Page 8 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
He gritted his teeth.
‘We shall make our way upstairs. Elizabeth and Michael are under the care of the housekeeper at the moment. Mrs Brown will be able to give you all of the information that you may need regarding their routines, their likes and dislikes.’
‘Do you not know these things?’
He did. He looked at her. ‘Of course not.’
He said it to wrangle her, and he did not know why he wished to do so. Perhaps because she had surprised him. And he did not like being surprised.
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘How was the household run that you were employed at previously?’
‘I never spoke to the Earl.’
‘And yet you expect that I should be more deeply involved?’
The implication, of course, being that he was infinitely more important than an earl.
‘The Earl had a wife.’
‘As did I until four months ago.’
The change was jarring.
The children...
Everything with Jane had been difficult in the end anyway, and the children had been coming apart like stuffed toys with loose threads even before her death. Because they had known. Of course they had. The way things were changing. Shifting. How indeterminable things had come between their parents.
He did his best as a father.
He tried to give them guidance without ever causing harm. His own father had been a tyrant whose every mood had overflowed and flooded everything around him. West believed in boundaries. Gulfs. Trenches that kept all of his inclinations flowing in their appropriate streams.
He loved his children. It was the reason he observed formality with them. Guidance without corporal punishment. Respect without intimidation. Love, he imagined, in the same way God loved His children.
Distant.
He kept his visits confined to mornings and evenings, and always within a set timeframe.
But this was testing him. Beyond anything he had ever endured before. It was harder and harder to maintain those visits, and at the same time harder to maintain his distance as their behaviour shifted to intolerable.
The home was palatial, most of it finely upheld details from the early sixteen-hundreds, when his family had first constructed the estate. This portion of the house, which contained the children, and had also been where Jane’s suite of rooms was housed, had been updated. He did not like it. But it had been his late wife’s wishes to have some of her tastes considered in the decorating of the house.
Anger burned in his stomach.
Rage.
It would be time to go out and ride his horse in the countryside. Perhaps do a bit of target practice. Archery or guns, he was not particular. It may even be time to go into London and take his place in the ring at the boxing club he enjoyed.
The thought pushed against the back of his mind.
There were other pleasures he might make use of in London.
Things he had gone without for some time, and which may be a necessary release.
No.
He was not considering that, and most especially not while standing next to Miss Smith.
