Buch lesen: «The Governess Heiress»

Chapter One

‘I would rather be outside, too, Lavinia, but you said it was too cold to learn as we walked this morning. Now we’re inside you still won’t listen,’ Eleanor Hancourt said sternly. ‘Remind us how many rods make a furlong.’

Nell’s eldest pupil went on staring out of the high schoolroom window and it took Caroline’s nudge to jolt her cousin out of a daydream. ‘Archbishop of Canterbury, Miss Court,’ Lavinia said triumphantly.

‘We have moved on from Plantagenet kings and troublesome priests, Lavinia Selford. British history was this morning.’

‘Oh,’ said Lavinia listlessly. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘Kindly explain how the fate of Kings and measuring God’s creation are unimportant, Lavinia,’ Nell said softly, although she wanted to let her temper rip.

‘Because I don’t care. Knowing such rubbishy stuff won’t get me a husband and a fine house in London,’ Lavinia replied defiantly.

‘Being a well-bred mother to his children will be enough for you, then?’

‘No, he will adore me and when I make my debut I’ll dance and have fun while you sew for the poor and read improving books out loud of an evening.’

Nell mentally conceded the girl could be right about the dullness of their current lives, even if everything else she had to say showed how immature Lavinia was. It was dull in this half-closed-up house at the back of beyond. Even she, the girls’ governess, was only three and twenty and sometimes longed for more and now it was temptingly within reach. Except nobody else really cared if they were happy or miserable, so long as they didn’t cause trouble. So she would have to stay until the Earl of Barberry came to take responsibility for his wards and the estate, but that seemed about as likely as pigs learning to fly.

Her authority felt fragile even after two years teaching the man’s orphaned wards, but at least he wasn’t here to challenge it. He had never been here to see if she was doing her job properly. He hadn’t even bothered to meet his young cousins during the decade he’d been head of the Selford family. The Earl left the country as soon as he heard his grandfather was dead and had stayed away ever since. Even two years on from being brought in to try and drive knowledge and ladylike behaviour into the Misses Selford, Nell was too young for such a role. Now she was an heiress to add to her puzzles, but she could think about that when Lavinia wasn’t as slyly confident she was going to win their latest battle.

‘I am well born and pretty and I have a good figure and a fine dowry,’ the girl listed smugly, the difference between them sharp in her light blue eyes.

‘A true gentleman requires more than looks and a large collection of vanities in a wife,’ Nell replied coolly, pushing the unworthy argument she was well born and a lot wealthier than her eldest charge to the back of her mind. ‘A talent for flirting and dancing won’t fascinate the fine young man you dream of marrying when every second debutante has that as well. Wit and charm, a sincere interest in those around her, a well-informed mind and a compassionate heart make a true lady, Lavinia. Youthful prettiness fades; do you want to end up lonely and avoided since you have no conversation or common interest to keep your husband at your side when you are no longer as young as you were?’

‘Oh, no, Vinnie, imagine how awful it would be to end up like that lady who stayed at the manor last year. The one who bored on and on about imaginary illnesses and how hard her life was until her husband went out of his way to avoid her,’ Caroline exclaimed with genuine horror.

‘What sane gentleman would marry an empty-headed creature for aught but her money?’ Caroline’s elder sister Georgiana added with a sideways look at her least favourite cousin.

‘That’s enough, Georgiana,’ Nell said firmly.

Lavinia was the daughter of the last Earl’s eldest son and senior in status and years, but what did that matter when all four of the old Earl’s granddaughters were stuck here in the middle of nowhere? None of them could inherit the earldom and Nell counted herself lucky that she could only imagine the last Earl’s fury when his youngest son made a runaway marriage to Kitty Graham, still whispered of as the loveliest actress of her generation. Hastily doing some mental arithmetic, Nell supposed Kitty and the Honourable Aidan’s son hadn’t mattered to his paternal grandfather for over a decade. The fifth Earl’s eldest son had a robust heir and never mind if his wife refused to share his bed after the boy was born and she declared her duty done. Since the lady was the daughter of a duke the old Earl didn’t challenge her until the boy was killed in some reckless exploit at Oxford. Then he’d ordered his heir to mend his marriage and even the Duke agreed, so Lady Selford gave birth to Lavinia a year after she lost her son and was declared too fragile for further duty by the doctors. According to local gossip, the lady turned her back on her baby daughter and returned to her family. Nell marvelled at her indifference, but Lady Selford died when Lavinia was seven and Nell doubted the child had set eyes on the woman above once or twice.

At least Georgiana and Caroline seemed to have been loved by their parents, but a sweating fever killed Captain Selford and his wife and Nell imagined the girls had had a stony welcome from their grandfather, since the servants still gossiped about how bitterly he resented his granddaughters for daring to be born female. Only Penelope had escaped the fury of that bitter old man by being born three months after the Earl died, but as a posthumous child of his third son she had been his last hope of keeping the offspring of an actress out of the succession. The latest Earl of Barberry had carried off the family honours in the teeth of his grandfather’s opposition then, but the sixth Earl had done precious little with them. Nell supposed it was better for the girls to grow up without another angry lord glowering at them when he recalled their existence. Lavinia’s old nurse once told her how the old Earl cursed whenever Lavinia crossed his path, so little wonder if she grew up imagining a rosier future for herself. Nell hoped the girl would make a good marriage, but misery awaited her if she wed the first young man who asked her to so she could escape her lonely life.

‘Forty, Miss Court,’ Lavinia said casually at last.

Nell wondered what she was talking about, then remembered the rods and furlongs. ‘Very good, Lavinia. So, Georgiana; how many feet in a fathom?’

‘Even a land sailor knows there are six and we were at sea until Papa died.’

‘You and your stupid sister insist on telling us about him all the time. As if we care,’ Lavinia said, quite spoiling the novelty of joining in a lesson for once.

‘Then why don’t you go and count your rubbishy ribbons, or gaze at your own ugly face in the mirror for hours on end, since you love it so much? At least then we won’t have to look at your frog face or listen to you rattle on about who you’re going to marry this week, Lavinia Lackwit,’ Georgiana scorned as tears flooded Caroline’s wide blue eyes at the thought of what the two sisters had lost when their parents died.

Nell felt sorry for Lavinia when even little Penny glared at her for upsetting the most vulnerable of the cousins and all three looked as if they’d be glad if Lavinia disappeared in a puff of smoke.

‘Georgiana, that’s an inexcusable thing to say. You will stand in the corner until I say you can come out. Lavinia; apologise to your cousin, then copy out the One Hundredth Psalm twice in a fair hand. Maybe that will make you humbler about your own shortcomings and a little kinder to others, but your guardian will be displeased to hear you refuse to make any effort at your lessons and fall out with your cousins.’

‘He doesn’t give a snap of his fingers for any of us and I hate this place and all of you as well. You’re always such good little girls for your darling Miss Court and she’s only a servant when all’s said and done. You make me sick. I hate you all, but I hate Cousin Barberry most. Why should I care what he thinks? I doubt he remembers we exist,’ Lavinia railed at the top of her voice, stamped her feet as if words couldn’t express her anger, then ran out of the room on a furious sob. Nell listened to the sound of her charge thundering downstairs and the garden door slamming with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that her day was about to get even worse.

‘I hope she took a shawl,’ Caroline said with a sympathetic shiver.

‘And I hope she didn’t,’ nine-year-old Penny argued vengefully.

Georgiana flounced to the corner she’d been ordered into with a sniff and a contemptuous glower and Nell tried to do what came next instead of feeling defeated.

‘Georgiana, stay there for ten minutes without saying a word or pulling faces at Caroline and Penelope. I shall ask Crombie to sit with you. Caroline and Penelope, you can read quietly, but you will not tease Georgiana or speculate about Lavinia. As soon as the ten minutes are up you may read as well, Georgiana,’ she told her charges as calmly as she could.

Seeing how impatient Penny’s one-time nurse was about being fetched away from her comfortable coze with the housekeeper, Nell knew they wouldn’t be allowed to riot in her absence. Now she only had to worry about organising a search for Lavinia with the daylight already fading. She gave orders for all the available staff to comb the gardens and parkland, then went outside to search her own section of the shadowy gardens.

* * *

Fergus Selford, Earl of Barberry, rode into the stableyard of Berry Brampton House for the first time in his life and found it strangely deserted. He hadn’t expected a fanfare on the arrival of an errant earl nobody knew was coming. Or much of a welcome even if they did, but it felt a bit of come down to stable his own horse. He owned the dratted place from cellar to rafters, yet he’d settled the tired animal in a convenient stall and retrieved his unfashionable boat cloak from the tack room before he met a single soul.

‘We’re not expecting visitors, so if you’re the new land agent you couldn’t have arrived at a better time, although you’re three weeks late and we had almost given up on you,’ a rather pleasant contralto voice told him from the shadowy doorway. ‘I saw the lamp and heard someone moving about in here as if he had a right to be here. All the stable boys are supposed to be out looking for one of my charges so I came to see if one of them was shirking. Now you’re here we need all the help we can get before Lavinia hurts herself or one of us falls into the ha-ha. You can help me search, since you’ll get lost if you wander about on your own and we’ll have to find you as well.’

‘If you’ve managed to mislay one of the Selford girls that’s your problem,’ Fergus told her gruffly, blaming his shabby cloak for her mistake. He was almost inclined to tell her who he was and that he employed her to take care of his wards, so why should he bother himself with a search for one of them when he was weary and uncomfortable and didn’t want to be here in the first place?

‘It’ll be yours if the Earl finds out we couldn’t keep one of his wards safe because you refused to help.’

‘Is she mad or just simple? It has to be one or the other since you believe she’ll do herself a mischief in his lordship’s private grounds.’

‘Miss Selford is a bright and spirited young girl who has trouble keeping her temper in check. A trait I sympathise with at this very moment,’ the governess said through what sounded like clenched teeth.

Now why was arguing with her in the semi-darkness more stimulating than flirting with sophisticated beauties? He heard her take a deep breath and she seemed to call on the reserves of patience his wards hadn’t already tested to the limit. Reminding himself he was here to do his duty, not amuse himself at the governess’s expense, he ordered himself to stop provoking her and get on with it.

‘Never mind, we’ll find her without your help and I suppose you wouldn’t be much use anyway,’ she said haughtily. ‘If you can exert yourself long enough to cross the yard and find Cook, I expect she will feed you, then direct you to your quarters. I wish you joy of the land steward’s house, by the way. You should have told us you were coming—since you are so tardy we had given up on you and abandoned the attempt to make it more welcoming.’ Even in the gloom he could see the glare the Amazon shot him before she turned to march back the way she came.

‘Stop,’ he ordered and she turned as slowly as an offended queen. He wanted to kiss the temper off her lips for a shocking moment. She would slap him and quite right, too, and he hadn’t come here to prove that every hard word his late grandfather had said about him had turned out to be true.

‘No, I’m busy,’ she said and strode towards a path he could only just see in the fast fading light.

‘Two pairs of eyes and ears will be better than one in this gloom,’ he said as he caught up with her, bowed ironically and indicated she carry on leading the way. ‘You know where you’re going,’ he explained, beginning to enjoy himself now he had such a prickly lady to annoy and this new disguise to settle into.

He told himself he wouldn’t have thought of such an impersonation until she thrust it on him, but not announcing who he was to a household he never wanted to inherit in the first place was too tempting to turn his back on. As a ruse for finding out what was going on without putting the entire neighbourhood on alert that the new Earl was home at last it could hardly be bettered. Pretending to be the land steward would save him the huge effort of being the sixth Earl of Barberry and he could spy out the land, then decide if he could endure being here. Perhaps it was as well the Moss boy, who he’d lined up to act as land steward, had backed out of this post for an easier one since his lack of backbone had forced Fergus to come here, but taking up his inheritance in the teeth of the late Earl’s bitter opposition still rasped his pride somehow.

Everything the Selfords had worked so hard to keep from a whore’s son, as they so charmingly called him, was his, but it felt like a hollow victory. After living on his own terms in Canada for almost a decade the rules of a polite little English society felt petty. As a heedless and rather angry young man he had been determined to defy his grandfather and all those who made his time at Eton and Oxford a mixed blessing. There was always some aristocratic sprig ready to deride him as grandson of Lord Barberry on one side and an Irish gypsy on the other. None of them would believe he never really wanted the titles and lands hanging around his neck like a millstone, so he’d left the country when the old Earl was barely cold in his grave. There were so many things he could do elsewhere, so many adventures to have, but he’d been doing his best to ignore the voice of his conscience and his mother’s pleas to come home ever since he’d fallen in love with the vastness and promise of the so-called New World. Another thing he could blame being Earl of Barberry for, having to leave a place he could have made his home if not for all the responsibilities he’d been so intent on running away from ten years ago.

Still, as Moss he could learn what he wanted to know, then go away again if he chose to and nobody here would even know he’d been. He ought to thank the woman striding along the path ahead of him as he stumbled in her wake like a rowing boat chasing a stately galleon.

Now what was her name? He was ashamed to find he couldn’t remember it, despite the quarterly reports she insisted on sending him of the state of his cousins’ health, happiness and progress, or lack of it. Still, she was the latest in a long line of governesses who’d all insisted on writing to him about their woes with the Selford girls when they were paid handsomely to deal with them. Just as well this one had no idea who he was, because he paid little attention to her meticulous lists of how Miss Lavender or Miss Patty, or whatever they were called, were progressing when his lawyers sent them on. Thousands of miles away he’d had to trust that his senior lawyer knew what he was doing when he’d insisted that young girls needed someone youthful to care for their happiness as well as teach them to paint screens and sew samplers, or whatever young ladies did until they were old enough to marry. Considering this female had carelessly mislaid one of his wards, he was beginning to wonder about the fellow’s wisdom and sanity right now.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked as he followed Miss Whoever into a generous old orchard.

‘If I told you it would mean nothing, unless you’ve been studying estate maps before taking up your employment?’ she said with too much irony for his taste.

‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’ he said defensively.

‘And only three weeks late as well. How very diligent, Mr Moss.’

‘That discrepancy is between me and my employer.’

‘And he doesn’t sound the most patient or tolerant of them. In your shoes I’d be careful how I conducted myself, now you’re here at last.’

‘Is that a threat?’ he asked, with what his half-sisters said was his most annoying sneer. Annoying or not, it was wasted on this woman. She was peering at what looked like a tall hutch in the twilight as if he didn’t exist.

‘An observation,’ she said absently. He felt like a fly so trivial it wasn’t even worth slapping him. ‘Don’t get too close,’ she warned and he instantly wanted to.

He was beginning to sympathise with his absent ward’s need to escape her governess’s authority. Then he got too close and an angry buzz shot past his ear. He stepped back hastily as the persistent little creatures took exception to him but, annoyingly, left the governess alone as if she belonged here and he didn’t.

‘I did warn you,’ she said with I told you so in her voice.

‘What is this place?’ he asked gruffly.

‘A bee house, of course,’ she said and followed him away as if nothing about this place troubled her, which it didn’t, he supposed—she wasn’t the one in danger of being royally stung.

‘Oh, of course, and what an ideal place for a runaway schoolgirl to hide.’

‘Lavinia is a fanciful creature and local lore insists the bees be told whatever happens in a household if they are to be part of it.’

‘And they really want to know when a girl is out of sorts with her governess?’

‘It was a possibility. Now maybe you’ll go back to the house and ask for your dinner so I can get on,’ she said as if tired of indulging him.

‘While you wander about in the dark and risk life and limb? Even I’m not that much of a yahoo, Miss... Who are you anyway?’ he demanded irritably, glad now he hadn’t remembered her name and given himself away.

‘Miss Court and I’m not in any danger since, as you pointed out just now, we are in his lordship’s private grounds. And I’ll get on a lot faster if you leave me be.’

‘No, if the wench has done something to herself in the dark you can’t carry her, great girl of fifteen or sixteen as she must be.’

‘How do you know the age of my eldest charge?’

Curse the woman, but now she sounded suspicious. Fergus searched his memory for lies he’d already told her. Even the son of a country squire would know enough to guess how old the Earl of Barberry’s wards must be now.

‘Everyone knows Barberry was left with a stable of female cousins when he inherited,’ he said and even managed to sound plausibly impatient. ‘The old lord’s quest for another male heir is hardly a secret and if those girls were old enough to be presented they wouldn’t need a governess, so even the eldest cannot be out yet.’

‘Clever,’ she said flatly and why didn’t he think it a compliment?