Page 87 of Trouble

Mrs Spencer, to her credit, took it in her stride. She was wearing a shade of puce that would have made Emily look like a corpse, but she somehow looked well in it.

‘Good evening, Mrs Spencer,’ Grace said, with a perfect curtsey. ‘I hope you are well. And I hope that your dog is well.’

‘My .?.?. dog is very well,’ said Mrs Spencer, with a slightly confused smile.

‘We can continue to converse in French, if you wish,’ Grace said, so seriously that the two men standing with Captain Edwards laughed.

‘Français,machérie?’

‘Oui,’ said Grace. ‘J’adore les chiens.’4

‘Your accent is wonderful. Your governess has taught you well.’

‘Oh, no, Emily doesn’t teach me French,’ Grace said, laughing as if Mrs Spencer would be in on the joke.

‘What does she teach you, then?’ said Mrs Spencer, smiling at Emily, who almost wished for another shipwreck to save her from this conversation urgently.

‘Arguing, mostly,’ said Grace. ‘And a bit of thinking. The other day she told me you can open almost any locked door with the right size of hairpin.’

‘I think Mrs Spencer has heard enough, Grace,’ Emily said, over the sound of more gentlemanly guffaws.

She dared glance at Captain Edwards and saw that he was affecting disapproval but had covered his mouth with a gloved hand, as if he might actually be smiling a little behind it.

‘I haven’t asked her how many legs her dog has yet,’ Grace said, in an attempt at a whisper that carried magnificently.

Emily finally managed to usher her from the drawing room and back up to the schoolroom, where Grace sat by the fire and read an apparently very amusing French book, and tried very falteringly to translate the jokes to Emily until it was time to go to bed.

Emily felt too antsy to go to bed herself, even though Meera had assured her that they could go without her help for one small dinner party. Instead, she wandered through the kitchen and immediately got into Joe’s way, which hastened her out of the door and into the grounds.

It was still light outside, the sky a milky sort of lavender, as Emily walked a loop of the house. She should have felt somewhat settled, now that she had a plan in place to stay at Fairmont a while longer and then slip out once she was no longer needed, but she had been feeling unaccountablyfidgetyand agitated since her conversation with Captain Edwards. Going home to her family had felt like the end of something; returning was like opening the door again, when she had intended to keep it firmly shut. The problem was that she had glimpsed something through that door, and now it was impossible to pretend she hadn’t.

It was sort of like when she had seen the captain without his shirt, except that this glimpsing was metaphorical, and the captain sans shirt had beenveryreal .?.?.

‘Good evening,’ said a woman’s voice.

Emily jumped, and then internally chastised herself. She had let her guard down so thoroughly since arriving at Fairmont House that there could have been an entire regiment of officers standing on the back steps waiting to arrest her and she wouldn’t have noticed.

It wasn’t an entire regiment of officers, though. It was Mrs Augusta Spencer. She had a shawl draped over her shoulders, and she was smoking a pipe.

‘Terrible habit, I know,’ she said, wrinkling her beautiful nose. ‘Not at all proper, but it does calm my nerves. Do you want .?.?. ?’

She seemed to be offering Emily the pipe. Emily was almost too shocked to say no, but when she eventually managed to shake her head, Mrs Spencer just shrugged genially.

‘You’re the governess, aren’t you?’

‘Miss Laurence,’ said Emily.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Spencer. ‘I remember.’

She took a deep drag on her pipe, and then expelled a large cloud of smoke like a silk-clad chimney.

‘What are the children really like?’ she asked. ‘Don’t coddle me – I’d love to know.’

‘They’re .?.?. good,’ said Emily. ‘Well, Aster can be pig-headed and Grace sometimes veers towards the ridiculous, but if you don’t mind that, they are perfectly pleasant.’

‘Not a coddler, then,’ said Mrs Spencer, amused. ‘Does that mean you’re the nasty sort? My governesses were always one of the two.’

‘If those are the only options, then .?.?. probably,’ said Emily, and she sounded so glum that Mrs Spencer laughed.