that there is some safety left in the world yet. A lancet has never reached that, and it never will.”

“How old is she?” Elizabeth asked.

“Six. Seven in the autumn,” said Lady Matilda quietly.

“And four when her mother died.”

“Four. She spoke until the morning of the funeral and has not spoken since.”

“Then she has been silent for the better part of the years she can remember, my lady. You have not engaged a governess. You have engaged an interpreter, and you would do well to hope I learn the language quickly, because she has had two years to forget that anyone ever spoke it.”

“The last woman but one was sensible enough.” Lady Matilda turned the ring again. “A clergyman’s daughter. Patient. Kind, by her own lights. The child bit her.”

“Good,” said Elizabeth.

“Good?” said Lady Matilda.

“It is the first sign of spirit you have offered me in the whole of this interview, my lady. A child who still bites has decided she is worth defending. It is the ones who have stopped biting that a person ought to lie awake over. Did the clergyman’s daughter understand what she had been handed, when those small teeth went in? ”

“She gave her notice the same afternoon,” Lady Matilda returned.

“Then she was frightened, and the child knew it. That is no great crime in the woman, but it made her the wrong one for this house.”