by Abby Ayles
So it was that he returned late from his office, having stayed to get the work done with a secretary in London who could do the job more admirably.
After all, it was the man’s position within the company to take on such work. How Edmund had ever countenanced giving such tasks to another was beyond him.
When he approached the house in his carriage, everyone was asleep. He had felt no worry at leaving Christopher alone in the house now that he knew the deal had been made. It was as if he no longer feared what mischief the boy could get up to; as if the taking of Miss Warrick’s hand had been the thing to worry about all along.
So, what did it matter now if he were left unsupervised?
But Edmund saw, with not a little consternation and chagrin, that the light of the candle was burning for him in the schoolroom, as always.
This was to be it, then. Now was his moment in which he must make matters clear, and break the long tradition they had held between them.
It was not right for Christopher’s intended wife to be waiting on the arrival of another man, servant or no servant.
He strode into the house and into his study, placing some papers on his desk and tidying them into piles. He knew he would not have long to wait, and so he busied himself, attempting to ignore the way his heart fluttered inside his chest with trepidation.
“My lord?” Miss Warrick asked, from the doorway, and he found all of a sudden that he could not turn to face her.
“Your services are not needed, Miss Warrick,” Edmund said, stacking away a group of letters that he had already repositioned twice.
“Oh, I see,” Miss Warrick said, with some surprise.
There was a moment of hesitation before she continued.
“I shall bid you goodnight then, my lord, and return to assist you tomorrow.”
“No,” Edmund said quickly, straightening up. “Not tomorrow, neither. What I intend to say, Miss Warrick, is that your services are not required at all. I have no need of a secretary. I have enlisted the time of the man at the office whose task it should have been all along. My papers will be done in London from now on.”
Edmund waited, but he did not hear her steps retreating or the door closing behind her.
At last, he turned, facing her as he had not wished to do.
“Is there anything else, Miss Warrick?” he asked, employing a haughty tone designed to remind her that it was he who would decide when there was something more to add. It was not her place to linger after having been dismissed.
“N-no,” Miss Warrick stuttered.
Her face was pale, and a picture of dismay.
“Forgive me, my lord. I… I just wish to know if I have displeased you in any way.”
“I have explained to you already,” Edmund said, on the verge of losing his patience.
Why couldn’t she see that he needed her out of his sight, and immediately? He could hardly bear to look at her.
“The work was never yours to do. You ought to focus on your duties as governess, while they are yours to hold. It should never have been any other way. I am simply returning things to their rightful state.”
Miss Warrick swallowed, hard, and looked down at the floor. Edmund saw water gathering in her eyes, and did his best not to allow the same thing to happen to his own.
“I am deeply sorry, my lord, if I have caused you any inconvenience,” she managed, before dipping her head in an approximation of a curtsey and hurrying away.
The swishing of her skirts followed her down the corridor as her footsteps retreated, and Edmund found himself sagging against his desk for support.
It was a hard thing that he had done, and he had no wish to do it. Still, it had to be that way now that everything was to change.
He felt even a little surprised that Miss Warrick had reacted so strongly – after all, she must know that things would change if she were to become Christopher’s wife.
Still, there again, she did not know that Edmund knew; and in circles he went, pushing it around in his head.
Edmund retired to his chamber almost immediately, having no wish to stay in that room any longer.
Once there, he did something that he had never in fact had cause to do in his whole life: he reached for an ancient, half-rusted key and locked his chamber door.
It was infinitely easier than locking his heart or his thoughts, but he had to start somewhere.
It had been not half an hour of lying awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness, before he heard her stealthy footsteps creeping along the corridor.
She was quiet, but he had learned to listen for her, and there was a tell-tale creak on a floorboard just down the hall that always signalled her presence.
Edmund’s heartbeat quickened, beating rapidly in his chest as she approached the door.
There was the lightest, smallest noise as she knocked. One would have to be wide awake as he was to detect it. Had he been asleep, it would have been lost in the quiet of the night, as was her intention.
Edmund waited. If she took gentle hold of the doorknob, he knew there would be a tiny squeak of complaint from the metal as she would turn it around. If she tried to open the door, it would stick with a clang, the lock hitting the inside of its cage on the doorframe.
He was uncertain what he wanted her to do. He could not determine his own treacherous heart. But she did nothing.
Edmund lay staring at the door, even though all was dark and he could see nothing. Even the hallway was dark, without candle flame, and he could not make out so much as her shadow under the door. But he knew she was there.
Finally, though Edmund could barely hear it over the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, the softest whisper permeated the door.
“I am sorry…”
It could have been the lament of a ghost, a whisper there and then gone, words scattered on the floorboards like ashes, a dream that, in the morning, Edmund would be unsure if it had been real.
Then she must have stepped away, and Edmund heard the creak of a floorboard down the hall, and knew that she was gone.
He did not sleep for many hours that night, and when he did, it was only to be tormented with dreams of his brother’s wedding.
***
Miss Warrick avoided Edmund’s presence, it seemed, for a long while.
Several weeks passed by and she did not appear in the sitting room, as she had sometimes been invited to do of an evening before they began writing letters together. Nor did she come by his study when he was home, even to talk about the children.
Indeed, whole days went by when he did not so much as see her in passing by accident.
Christopher lingered, choosing to spend his whole leave at home for once, but he still did not share his good news.
Edmund grew more enraged with each passing day. How dare he keep something so important a secret from his own brother? The man who, by rights, controlled any fortune he did not make for himself?
It was tantamount to failing to tell a father. For less than that, many a man had been disowned.
“My lord.”
Edmund started at the interruption, turning to see Miss Warrick standing at his door. It was a Saturday, and he had spent the day at home, though there was still, as always, some correspondence to be done.
He had been whiling away the time watching Christopher play catch with Samuel outside the window, silently seething. His anger was almost at a boiling point by now, and he was barely keeping it under control.
It was with some small guilt, therefore, that he turned to face Miss Warrick at last – not to mention a healthy dash of discomfort.
“Miss Warrick,” Edmund said, attempting to pretend as though he had been looking at nothing in particular.
He returned to stand by his desk and started shuffling through some papers. “Nothing is the matter with the children, I hope?”
“No, my lord,” she said, hesitantly, in a voice so small and weak that he barely caught it at first.
Edmund
leafed through a few more sheets, frowning at them as if they held information of the utmost importance.
Miss Warrick did not speak again, and he was forced to look up at her.
“Well?” he asked. “What is it that brings you to interrupt my work, Miss Warrick?”
“Forgive me, my lord,” Miss Warrick said, her face dropping as she turned immediately to go. “I did not think to inconvenience you. I will leave you in peace.”
Edmund felt his heart drop at the same rate as her departure, and felt a compulsion to call out.
He was being too cruel, perhaps. She had done nothing wrong – in her position, any woman would have been forced to accept Christopher’s proposal. It was her only hope at a comfortable life, one not spent serving others.
“Wait,” Edmund said, unsure of whether he stopped her from compassion or from longing for her company. “Turn back. What is troubling you, Miss Warrick?”
She faced him again, though the hesitation had not left her. She seemed unsure of what to do with her hands, tangling them around a length of blue ribbon over and over again.
“It is just,” Miss Warrick began, and then her face crumpled in a manner which was most alarming.
Edmund laid his papers down on the desk immediately, though he was held back from rushing to her side. She was, after all, his brother’s woman.
“Miss Warrick?” he prompted, fighting to keep his growing concern from his voice.
“It is just,” she rallied with some effort. “That I feel I must have failed you in some way. I tried my hardest to serve you well as a secretary, my lord. Please, tell me my fault that I may correct it. I wish to be of use for as long as I may.”
Edmund was almost choked, seeing the emotion writ upon her face.
So, for all this time she had imagined him angry at some supposed failure in her deeds as a secretary. How irksome it was to see that she had not the slightest inclination of how she had wounded him, how her secret had festered between them.
A rage boiled up in Edmund again, the rage he had so far reserved for Christopher. Now it was full to spilling over, and there was no preventing it.
“There was never any problem with your letter-writing skills, Miss Warrick,” Edmund said icily, keeping his back straight and his gaze firm.
“Though you are but an uneducated woman, you have matched any clerk or secretary from my firm. No, it was not that which caused me to force you from my aid. It was your emotions towards my brother that sealed your fate. Surely you see that you cannot work for me any longer – in any capacity.”
Edmund let his words hit their mark, seeing the look of shock upon her face, and he snatched up his riding cloak from where it lay over the back of his chair.
He pushed past her then, his boots ringing smartly on the floor as he stormed away, as far from her as he could manage.
At that moment he was no longer thinking logically, or trying to remain calm. Instead, all he thought of was the need to remove himself from the vicinity of his brother and the vixen who had ensnared him.
Ensnared both of them, as it happened.
Edmund strode to the stables before he really even knew that was where he was going, sweeping his cloak onto his shoulders as he went. He shouted an order to Jenkins to gather him some victuals as he passed by the old man, who was skulking about in the corridor as usual.
“Saddle my stallion,” Edmund barked to the coach driver, who served also as stable hand when they were not in motion.
He was incensed by the delay, pulling on soft riding gloves and changing his boots with the impatience of a man who would prefer to have left hours ago. He almost leapt onto the horse before the driver was done, causing the man to cry out in alarm and check the girth one more time.
Jenkins hurried out of the house with a bundle in his arms, which he quickly transferred to the saddlebags of the prancing stallion.
The steed sensed his master’s impatience to be off and would not suffer to be held in check.
With all things done, Edmund shouted a warning to his servants to stand clear, and gave the stallion his head.
They charged out of the yard and into the countryside, the wind streaming over them as they fled the house. Edmund did not even give a backward glance to his home, for he feared that if he did, he would see them looking back at him.
Chapter 32
Joanna was in shock.
It had taken her a long moment even to digest Edmund’s words, and then the first of them to hit home was the understanding that he was dismissing her from her post as governess.
This realisation had her sinking to her knees. Small mercy it was that he had already left the room, for she would have been most ashamed for him to witness how his words laid her low.
To be without the children! To leave this place, which had become such a comfortable and natural home, behind!
But most of all – to be without him – to be away from her Lord Edmund…
Joanna stayed there for a time, unmoving except for the tears beginning to leak from her eyes, and it was only hoofbeats outside the window that made her start and rise.
She rushed to the casement, only to see Edmund riding away on his stallion at great speed. His riding cloak flared out behind him on the wind, and he rode on despite the dark, cloudy skies that gathered above him.
Joanna felt a moment of true despair to imagine him caught in a storm, alone, and all because of her own doing.
But, wait: what was it that he had meant? He had spoken of her emotions towards his brother – surely he intended her to understand he was speaking of Christopher, not of Samuel.
If he feared she had grown too close to the children, regarding them as her own, then he should have mentioned Amy at the least.
So, Christopher then – and what could he mean?
There was the proposal, of course. It was bound to appear straight in her mind, the most recent and most startling display of any kind of emotion between them.
True, also, that she had been avoiding Christopher since then. Could it be that Edmund thought she could no longer continue, having dishonoured Christopher by so flatly turning him down?
But, no; that was not the story that Christopher would tell, she was sure of it. There was no reason for him to admit his defeat. She had vowed never to reveal it, and it would only appear as shame for him. So, then, what?
“Miss Warrick?” a shy voice came from the corridor.
“Miss Amy,” Joanna said, refusing to turn around so that the child would not see the tears on her face as she hurriedly tried to wipe them away.
“Why are you in Edmund’s room?” Amy asked, with the sly curiosity that only the young possess.
“I was just talking with him,” Joanna explained hastily, attempting to compose herself. “I shall be leaving momentarily.”
“Why did he go out riding?” Amy wondered. “It’s a storm.”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said, a little more flatly than she had intended.
She turned then, trying to soften her words with a smile that could not quite reach any part of her face but her lips. “I don’t think he wanted to see me anymore.”
“Why not?” Amy asked, swinging her weight from the doorknob and making the door rock to and fro.
Joanna hesitated, trying to find some way to explain this. She had not expected to be confronted by one of the children so soon, but she felt she had to come clean.
They must know that she was leaving them. It would have been a betrayal to leave without saying goodbye.
“Is it ‘cause of Christopher?” Amy asked, cutting off Joanna’s need to explain in that easy way that came from total innocence.
“What do you know about the Lieutenant?” Joanna asked carefully, thinking that perhaps Amy knew more than she was letting on.
“Me and Edmund are sad,” Amy said, shrugging. “But I decided it’s okay if you’re to be my sister.”
“Why should I become your sister?” Joanna asked, coming closer to Am
y now and peering down into her face.
“When you marry Christopher,” Amy said simply, and let go of the doorknob. “I’m going to find Mary and make her play.”
“Alright, sweet,” Joanna said distantly, watching her run off down the corridor.
So, this was the crux of it.
Somehow, from some corner, Edmund had received the idea that Joanna was to marry Christopher after all.