The Dower House had once been a gem.
Built in the reign of George II, it was a perfectly proportioned little thing, all honeyed stone and gracious lines. A house designed for comfort, not grandeur. For an elderly dowager countess to hold her quiet court, perhaps, or a widowed aunt to tend her roses and solicit letters.
It had not been designed for exile.
Richard Corbyn sat at the spindle-legged table beneath the largest window, a pen in his hand and a book open before him. Outside, the rain whispered at the glass. Inside, the only sounds were the scratch of the nib and the low hiss of the fire.
He paused, shook the pen to coax the ink downward, and bent again to the margin.
*Hobbes insists that man, in a state of nature, is governed by fear,* he wrote, in small, precise script. *He seems unaware that fear can as easily become a state of nature.*
He frowned, then crossed out “unaware” and replaced it with “unwilling to admit.”
Across from him, near the chimney, a pile of books slouched against the wall. Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume. German philosophers, their names a tangle of consonants. French radicals whose pages smelled faintly of smoke. A volume of Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* that he had been reading in the original Latin for no reason other than that the English no longer sufficed.
His hair had fallen into his eyes again. He pushed it back impatiently. It caught on the ink-smudge at the side of his hand, leaving a faint dark streak on a curl.
He should have gone up to the Hall.
He should, he knew, have been there when the new governess arrived. He should have received her in the library, or the morning room if it were not too damp, and looked her over with his brisk, distant gaze. He should have asked the polite questions: where had she last been employed, had she references, did she play the pianoforte, was she overly fond of poetry.
He should have, but he had not.
Instead, he had told Mrs. Pritchard—in a tone that brooked no argument—that he would see the new governess “later.” Which could mean tonight or tomorrow or next week, depending on how successful he was at not thinking about it.
Someone had knocked at the Dower House door this morning, a sharp rap attended by the steady drip of rain from an umbrella. He had not answered it. He knew, rationally, that only three people ever came here uninvited: the steward, the doctor, and Mrs. Pritchard. The steward had sent his accounts yesterday. The doctor would have sent a boy if there had been an emergency. That left Mrs. Pritchard.
She had given up after five minutes. He knew because she had a particular pattern when she despaired of his manners: three firm knocks, a pause, two softer ones as though testing whether he was truly determined to isolate himself.
He had listened, motionless, until the sound of her footsteps retreated.
Now, guilt lapped at the edges of his concentration. He stabbed the pen a little harder at the paper than was necessary.
“Damn it,” he muttered, when a blot of ink spread like a bruise across the margin.
He did not often swear aloud anymore. There was no one to shock, save himself, and he had grown tired of being shocked by his own inadequacies.
He laid the pen aside, flexed his fingers, and leaned back in the chair.
The Dower House kitchen ticked softly as the banked fire settled. The small parlor, visible through the open door, was cluttered with yet more books. Volumes covered the sofa, the chairs, the floor. The bedchamber upstairs—what had been the dowager’s pretty room with its rose-sprigged wallpaper and frilled curtains—now held a narrow bed, a wardrobe, and a writing desk supporting still more volumes. The original furnishings had been removed to make way for his temporary occupation. Temporary, they had all said. Just until—
Until what?
Until he returned to the Hall properly. Until he went back to London. Until he ceased being a haunted man who spent his nights arguing with dead philosophers and his days avoiding his daughters.
He scrubbed his hand over his face, rough stubble rasping against his palm. He had not shaved that morning. Or the morning before. His reflection in the small, warped glass that hung above the sink was more shadow than substance: dark hair curling untidily over his ears, jaw scraped with black, eyes hollowed by poor sleep.
He was thirty-four years old and felt twice that.
With an impatient motion, he pushed the chair back and rose. The room felt close, the air thick. He crossed to the window and unlatched it, shoving it open a few inches. Cold, damp air rushed in, smelling of wet grass and woodsmoke from some distant cottage. Rain speckled the sill, then his hand.
He braced his palms on the frame and looked out.
From here, he could not see the Hall. The Dower House stood in a shallow dip of land, surrounded by a copse of trees that had been planted for privacy a century ago. Beyond the copse, the estate rolled in gentle hills: fields stitched in green and gold, hedgerows like seams. Broken Oaks lay northward, its long façade hidden from this vantage, though he could imagine it easily enough. Every crack, every missing slate, every smothering clutch of ivy.
He had thought, five years ago, that he would be able to bear the sight of it again in time.
Time, it turned out, was an unreliable ally.
He heard, distantly, a carriage on the lane. Not the jangle of fine London harness, but the slower, more practical rumble of a country coach. The governess’s, perhaps. Or the carter’s. Or some local farmer making his way home.
He shut the window.
He had not always been a coward.
There had been a time when he had ridden headlong across these fields, wind tearing at his coat, laughter in his throat. A time when he had gone up to London each Season, danced and dined and argued in smoke-filled clubs. When he had courted a girl with shining hair in a ballroom and thought the world a rational place where actions had predictable consequences.
He had married Elizabeth Fairburn because he had loved the way she laughed at the same absurdities he did, because she moved with a kind of bright assurance through rooms filled with people twice as confident and half as intelligent. He had loved that she had not simpered. That she had read novels by female writers and enthused about them, unabashed.
He had not asked himself whether a woman who hated rules would thrive in a life made of them.
He had not asked whether a girl whose father had gambled away half his fortune might consider marriage primarily as an escape.
By the time he understood those things, it had been too late.
Even now, five years later, the memory of that night came with such clarity that it felt less like recollection and more like physical sensation.
The echo of the front door slamming. The frantic tutter of the housemaids in the passage. The way Mrs. Pritchard’s normally impassive face had crumpled, just once, before she mastered herself.
“She has gone, my lord.” The housekeeper’s voice had been low, urgent. “Her—her maid says she left at midnight. A hired carriage. Trunks taken out the side door.”
“Gone where?” he had asked, stupid with disbelief.
“To London.” Pritchard had swallowed. “With—”
He had known, in that sick instant, whose name would follow. Lord Ashcombe, with his easy smile and his heated glances.
He had gone up to Elizabeth’s room, as though there might be some mistake. The wardrobe had stood open, gaping. The bed was unmade, the coverlet flung back as if she had only just stepped out of it. A single slipper lay on its side beneath the chair, an absurd, abandoned thing.
On the dressing table, propped against the mirror, a letter.
> I cannot do this any longer, Richard. I cannot be what they require. I cannot be what *you* require. You bury yourself in books and expect me to do the same. I refuse to grow old in the country while you pretend London does not exist. I have a right to a life, to pleasure, to being seen. You made me a marquess’s wife and then hid me away like something shameful.
> I know you will say I have betrayed you. Perhaps I have. But you betrayed me first when you made love to me with your body and left your thoughts elsewhere.
> I do not care what they say of me. I am done caring. I go with a man who wants me. Who sees me. Who will take me to London and to the world.
> Tell the girls I am dead. It will be easier for them than knowing I chose this.
> E.
He had not gone to London that night. Or the next, or the next. He had not pursued her. He had sent his solicitor to inquire, formally, and had received, formally, a notice that Elizabeth, Marchioness of Corbyn, had been granted a legal separation and had taken up residence in a discreet house in St. John’s Wood.
He had not divorced her. Not because he still loved her, though some shredded remnant of that emotion clung like a cobweb in some unvisited corridor of his heart. But because divorce required a public spectacle. A trial. Testimony. Newspapers. Columns of type that would etch his private humiliation into ink.
He had not been able to bear the idea of his daughters reading, one day, in some yellowed clipping, the details of their mother’s abandonment.
So he had done the cowardly thing dressed as the kind one. He had kept it quiet. He had paid enough lawyers, quietly, that the matter settled into a murmur rather than a roar.
And then he had retreated.
He had told himself that he remained at Broken Oaks for the girls. That London held nothing for him now. That his presence there would only invite questions he did not wish to answer.
He had not admitted—perhaps still could not entirely admit—that it was not London he feared. It was seeing her. On Bond Street, perhaps, on the arm of some gaudily dressed man. At the opera, in a box opposite his own. Or simply stepping out of a carriage, laughing that bright, careless laugh at some remark.
He feared, most of all, that she would look at him and feel nothing at all.
He flinched away from the thought and reached, almost desperately, for the book on the table. Hobbes again. Always Hobbes when he wanted to drown in someone else’s bleakness.
It was useless. The words swam.
He pushed the book aside and stood abruptly. The chair scraped the floor with a screech.
He should go to the Hall.
He should meet the governess.
“Damn it,” he said again, more softly.
He strode into the small parlor and snatched up his greatcoat where it hung from a peg. It was patched at one elbow. He had others, better ones, at the Hall. This one was simply the closest, the most familiar. Greater men than he had worn worse, he supposed, but greater men did not skulk in their own Dower Houses like ghosts.
He shrugged into the coat, raked a hand through his hair, and seized his hat. The day was nearly gone; the light outside had gone from grey to gunmetal. Still, it was barely five miles. He could be there and back, if not in time for dinner, then at least before the household went fully to bed.
He opened the door.
The rain had softened to a mist, fine as breath. It slicked the flagstones and beaded on the bare branches of the trees. The lane between the Dower House and the main avenue glistened with puddles. His boots sank into the mud as he descended the three low steps.
He hesitated only once, at the gate, fingers resting on the cold iron latch. Then he lifted it and stepped onto the lane.
His horse, tethered in the lean-to stable, snorted when he approached. A plain bay mare, sturdy and long-suffering. He saddled her with the efficiency of habit and swung up, ignoring the creak of leather that needed oiling.
He had not ridden to the Hall in daylight for months.
As he guided the mare down the lane and through the small copse, the shape of Broken Oaks rose gradually ahead, its grey bulk shouldering against the sky. A few windows glowed with candlelight. The front drive was rutted, puddles gleaming dull copper in the fading light.
He did not go to the front.
Instead, he circled round to the side, following a path barely discernible beneath the encroaching grass. The kitchen yard lay on the east side, sheltered from the worst of the wind. Smoke drifted from the chimney. He dismounted there, handed the mare’s reins to one of the stable lads who had come hurrying across, and slipped in through the back door.
The kitchen was warm, crowded, and smelled of onions. Cook stood at the table, arms flour-dusted to the elbow, pounding at a lump of dough as though it had personally offended her. A girl turned the spit. In the corner, a boy polished pewter.
“Your lordship,” Cook said, startled, then immediately attempted a curtsey without removing her hands from the dough. It was not successful.
“Cook.” He nodded, moving toward the door that led to the inner passage. “How is Agnes?”
“Fever’s down, they say,” Cook replied. “Miss Harrow’s with her. Or she was. I sent up broth an hour since. With barley.” She added the last word as if it were a gesture of extravagant generosity.
Richard stopped. “Miss… Harrow?”
“The new governess.” Cook’s heavy brows rose. “Mrs. Pritchard said you’d be seein’ her this mornin’.”
Ah.
So he was discovered.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “I was delayed.”
Cook made a noise in her throat that might have been agreement. Or might have been judgment. It was difficult to tell with Cook.
He escaped into the passage.
The familiar scent of the house wrapped around him: stone, old wood, beeswax, damp. His footsteps echoed more than they should have. Too many rooms closed, too few carpets refreshed.
He nodded curtly to a maid carrying a bundle of linens, exchanged a few low words with the steward about a tenant’s boundary dispute, and endured Mrs. Pritchard’s tight-lipped bow in the corridor with an inward flinch.
“I trust Miss Harrow has settled in,” he said, because he was not entirely without courage. Or courtesy.
“She has, my lord,” Mrs. Pritchard replied. “She has already begun lessons with the young ladies. They are at their supper now. I believe she plans to keep them to their rooms this evening.”
“Good.” He was absurdly relieved to have an excuse not to see the children just yet. Shame pricked at the relief. He seized on the safer portion of the information instead. “Lessons? Already?”
“Yes, my lord.” Something in the housekeeper’s expression softened, just a fraction. “She wasted no time.”
He found himself, unwillingly, curious. Governesses, in his experience, were either timid—wilting under Miriam’s sharp tongue and Mabel’s mischief—or stern in a way that only sharpened the girls’ defiance. The fifth in two years, Pritchard had written to say. He had signed the letter of engagement with barely a glance.
“You approve of her?” he asked, surprising even himself.
Mrs. Pritchard’s brows rose, then lowered. “I approve of her willingness to work,” she said. Which, from Mrs. Pritchard, was almost rapture. “She is not afraid of them.”
“Of the girls?”
“Of anyone, I think.” The housekeeper hesitated. “She refused the attic room. Said the ceiling leaked. I told her they all leak, but she insisted upon the one on the third floor and set a bucket beneath the crack herself.”
“Very… industrious,” he said, unsure what else to call it.
“She also told Miriam that if she insisted on throwing books, she must first wrap them in shawls to protect the bindings,” Mrs. Pritchard added, almost grudgingly. “I do not pretend to understand her. But the children seem… engaged.”
“You disapprove of engagement?” he said dryly.
“I disapprove of disruption, my lord.” She looked past him, at the shadowed corridor. “And she will disrupt things, that one. Mark my words.”
He thought of the neat, predictable quiet of the last years. Of dinners eaten alone at one end of the vast dining table. Of lessons half-heartedly supervised by a governess who watched the door as if calculating the distance to her freedom.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “that is not the worst thing.”
Mrs. Pritchard’s lips pressed together. She did not argue. That, in itself, was noteworthy.
“I shall be in the library,” he said. “If—when she is at liberty, you may inform her I wish to see her.”
If he must face this, best get it over with.
He left the housekeeper standing in the passage, her gaze resting briefly on his retreating back. He did not turn to see the expression on her face. He suspected it mingled hope with the wary protectiveness of one who had watched him fail, in small ways, too often.
***
The library at Corbyn Hall had been his father’s domain. Long lined with shelves, it had held more leather-bound volumes than most country houses boasted. More than a few, Richard had updated or added to: mathematics, natural philosophy, political economy. Over the last decade, he had smuggled in the books less welcome in polite circles. Voltaire. Rousseau. Paine. A few anonymous pamphlets that might, in the wrong hands, be considered seditious.
Now, the room bore the marks of his neglect in other ways.
A film of dust lay on the higher shelves. Cobwebs occupied the upper corners of the tall windows. One of the curtains sagged where its hook had given way. More books lay in stacks on the floor, on tables, on any flat surface that would bear their weight. Volumes left half-open where he had abandoned a train of thought mid-journey.
He paused in the doorway, frowning. Had he left that chair in the center of the room? And the pile of books on the nearest table—he was almost certain those had not been so neatly arranged.
He stepped inside.
Someone had been in his library.
Not just been in it. *Interfered* with it.
He approached the nearest table. The scattered volumes that had previously formed a precarious tower now lay in three tidy piles: history, philosophy, and something that looked suspiciously like “miscellany.” A feather duster leaned against the leg of the table, as though its owner had been interrupted mid-sweep.
The books on the low shelf by the window—his current reading—had been pushed back into a straight row. The armchair where he usually sat, its leather cracked, had been turned to angle more directly toward the light.
Some irrational tightening occurred in his chest.
He did not like other people’s hands on his things. Not after—
“Well,” he said aloud, to the empty room. “Our Miss Harrow is efficient.”
He stalked to the tall ladder that ran along the north wall, its wheels squeaking faintly as he shifted it. The shelves there had been wiped. He could see the faint streaks where dust had been disturbed. Several volumes that had been askew for months—years—now stood upright.
He should not mind. It was, after all, the duty of the staff to keep the library in order. He had, in fact, *paid* for such order and received very little of it. Mrs. Pritchard had long ago drawn a line at risking the maids on the high ladder. “They’ll break their necks and then where will we be, my lord? Down a girl and with blood on the Axminster. You want dusting done, you do it yourself.” He had not bothered to argue.
But this—this unexpected, unauthorized *improvement*—irritated him more than the dust ever had.
He ran a finger along the spine of a book. Clean.
“This is intolerable,” he muttered.
In truth, it was nothing of the sort. It was ridiculous. It was a minor alteration in a house where major decay went unaddressed. It was one woman, doing what she evidently believed to be her job, and perhaps grasping desperately at something she could set to rights in a place where so much lay beyond her control.
He knew that.
He frowned at the straightened row of Plato.
He did not, he told himself firmly, resent her.
He *did* resent the way her presence, though he had not yet seen her, already disturbed the stasis he had so carefully constructed.
He went to the sideboard where he had once kept port and now kept only ink and paper. The bottle of port, untouched for months, stood with a film of dust on its shoulders. He considered it. Then, with a muttered curse, he pulled the cork and poured a small measure into a glass.
It burned pleasantly down his throat. He had forgotten that about port. He had forgotten a great many things, he reflected. How to laugh. How to speak of anything that mattered. How to face his daughters without seeing in each of their faces the bright, careless one that had left him.
The door at the far end of the library opened.
He tensed, glass in hand, and turned.
Mrs. Pritchard entered, followed by a woman.
For a moment, all he registered was the unfamiliarity. There had been no new women in this house in five years who were not belowstairs. No fresh female face that was not under the age of twelve.
She was not young in the way Elizabeth had been at nineteen, all glitter and promise. But she was young enough to be called so still. Mid-twenties, perhaps. Brown hair smoothed beneath a serviceable cap, though a strand had escaped and curved against her cheek as if it had a mind of its own. Her figure was neat rather than lush, her gown plain, the grey merino worn but well kept.
Her face—
It was not the sort of face that made men at White’s put down their dice. Her features were unremarkable taken one by one: a straight nose, a firm mouth, eyes that were… He frowned, trying to name their colour.
Grey, he realized. The exact clear grey of a winter sky before snow.
Not dramatic, then. But *watchful*. Self-possessed.
She regarded him as if he were a problem set on a slate. Not hostile. Not deferential. Simply… interested. Weighing him.
“Your lordship,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “Miss Harrow.”
Miss Harrow sank into a curtsey. It was correct and neither low nor shallow. She placed no extra weight upon the title, no extra humility in the bow of her head.
“My lord,” she said.
Not “your lordship.” Certainly not “your Grace.” And, he noted with a prickling irritation, not “my lord.”
He realized belatedly that he was staring. He set the port glass down a shade too abruptly. It clinked against the tray.
“Miss Harrow,” he said. “You have been here… what, a day? And already you have restructured my library.”
She blinked. “If I have overstepped, I beg your pardon. It was… unavoidably dusty.”
“Dust is unavoidable in any library worth the name,” he shot back.
“Not to this extent, my lord.” Her tone was mild, but there was an edge in it. “Some of these shelves had not seen a cloth in years. I feared for the bindings.”
“You feared for the *bindings*,” he repeated, incredulous.
She inclined her head. “The care of books is no small matter. They cannot speak for themselves.”
“Most books speak too much,” he muttered before he could stop himself.
“Then you have been reading the wrong ones,” she said, so promptly that he found himself almost—almost—amused.
Mrs. Pritchard coughed pointedly. “I shall leave you, my lord. Miss Harrow.” She withdrew with the speed of a woman tactfully abandoning a room in which something combustible might shortly occur.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Silence crawled in.
Richard folded his arms. He was aware that he stood in his oldest coat, hair likely disordered, half a day’s growth roughening his jaw. He should have received her properly. He had not. That was done. He could only salvage what dignity remained.
“You arrived this morning,” he said. “I was informed you began lessons at once.”
She glanced briefly toward the nearest shelves. “The young ladies were… eager for structure.”
“That is a diplomatic way of saying they were feral,” he observed.
A flicker of something—perhaps amusement, perhaps disapproval—crossed her features. “They are children, my lord. Children left too long without consistent guidance. Such conditions tend to produce… energetic results.”
He stiffened. “You presume to critique the management of my household after less than twelve hours in it?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I presume to comment on the educational state of my pupils. That is, after all, why I am here.” She met his gaze levelly. “I was not aware the previous governess had gone. Had I known there was a gap in their instruction, I might have been prepared for more… remedial work.”
“The previous governess lasted six months,” he said. “That is a record, for this house.”
“So the girls informed me.” Her lips tightened slightly. “They also informed me that you were expected this morning and did not come.”
The rebuke was so quiet he might have missed it had he not been listening for judgment.
His temper, never far from reach these days, surged.
“My schedule,” he said, “is my own, Miss Harrow. You may arrange your days as you please within the nursery. You may not dictate mine.”
“I have no desire to dictate to you,” she said coolly. “I merely point out that your daughters notice when you fail to appear. Children are observant creatures. It is inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient?”
“For parents who would rather be unobserved,” she said.
The words hit him like a slap.
It did not help that they were true.
He stared at her, at this neatly dressed, ordinary-looking woman who stood in his father’s library and told him, without raising her voice, precisely what sort of father he was being.
“You are impertinent,” he said, soft and dangerous.
She did not flinch. “No, my lord. I am employed.”
The line was so unexpected that whatever he had been about to say twisted in his throat. He barked out a short, mirthless laugh.
“You think your salary grants you license to speak to me as no one else in this house does?”
“I think my position obliges me to speak plainly where the children are concerned,” she said. “If that plainness gives offense, then we have a difficulty. But the difficulty will not alter the children’s needs.”
He took a step toward her.
She did not retreat, but he saw the flicker of awareness in her eyes, the minute tightening of her hand on the strap of the reticule she carried.
“You will find, Miss Harrow,” he said, “that there are many in this world who require things they do not receive. That is the nature of life. It is not—despite what novels like to proclaim—a governess’s task to mend every lack.”
Her grey gaze sharpened. “No. But it *is* her task to attempt. Otherwise she is merely a warm body in a chair. I do not consider that sufficient.”
His mouth twisted. “You have high opinions of your own importance.”
“No, my lord.” Her voice dropped, quieter. “I have high opinions of theirs.”
Something in his chest flinched.
He thought of Miriam’s shuttered eyes, Mabel’s brittle bravado, Agnes’s too-hot hand in his own.
He swallowed.
“This is remarkably earnest for a conversation that was meant merely to establish your duties,” he said, rougher than he intended.
“My duties were established in your housekeeper’s letter,” she replied. “Rise at seven. Lessons at nine. Supervise the girls at meals, at recreation, at prayers. Attend their illnesses. Report to you as required. If you wish to add to or amend that list, I am at your disposal.”
He hesitated. What had he called her here to say? He had intended to make the usual inquiries, the perfunctory remarks. To keep this strictly within the bounds of employer and employee, the distance necessary to maintain the fragile equilibrium he had carved out.
Instead, she had unsettled him within three minutes.
“Mrs. Pritchard informs me,” he said finally, “that you refused the attic room.”
“It leaked,” she said simply. “In three places.”
“They all leak,” he snapped. “This house is old.”
“Then one must choose the least dangerous leak,” she said. “I did so. If you wish me to move, I will. But I cannot teach adequately if I am half-drowned.”
A reluctant, unwilling amusement stirred again. “You do not lack for conviction, Miss Harrow.”
“I cannot afford to,” she said.
There it was. The simple truth of a woman in service.
He knew, of course, that governesses were generally genteel women fallen on hard times. Daughters of clergymen, impoverished cousins of minor gentry. Women who had once danced, perhaps, at assemblies, only to find themselves reduced to teaching other people’s children the same steps.
“It says here,” he said abruptly, crossing to the side table where Mrs. Pritchard had left the folder of her references, “that your father was a vicar. That he died two years ago, leaving you and your brother without means.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “He was curate at St. Luke’s in Bloomsbury. Curates are not paid extravagantly, even when they devote their lives to their parish.”
“No. They are not.” He turned a page. “Your previous position was with the Lennox family.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave?”
Her jaw tightened. “Lord Lennox has a son. He has… difficulty keeping his hands to himself.”
A hot flare of anger went through him—at the nameless Lennox son, at the situation that made such predation almost ordinary, at the fact that her matter-of-fact tone suggested she had not been particularly surprised.
“You reported this to Lord Lennox?” he asked.
“I did,” she said. “He assured me his son meant no harm.”
“And the son?”
“He assured me that I ought to be flattered.” Her lip curled. “I was not.”
His hand curled around the paper. “You left.”
“I did. Without a reference from Lord Lennox.” She lifted her chin. “Lady Lennox, however, wrote one. As did the vicar at St. Luke’s. Their letters are there.” She nodded toward the papers in his hand. “If you find them insufficient, then I suppose I shall have to leave here as well.”
He looked down at the neat, flowing script of Lady Lennox’s testimonial, the firmer hand of the Bloomsbury vicar. Both spoke of her intelligence, her diligence, her patience with children.
Both made brief, oblique reference to the “unfortunate situation” that had necessitated her departure.
He slid the papers back into their folder.
“You are under my protection in this house,” he said briefly. “No man, under my roof, will touch you without your consent. If any attempt is made, you will report it to me immediately. Is that understood?”
Color rose vividly in her cheeks. “Yes, my—” She stopped, then went on, more controlled. “Yes. Thank you.”
He felt an absurd urge to reassure her further, to vow that he himself would never—
He quelled it. She did not need his protestations. She needed employment and a safe roof.
He moved to the hearth, bracing one hand on the mantel. The fire burned low. He should have had more wood brought. Another small neglect.
“You will, of course,” he said, “be expected to address me properly in the presence of the children. ‘My lord’ will suffice. I have no patience for flattery, but I require courtesy.”
Her brows drew together. “I have addressed you as ‘my lord’ since I entered the room.”
“Barely,” he said. “You clip the words.”
“I am sorry if my enunciation offends, my lord,” she said, with just enough emphasis on the title to let him know she had noticed his pettiness.
He almost smiled.
“I only mention it,” he said, “because Miriam is very quick to notice any sign that authority can be undermined. If you do not show respect to me, she will seize upon it. She will assume she need not respect you either.”
“That is not how respect works, in my experience,” Martha said. “Children are more likely to respect adults who respect each other. They are also very quick to sense hypocrisy.”
He met her gaze. “You are suggesting that I am a hypocrite.”
“I am suggesting,” she said slowly, “that it is unwise to demand from them what you do not give.”
He should dismiss her, he thought. Right now. Send her back to London with a month’s wages and a curt letter. Who was she to presume—
“You speak as though you know me,” he said instead.
“No.” Her voice dropped. “I speak as though I know children whose parents leave them waiting in nurseries for visits that never come.”
The blow landed.
He inhaled sharply, anger and shame tangling.
“My presence or absence in the nursery is not your concern.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “It is very much my concern. Because I am the one who must answer their questions. Who must watch them watch the door. Who must explain, over and over, that Father is busy. That he has important matters to attend. That he will come *next* time.” Her hand tightened on the reticule strap. “I would prefer, my lord, not to have to lie to them.”
“You presume much,” he said in a low voice.
“I presume that you care for them,” she said. “Why else would you keep them here, away from London?” Her gaze searched his face. “I presume that you are not a monster. But they do not presume that. Not any longer. Children are not so patient with absence as the world would wish them to be.”
He heard, unexpectedly, a note of personal experience in her words.
“Your father,” he said, before he could stop himself. “Was he often absent?”
Her mouth twitched. “He was often present. Which, in some ways, is worse. One cannot make excuses for a man who is always there and never listening.”
He had not expected that answer.
“I see,” he said, after a moment.
“Do you?” she murmured.
A log shifted in the hearth, sending up a small shower of sparks.
He rubbed at his temple. “We will, it seems, not always agree.”
“I do not require agreement,” she said. “Only that you consider what I say where it touches your daughters. And that you allow me to do my job.”
“And your job includes… reorganizing my library.”
“It includes creating an environment in which they might be exposed to knowledge,” she said. “Your daughters have more access to novels about highwaymen than they do to histories. Miriam has read *The Female Quixote* three times but not once *Plutarch’s Lives*.”
He blinked. “Miriam has read *The Female Quixote*?”
“Yes. She pronounced it both tedious and instructive.” A ghost of a smile touched her mouth. “She admires the heroine’s independence but finds her foolishness exasperating. I suggested she read something less given to overwrought delusion. She asked for recommendations. I came here to find them. And discovered that any attempt to locate a specific volume risked the collapse of several others.”
He glanced around the room. It was, he conceded, not entirely false.
“I rarely read novels,” he said. “This library reflects that.”
“So I gathered,” she said. “There are, however, books here that might suit her. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance. She could do with a few heroines possessed of reason as well as passion.”
He stared. “You would give Wollstonecraft to a twelve-year-old?”
“In selected passages, yes,” she said calmly. “Do you object?”
He very nearly said yes on principle, simply to reassert some control over the conversation.
But the idea of Miriam—sharp-tongued, wary Miriam—encountering Wollstonecraft’s arguments about female education, about rationality and virtue… It was, at the very least, better than her devouring gothic romances that convinced her fainting was the height of femininity.
“I do not object,” he said slowly. “Provided you choose those passages with care.”
“I had already intended to,” she said.
“Of course you had,” he muttered.
A beat.
The tension in the room had shifted. Not gone, but altered. Less incendiary. More… wary.
He sighed. “Miss Harrow. I am not in the habit of… conversations such as this.”
“Conversations in which people speak to you honestly?” she asked.
“Conversations in which my own shortcomings are enumerated like items on an account ledger,” he snapped.
Her gaze softened, unexpectedly. “You are not the only man in England with shortcomings, my—” She paused, then went on. “Richard.”
He went very still.
“No one calls me that,” he said.
“Someone ought to,” she replied quietly. “Someone must, surely. Else you forget you are anything but a marquess.”
He swallowed. His throat felt dry. “In this house, you will address me as ‘my lord.’”
“In front of the children, certainly.” Her chin came up. “But when I speak to you alone, about matters that are not solely to do with titles and rent rolls, I will call you by your name.”
“You will not,” he said, shocked.
“I will,” she said. “Because I cannot reason with a title. I cannot appeal to its better nature. I cannot tell a marquess that he is behaving like a mule. But I can tell a man so, if need be.”
His breath left him in something very like a laugh, though it was edged.
“You intend to call me a mule?”
“Only if you insist upon behaving like one,” she said briskly. “Thus far, you have only sulked.”
He stared at her.
She lifted her brows. “Have I overstepped again?”
“Frequently,” he said.
“And yet, you have not dismissed me.”
“Not yet,” he said.
They stood, the two of them, in the fading light of the neglected library: a marquess frayed around the edges and a governess who refused to bow quite as low as she ought. Between them lay shelves of philosophy and history and the heavy quiet of unspoken things.
“I will see the children tomorrow,” he said finally. It cost him something to say it. “You may inform them.”
“I would prefer you inform them yourself,” she said. “Else they will not believe me.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “Very well. I will be in the schoolroom at nine.”
“They have arithmetic then,” she said. “They detest it. Your presence will not sweeten it.”
“Then perhaps they will learn that we must sometimes do things we detest.”
She tilted her head. “You may find, my lord, that you detest arithmetic less than you fear your daughters’ questions.”
He opened his eyes. “I fear nothing.”
She did not laugh. She only looked at him in a way that suggested she knew, as he did, that this was a lie.
“Good evening, Miss Harrow,” he said sharply.
“Good evening, Richard,” she replied, very softly.
He should have corrected her. He did not.
As she left the library, skirts whispering over the worn carpet, he found himself watching the swing of her step, the straightness of her back.
He reached for his glass and discovered his hand shaking, just slightly.
“Damn it,” he said, to the empty room.
This time, the curse did not feel like anger. It felt like the first shift of something in him that had been frozen a long, long time.
***