Chapter One
“You cannot possibly mean to go to Yorkshire in October.”
Lorraine Weston folded another sensible grey dress into her battered trunk and did not look up at Mrs Whitmore, who stood in the doorway of the governess’s modest chamber with an expression that suggested Lorraine had announced plans to sail for the Arctic.
“I am afraid I do mean it, ma’am. The summons was quite urgent.”
“But the girls will miss you dreadfully. Arabella has only just mastered her French conjugations, and poor Cecily—”
“Will continue to improve under Miss Fletcher’s capable instruction.
” Lorraine tucked her hairbrush beside her stockings with practised efficiency.
Three years of moving between households had taught her to pack quickly and travel light.
Sentiment, she had learned, weighed more than any trunk.
“You were kind enough to engage her last month precisely for this eventuality.”
Mrs Whitmore’s mouth pursed. She was not a cruel woman—merely one who found change inconvenient, and departures something of a personal affront. “This Duke of Ravenswood. You have never met him?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And yet you race off to the moors at his beck and call?”
Lorraine permitted herself a small smile as she closed the trunk’s lid.
“He offers triple the usual salary for a governess of my qualifications—for a temporary engagement of perhaps three months.” She met Mrs Whitmore’s eyes with the pleasant directness that had served her well in drawing rooms where she was neither quite servant nor quite guest. “I should be a fool to refuse.”
What she did not say: And I have been a fool quite enough for one lifetime.
Mrs Whitmore sniffed, but her resistance was already crumbling. Triple salary was the sort of argument that penetrated even the most steadfast maternal attachment to one’s children’s educational continuity. “Well. I suppose if it is only three months. You will write?”
“Of course.”
“And you will return to us when this mysterious duke has found a permanent solution for his ward?”
His ward. A child, the letter had said. A boy of six, recently orphaned, whose grandparents were delayed in India and could not retrieve him for several months.
The Duke required someone capable of managing the child’s care and education in the interim.
Someone who could begin immediately. Someone who would not ask too many questions about why he was offering so extraordinary a sum for so ordinary a position.
Lorraine had questions, naturally. She simply could not afford to ask them.
“If the position remains available,” she said carefully, “I should be glad to return.”
***
The coach that carried her north was not uncomfortable, though neither was it warm.
October had arrived with a vengeance that year, the summer that never came giving way to an autumn that felt like penance.
Lorraine wrapped her cloak more tightly about her and watched the countryside transform beyond the rain-streaked window—gentle southern hills flattening into the broad, bleak expanse of the Midlands, then rising again into something wilder. Starker. Yorkshire.
She had never travelled so far north. Her father had spoken of it sometimes, in that wistful way he possessed when describing places he would never afford to see.
Wild country, Lora. The sort that makes you feel your own smallness.
He had meant it as praise, she thought. Her father had always loved anything that reminded him of perspective.
Her father had been dead these three years, and Lorraine had learned a great deal about perspective since.
The coaching inn where she spent the night was clean but cheerless, the sort of establishment that catered to travellers passing through rather than those with any wish to linger.
Lorraine ate her modest supper alone in a corner of the common room and tried not to think of the letter tucked inside her valise.
Not the Duke’s summons—that was merely business.
The other letter.
The one she had received a fortnight earlier, forwarded through three households before finally reaching her.
Dear Sister, it had begun, in Lydia’s careful copperplate, and Lorraine had known at once that nothing good would follow those words. Lydia wrote only when she wanted something—or, more precisely, when her conscience had accumulated more guilt than it could comfortably ignore.
I hope this finds you well. Arthur and I are lately returned from Bath, where the waters did wonders for his constitution…
Two pages of meaningless pleasantries before arriving at the point:
I have enclosed a small token of our appreciation for your continued discretion in family matters. Pray do not hesitate to write if you find yourself in need.
The “small token” had been ten pounds.
Conscience money, Lorraine thought of it. Lydia sent it twice a year, always anonymously, always through solicitors, as though their shared surname might somehow combust if committed to paper too near the funds.
Lorraine had returned it, as she always did. The solicitor was likely quite weary of her by now.
I do not want your money, she had written in the privacy of her own thoughts—in words she would never send. I want you to say thank you. I want you to acknowledge what I did. I want you to remember that I had a life once—and prospects—and I burned them all so that you might keep yours.
But that was the thing about sacrifice, was it not? The moment one demanded recognition for it, it ceased to be noble and became merely transactional. And Lorraine Weston was many things—proud, stubborn, and occasionally too clever for her own good—but she refused to be pathetic.
She finished her supper, paid her bill, and retired to a narrow room with a window that faced north.
Toward Yorkshire.
Toward Rovewood Hall, and its mysterious, frozen duke, and the orphaned boy who needed someone to care for him.
Three months, she reminded herself. Do not grow attached.
She was very well practised in not growing attached. Practice, after all, made perfect.
***
The final approach to Rovewood Hall was everything the name suggested—and nothing it had prepared her for.
The carriage had set her down at a crossroads two miles from the estate—some confusion regarding the driver’s willingness to navigate the private road in gathering darkness—and Lorraine had been obliged to walk the remaining distance, her single trunk balanced upon a borrowed handcart.
The lane wound through a wood of ancient oaks, their leaves thinned and ragged by the early cold, branches reaching toward a sky the colour of wet slate.
Rooks circled overhead, their cries harsh in the stillness.
Wild country, her father’s voice whispered. Makes you feel your own smallness.
She felt small, certainly. Small, cold, and beginning to question the wisdom of answering urgent summonses from reclusive aristocrats.
And then the trees parted, and Rovewood Hall rose before her.
It was beautiful.
That was the first impression—the unavoidable, almost aggressive beauty of the place.
Pale stone and Gothic windows, turrets and towers; a structure that seemed to have grown from the moorland itself rather than been built upon it.
Ivy clung to the eastern wall in defiance of the season.
Lamplight glowed behind a scattering of windows, warm against the grey October dusk.
It was also, Lorraine noted with the practised eye of a woman accustomed to assessing households at a glance, enormous—and plainly understaffed.
The drive was not quite overgrown, but neither had it been recently raked.
The topiaries flanking the entrance had grown shaggy with neglect.
A house of this size ought to boast footmen at the door, a groom hurrying forward to receive arrivals, the quiet bustle of a well-ordered establishment.
Instead, there was only silence, the wind across the moors, and the distant cry of birds she could not name.
Lorraine squared her shoulders, left the handcart at the foot of the steps, and lifted the heavy iron knocker.
The sound echoed through what she imagined must be a vast entrance hall. She waited. The wind tugged at her cloak, and she thought she heard something—movement, perhaps, from somewhere above. She tilted her head.
There.
A small face at an upper window. Pale and solemn, framed by fair hair. A child’s face, watching her with an expression she recognised at once.
Waiting to see whether this one will stay.
Lorraine raised her hand in a small, reassuring wave.
The face vanished.
The door opened.
“Miss Weston?” The woman who stood before her was perhaps sixty, grey-haired and sharp-eyed, with the air of one who had been managing households since before Lorraine was born. Her expression held wariness, hope, and fatigue in equal measure. “We expected you yesterday.”
“The roads were difficult.” Lorraine stepped inside without waiting for a formal invitation—a small breach of etiquette, but she was cold, tired, and rather past caring for strict propriety. “The coaching schedule from York was much disrupted by the weather.”
“Yes, well.” The woman—housekeeper, Lorraine assumed—closed the door firmly against the wind and subjected her to a thorough inspection. Whatever she saw appeared to satisfy some internal measure, for her expression softened a degree. “I am Mrs Potter. We corresponded.”
“Indeed.” Lorraine set down her valise and cast her own swift survey of the entrance hall.
Magnificent, as expected—vaulted ceilings, ancestral portraits, a staircase sweeping upward into shadow—but cold.
The sort of cold that spoke of too few fires in too many rooms. Of a house that had forgotten how to be lived in.
“The journey has been long, Mrs Potter, and I confess I should be glad to see my room—and perhaps take some tea. But first, I should like to meet my charge. The boy. Thomas, is it not?”