by Emily Larkin
Linwood hadn’t expected that. He blinked, looking quite taken aback.
“It will be free,” Pip said, persisting in the face of that blank-faced surprise. “We’ll advertise—posters and flyers—but we’re not expecting many students. Servants only get one half day off a month, after all. But even if we only have a handful of women in each class—even if there’s only one—it will be worth it, because it’s important that they know how to defend themselves.”
Linwood didn’t cringe at the word “advertise,” or at “posters and flyers,” nor did he try to interrupt her. He listened until she’d finished, and then he inclined his head in one of those courteous nods and said, “Yes, it is important.”
Pip studied his face. He appeared to be sincere.
“There might be negative attention,” she told him. “Criticism. People who think it’s improper and unseemly, or even scandalous.”
“I have no doubt you’ll ruffle a few feathers,” the duke said. “But I hope you won’t let that stop you.”
“We won’t,” Pip assured him.
Linwood smiled. “An unusual venture, but as you say, an important one. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to contribute. Perhaps I could pay for the advertising?”
Pip was so astonished that she said, “What?” On the heels of that injudicious utterance came a hot rush of blood to her cheeks, because saying What? to a duke wasn’t just gauche, it was rude. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace.”
Fortunately, Linwood didn’t appear to be offended. “My grandsons’ lessons saved you from a grievous assault, Miss Toogood. If similar lessons can save even one other person from something similar, your school will be worth it.”
Pip might not be able to hear lies, but she could hear that the duke was telling the truth. Her hot blush faded. “It will be worth it,” she said. “Thank you.”
Linwood smiled at her and offered his teacup to be refilled.
Pip poured. This time her fingers didn’t tremble.
They talked of other things for the next half hour. When at last she and Octavius rose to leave, the duke stood, too, and clasped his grandson’s hand and said, “You’ve matured a lot in the last few months, my boy.”
“Only since meeting Miss Toogood,” Octavius said. He met her eyes and smiled.
The duke smiled, too. “Then it’s a happy circumstance that you met.”
I’m only a governess, Pip wanted to say. But Linwood knew that, and he truly didn’t seem to care.
The duke released his grandson’s hand. “It’s been a pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Toogood. I’m delighted you’re going to marry my grandson.”
Pip made him a deeply respectful curtsy. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
The duke shook his head. “You’re part of the family, now. Call me Linwood if you must, but . . .” His smile became a little wistful. “I should prefer it if you called me Grandfather.”
“Thank you,” Pip said, and then she added, a little shyly, “I would very much like it if you called me Pippa.”
Not Philippa, not Pip, but the name her father had called her: Pippa.
“It will be my pleasure,” Linwood said. His smile wasn’t wistful anymore; it was warm and friendly. The sort of smile you gave someone you liked.
“Dinner will be served at six,” he told them. “Go for a walk the pair of you, get some fresh air.”
“Yes, sir.” Octavius captured Pip’s hand and led her from the sitting room.
Pip snatched one last glimpse of the duke before the door swung shut. What an astonishing old man. He wasn’t at all what she’d thought a duke would be like. She understood why Octavius loved him so much. After an hour in his company, she loved him, too.
Octavius tugged her hand eagerly. “Come on,” he said. “I can’t wait to show you the gardens. There’s a maze, you know, and two follies.”
They clattered down a spiral staircase and spilled out into a long corridor. Octavius picked up his pace, half running, pulling her along with him. Pip caught up her skirts in her free hand. Relief bubbled up inside her. She hadn’t realized until now just how anxious she’d been about meeting the duke, how afraid she’d been that he wouldn’t approve of her. There was still the duchess to meet, and Octavius’s parents and his brother, his uncles and aunts, his other cousins, but the most daunting introduction was over.
Linwood didn’t see her as an unwanted interloper. He liked her. He wanted her to call him Grandfather.
Octavius flung open a side door and suddenly they were outside on a sunny terrace. “What would you like to see?”
“Everything!” Pip said.
Chapter Forty
Lord Octavius showed her the rose garden and the water garden, the maze, the Chinese Folly with its tiers of funny peaked roofs, and then he took her to the bluebell dell. The feeling that she’d stepped into an enchanted England grew stronger. “My goodness,” Pip said, with a laugh. “I feel as if I’m inside a picture book. It’s too idyllic to be true!”
She wondered what words the Reverend Gilbert White would have used to describe this woodland dell—the slender birches with their upraised branches, the trembling green canopy of leaves, the dappled light and shade, the drifts of blue flowers.
They wandered hand in hand through the trees, climbed a gentle rise, and came upon another folly, one Octavius called the Bird’s Nest. It wasn’t as fanciful as the Chinese Folly, just a tall stone tower with a winding staircase inside.
The room at the top was circular and had windows all the way around. Pip lost what little breath she had. Her Oh was silent. She forgot that she was an adult and ran from window to window, gazing out in wonder.
“What do you think?” Octavius asked, after she’d made two complete circuits.
“I love it!” The folly had been aptly named. It felt as if they were perched in a bird’s nest, high among the treetops.
Pip made another circuit and halted where she could see Linwood Castle in all its whimsical, welcoming glory.
Octavius stepped close behind her. His hands came to rest lightly at her waist. Pip tipped her head back against his shoulder. How could this possibly be her life? The bluebell dell and this folly, the castle, the duke, and most of all, Octavius.
Two weeks ago she’d been a governess. A very ordinary governess with little money and no family.
Now her life wasn’t at all ordinary. She was about to be married. She had a family.
And what a husband. What a family.
Pip wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She chose to laugh, and to turn around and put her arms around Octavius’s neck and kiss him exuberantly.
He kissed her exuberantly back. His hands settled at her waist again, drawing her closer.
They kissed and laughed and kissed again, and when they were breathless they sank down on a daybed piled high with plush cushions and the kissing became slower and more exploratory. Octavius kissed her fingertips; Pip kissed his jaw. Octavius kissed his way up her wrist; Pip kissed his ear—and then she hesitated. “Octavius? Am I meant to bite your ears?”
Octavius stopped exploring her wrist. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your cousin said that women bite his ears. Is that what you want me to do?”
Octavius laughed. She felt his body shake with amusement. “I beg your pardon,” he managed to choke out. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just . . .” He laughed again, and then sobered and said, “You’re not meant to do anything you don’t want to, Pip. Only what feels good.”
“Biting?” Pip said, with a dubious frown. She didn’t think she wanted to bite anyone, or be bitten.
“It can feel good. It depends how it’s done.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and nipped one of her fingertips very lightly. It sparked a delicious little shiver, a tingling scintilla of sensation. He nipped a second fingertip and then a third, sparking more scintillas of delight—and then he leaned up and bit her earlobe. The sensation that elicited was more starburst than spark. Pip heard herse
lf gasp. Heat flushed her skin.
“Well?” Octavius asked.
“It does feel good,” Pip admitted, a little breathlessly.
He grinned. His eyes were alight with amusement—and something else that she recognized as passion.
She sank back into his embrace, into his kisses and caresses, and yes, his bites. He kissed her throat, then gently nipped where he’d kissed, soothed the faint sting away with his tongue, kissed again. Pip tried to reciprocate, but men’s clothing was much more obstructive than women’s. His neckcloth was in the way.
“May I take this off?” she asked, touching those crumpled folds of muslin.
“What?” he said, and captured her mouth again.
Pip forgot her question. Quite a few minutes passed. She was hot and disheveled and short of breath by the time Octavius released her.
“We have to stop,” he said. “Or we’re going to end up having our wedding night right here.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” she confessed.
They stared at each other for a long and breathless moment. Octavius reached for her and kissed her again, then drew back. “Much as I’d like to have our wedding night now—much as I want to—we’d be late for dinner.”
The devil fly away with dinner, Pip wanted to say. Common sense and desire wrestled with one another for several seconds, before common sense won. She knew as well as he did that they couldn’t be late for dinner. It would be shockingly disrespectful to his grandparents.
Pip sighed, and sat back.
Octavius sighed, too, and smiled at her ruefully. His face was flushed, his hair mussed, his lips rosy and swollen, his neckcloth in disarray. He looked quite debauched.
No doubt she looked equally debauched.
Pip reluctantly climbed off the daybed. She twitched at her neckline, smoothing the fabric. Were all those little nibbles he’d taken up and down her throat visible? She crossed to the nearest window and examined her reflection. She couldn’t see any marks at her throat, but she could see that her hair needed rescuing.
Pip plucked out her hairpins and redid her chignon.
She thought her reflection looked a little neater, but it was difficult to tell; her eyes kept focusing on the view—the treetops, the parkland, the hills and valleys beyond.
Twenty miles to the south lay Royal Wootton Bassett, where Newingham had his estate and where they’d stayed last night—and that was something she must do: find Fanny and Edie a new governess.
She’d make a start on that tomorrow.
Pip wandered a few windows further, until she was looking east. She imagined watching the sun rise over that horizon.
Octavius came up beside her. He bumped their shoulders together companionably. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m wishing I could see the dawn from these windows.”
“You’d like to watch from here?”
“I’d love to,” Pip said. At that moment, movement caught her eye. A carriage was wending its way across the parkland. “Is that your grandmother?”
Octavius narrowed his eyes in a squint. “I think it’s my parents’ carriage.” He caught her hand and pulled her towards the stairs. “I can’t wait for you to meet them.”
Chapter Forty-One
Pip met a marquis and a marchioness later that afternoon and a duchess that evening, and the next day she met an earl, two lords and their wives, a Miss Pryor, two Mr. Pryors, and a duke’s illegitimate son. All the men had the Pryor eyes and nose, which made it extremely confusing. Pip drew a family tree and jotted down notes to help her distinguish one man from another.
Nonus, the youngest son of Lord Tertius Pryor, was the most conspicuous of the Pryor cousins. He reminded her of nothing so much as a great overgrown puppy. Or perhaps an elephant.
He wasn’t a bully, but he was a prankster. A prankster who could become invisible. Fortunately, he was so loud that all his attempts to creep up on his family failed.
“We can hear you,” his father said, not even looking up from his newspaper as Nonus crept loudly into the library.
“We can hear you,” his aunts chorused as he crept equally loudly into the fernery.
“We can hear you,” three of his cousins informed him as he crept even more loudly into the drawing room before dinner.
He looked so crestfallen each time that Pip was hard pressed not to laugh. On the morning of her wedding, when Nonus had tried unsuccessfully to creep into the breakfast parlor yet again, Pip took pity on him. “You need to study the art of moving,” she told him over her plate of eggs. “A year’s worth of fencing lessons ought to do the trick.”
“Don’t help him!” Decimus Pryor said, aghast, while his sister, Phoebe, giggled into her teacup.
“Wouldn’t do any good,” Lord Secundus Pryor said, buttering his toast. “All the fencing lessons in the world couldn’t stop my nephew being a noisy clodhopper.” And then he winked at Pip.
“They might,” Nonus said a little defensively, piling his own plate high with food.
Octavius shook his head. So did most of his cousins.
“They might,” Nonus said again, even more defensively. He put his plate down on the table with a thump, pulled out his chair with a thump, sat down with a thump.
“Not possible,” his brother, the exceedingly beautiful Sextus Pryor, said, refilling his cup of tea.
“It might be!”
Even the ever-courteous marquis and his equally courteous eldest son, Quintus, were laughing at Nonus now. There was no cruelty in that laughter, it was friendly and familial, but even so, Pip felt a little sorry for him. She’d always favored the underdog, and in this moment Nonus Pryor was an underdog. A very large, very loud underdog.
After breakfast, before they headed their various ways, she plucked at his sleeve, drawing his attention. “Fencing lessons would help. You need to learn to think when you move.”
“I’ve already had lessons. I know how to fence.”
“But can you do it well?”
He pulled a rather gruesome face. Pip took that to be a no. “You need lessons in the art of moving,” she told him firmly. “Fencing and dancing and deportment. You need to learn to be aware of what your body’s doing.”
“Dancing and deportment?” Nonus said, in a horrified voice.
“Yes,” Pip said. “Fencing, dancing, and deportment. And by the end of twelve months you’ll be able to walk quietly.”
“You think so?” he said, dubiously.
“I know so,” Pip said, and then, as Nonus still looked unconvinced, she said coaxingly, “Go on, give it a try. One year of lessons. What harm can it do? I’m sure you’ll be able to creep up on them by the end of it.”
Mischief suddenly lit his face. “I wish I could!”
“Shall we make it a wager?” Pip said, holding out her hand for him to shake. “One year of lessons—fencing, dancing, and deportment—and by the end of it I bet you’ll be able to creep up on anyone.”
“What’s the forfeit?” Nonus said. “I know! Whoever loses has to walk backwards for an entire day.”
“Whoever loses has to walk backwards for one hour,” Pip said.
“That’s no fun!” Nonus protested.
“Take it or leave it,” she said, still holding out her hand.
Nonus thought about it for several seconds, and then said, “All right.” He clasped her hand in his giant paw and gave it a hearty shake. “One year of lessons. I’ll show ’em!”
He released her hand, nodded to her, and strode off down the corridor with a thunderous clomp, clomp, clomp of his very large feet.
Pip watched him go . . . and felt a faint qualm of misgiving. If Nonus Pryor did learn how to move silently, what mayhem would he cause? But then a certain someone slipped an arm around her waist and pressed a kiss to her temple.
Pip stopped thinking about invisible pranksters and started thinking about her upcoming nuptials instead.
Three hours later, in the rose garden, Pip and Lord Octavius w
ere married by special license. The ceremony was small and informal, family members only, but it didn’t matter that Pip had no family of her own because these people already felt like family.
Following the wedding came a champagne luncheon, after which the younger members of the party headed outside for a merry game of blind man’s bluff and an even merrier game of hide-and-seek.
Pip discovered that the kitchen garden was an excellent place in which to hide, and that the water garden was not. She discovered how impossible it was to be quiet when one was overcome with the giggles. And she discovered how much she liked being kissed by her husband in the Chinese Folly and in the maze and under various wisteria-covered bowers.
Later that evening, after a long and convivial dinner with her new family, Pip learned a great many more things.
The first thing she learned was that naked men looked very naked. More naked than naked women looked. Octavius was slightly dumbfounded when she uttered this observation aloud. “No, we don’t.”
“Men wear so many clothes,” Pip said. “One never gets to see their throats or arms or ankles.” Unless the man in question was one’s husband and he was standing in one’s bedroom looking exceptionally naked.
Octavius’s throat and arms and ankles, now that they were revealed, were very fine. He had the sort of body that sculptors and painters prized. Pip couldn’t decide which part of him she liked looking at the most. His shoulders? Those muscular thighs?
She knew which part disconcerted her the most: his groin, where that strange, fascinating, and slightly alarming appendage was located.
In that moment, Pip learned that one could simultaneously be eager and afraid, and that one’s heart could beat fast in anticipation while at the same time beating fast with nervousness.
The next thing she learned was that when Octavius took her face in his hands and kissed her, tenderly and reverently, her fear faded and the nervousness melted away.