Page 22 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
She had not given him permission to inhabit her thoughts in this fashion. And she would not allow it to happen again.
Tomorrow, she would be nothing but impeccably appropriate in her interaction with him. She would not allow him to get beneath her skin again. She refused. She took several deep breaths, and she bid herself to be calm. Tomorrow would be different. She would be different. She had reinvented herself once already, and she could change in whatever way she needed in order to survive this.
She needed thicker armour, that was all.
And she was more than up to the task of making it.
‘Today,’ she said, looking at her two angry charges, ‘we will go for a walk.’
Elizabeth looked outside, her eyes going round. She had her father’s eyes. If not precisely the colour, the uncompromising edge to them. ‘It’s raining.’
‘So it is,’ Mary said cheerfully. ‘But this is England. And if we were to stay inside because of the rain, we might never go out.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Michael.
‘But you need fresh air. We need to get some exercise. It is important. The building of a healthy constitution begins in childhood.’
She said this, confident that logic would prevail. It did not.
‘I don’t care,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t care what you think, and I don’t care if I get exercise.’
‘Then we should clean up the nursery,’ she said.
The children looked at her as if she had grown another head. ‘That is not our job,’ said Michael.
‘You seem appalled by the idea that you might have to clean something. Whose job is it?’
‘Yours,’ he said. ‘Or one of the maids.’
‘And why could you not clean the nursery?’
‘It is a disaster,’ said Michael, surveying the damage that he himself had done yesterday.
‘And yet you find it acceptable that someone else should have to take responsibility for this. But it is a horrifying thought that you might. Come now, we will tidy the place, and we will do it together. If you will not take responsibility for the health of your bodies, you will take responsibility for your surroundings. You treated your things yesterday with an appalling lack of respect and care. Perhaps this will teach you...’
‘No,’ said Michael, sitting in the middle of the floor and gripping his toes, refusing to move. ‘If my mother were here she would dismiss you.’
The truth of what he’d said settled around all of them.Ifhis mother was here.
But she was not.
Mary was not unkind enough to say it. Michael was a child and he was lashing out. But she would speak truth to him, even if the edges of that truth were harsh.
‘Perhaps,’ she said softly. ‘ButIam here. And this is what I am asking you to do.’
Structure would help them. She was convinced of that. In the end, stability, and her proving that she would not be held hostage to their moods, would make them feel safe. It would.
The Duke saw the rotation of governesses as a failure on their part, he saw it as misbehaviour from his children, but what he wasn’t understanding was that it did not need to be punished, rather it needed to be proven ineffective. What the children needed was for the person caring for them to prove that they could not drive her away.
Their mother had gone away, and every person who had cared for them since had found their pain too much to bear. Their father did not come into the nursery, he had said that he spoke to them twice a day, and yet she had not seen him once.
Because of his own grief he avoided them, or maybe he always had, but the children had no one, and she would not be like that. She knew what it was to feel as if you could count on nothing. To wonder if those who were supposed to care for you would. She had also experienced the bitter truth of not receiving that care.
No, these children were not in danger of not having food. They were not in physical danger, but it did not mean they didn’t feel imperilled in their hearts.
And it made her ache for them.
‘We will begin to tidy now.’
