Page 15 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
She had stepped over the line again, she was certain.
‘Are you always so forthright?’
‘No,’ she said.
She wasn’t. There was something about him. Normally, she spoke to housekeepers, and perhaps the children’s mother. But no one had ever demanded a full account of what the children had done in the day, least of all in such an emotionless manner.
‘I do not require your shame,’ he said. ‘I simply wish to know the woman minding my children.’
‘It might be beneficial for you to have some personal involvement with your children.’
Another icy glare, and this one she felt in the pit of her stomach.
‘Do you mean to scold me for how I handle my own children?’
As far as she could see he didnothandle the children.
‘They are struggling. This has been a very tumultuous time...’
‘Do you not think I am aware of that? Why do you think I’ve had four governesses leave in as many months? Because the children are angry. But I am angry as well. And there is not much that I can do. They can yell at their governess, and what am I to do? Rage at God?’
She felt some sort of secret satisfaction at this. At this unravelling of the contained man before her. Not a complete unravelling, but a loose thread had been revealed. It made her feel as if she had more power than she had a moment before, and yet she could hardly feel too triumphant having used his children and the death of his wife to get a response from him.
‘I find sometimes it is necessary to do so,’ she said. ‘And that God has broad shoulders. He can certainly bear the burdens that we place upon him.’
‘And now you speak to me of God?’ The words were hard.
‘You spoke to me of him first. I thought this was a conversation.’
He stared at her. And she knew that he found her utterly insolent.
She spoke to him as she had his children. She found it easier.
‘I am terribly sorry, Your Grace. It is perhaps that I am near feral, not being English.’
‘You are certainly not English.’
His face was a study in hard granite lines.
He was...
He was starkly beautiful. She would guess the man to be nearing forty. There was grey at his temples.
He was angry, and yet he kept that anger leashed. She could sense it, boiling beneath the surface of his skin, and yet he did not give it free rein. Nothing like her father, who had led with his fists, his brandy-induced rages a terror for his wife and children.
And then there was the man who had attacked her. Useless. Nothing. The sort of man who wanted nothing more than to prove his strength by breaking someone weaker than him.
Pity the man who did not understand what the strength of the heart looked like.
Perhaps pity was the wrong word. Because she did not pity him at all. She hoped his soul rotted in the depths of hell.
It was said that forgiveness set one free.
She did not believe in bitterness. She did not believe in forgiveness for the unrepentant either. The lake of fire would suffice.
And she wished him well in it. So that he could survive longer with the flames licking his skin.
‘You will understand that the household has been in a period of mourning.’
