Once More, Miranda

by Jennifer Wilde

  “I doubt it, Douglas.”

  “I’m Dougie. All the servants call me Dougie. Master Dougie.”

  “I believe your name is Douglas. I’m not a servant, incidentally. I’m your governess.”

  “What the he—uh—what the heck is a governess?”

  “A governess is a very good friend who tells stories and teaches you all sorts of clever things and slaps you if you’re sassy. She teaches you to speak like a little gentleman instead of a young hooligan.”

  He peered up at me with his head cocked to one side, trying to decide if I was to be taken seriously. After a moment he frowned, shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

  “I guess you’ll do,” he said. “I was expectin’ someone really mean.”

  “I’ll do very nicely,” I replied. “Little gentlemen do not drop their final ‘g’s,’ by the way. They say expecting, not expectin’. I want to hear that final ‘g’ from now on.”

  “What’s a hooligan?”

  “A hooligan is someone who goes around beating people up and stealing their money and getting into all sorts of trouble.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “It isn’t, I assure you. Hooligans invariably end up in Newgate. The constables and watchmen chase them and catch them and lock them up. Newgate is a prison in London, a huge, horrible place where bad people are kept. Some of them have chains on their arms and legs.”

  “Really?” He was enthralled.

  “Yes, indeed. You wouldn’t want to end up there, I’m sure.”

  “I’d bust out,” he said. “Who are them constables and watchmen you mentioned?”

  “They’re—well, they’re not much better than hooligans themselves, but they have the authority to catch bad people and lock them up.”

  “You ever met one of ’em?”

  “One of them. No, I’ve never been in London, but I’ve read all about them. The headmistress at the school in Bath got all the London newspapers. She let me read them after she was finished.”

  “You’re pretty smart,” he observed.

  “I am indeed. I know lots of fascinating things. I’ll tell you more in the morning. Now I suggest you go to your room and go to bed.”

  “I got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t I just crawl in bed with you? I get kinda lonely, you see, and sometimes I even get scared when I wake up at night and everything’s dark. I wouldn’t be any trouble,” he continued. “I’d be real still and I promise not to kick or hog the covers.”

  His manner was extremely offhand, his voice quite casual, but I detected the longing nevertheless. The child was starved for attention and affection, that was plain to me. I vowed to give him both, but I had no intention of setting a precedent this first night.

  “I’m afraid that wouldn’t work,” I informed him. “You see, I do kick. I also snore, quite loudly. Your room is right next door to my sitting room, isn’t it? I believe there’s a connecting door. Why don’t we leave that door open and I’ll leave my bedroom-sitting room door open, and if you wake up in the night you can listen to me snore.”

  He wasn’t overjoyed about it, but he didn’t argue. I took him by the hand and led him through the sitting room and on into his own bedroom. He swaggered along beside me, disappointed but stoic. A candle was burning on the night table, the Flame casting flickering shadows over the walls. I heaved him up into my arms and swung him onto the bed and tucked him in. He looked up at me with serious gray eyes.

  “Are we really gonna have fun?” he asked.

  “Loads,” I promised.

  “I like you, Miss James.”

  “I like you, too.”

  I leaned down and gently rubbed my cheek against his, and then I blew out the candle and left the room, leaving the door wide open. Back in my bedroom I sighed and climbed between the crisp linen sheets that smelled faintly of verbena. I might have apprehensions about Lord Robert Mowrey, but I had none whatsoever about his nephew. The engaging young scamp had already stolen my heart.

  3

  I was given a free hand with douglas from the start, and the two of us got along beautifully. I was nursemaid-companion-teacher-friend, and I found that my experience teaching the younger students in Bath stood me in very good stead. I had learned how to inspire interest and stimulate curiosity and, most importantly, had learned to discipline with a firm but light touch that prompted obedience but never caused resentment. Doug’s conduct began to improve almost immediately, and within the week I had weeded from his speech most of the vulgarities and contractions that, while charming, were most unsuitable for a budding young aristocrat. Every time he said “ain’t” or “wudn’t” or “’em” or such, I refused to speak to him again until he corrected himself, and that was the worst punishment of all for the child who dearly loved conversation.

  The nursery was across the hall from our bedrooms—a long, sparsely furnished room flooded with sunlight from the tall windows that looked out over the woods, the sea a misty blue-gray haze visible beyond the treetops. In the cupboard I found paper and colors and scissors, and in the bookshelves there were dozens of books that had been used by generations of Mowreys. Doug and I spent hours at the worktable drawing figures and coloring them, he chatting all the while. We made a tiny theater out of cardboard and colored settings and recreated some of the more suitable plays of Shakespeare, moving the miniature figures we had made across the stage while I told the story of Oberon and Titania and the mischievous Puck. Doug was thoroughly enchanted and insisted we do the part with the donkey’s head over and over again.

  He was remarkably intelligent for a child his age. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t teach him his alphabet. Within days he was reeling off his ABC’s with jaunty aplomb, and before the first month had passed he could spell cat, dog, Douglas, Honora, Mowrey and tree, adding new words to his repertoire each day. He wasn’t nearly so adept with numbers. He could count to twenty without faltering and dimly understood that two plus two was four, but numbers bored him and he obstinately refused to give his attention to them. He much preferred to have me read to him or whirl the great globe of the world around and point out Holland and tell him about windmills and wooden shoes and tulips or show him the vast expanse of America and relate the tale of brave Captain John Smith and the Indian princess who had saved his life.

  We didn’t spend all our time in the nursery, however. The weather was frequently inclement, the wind roaring, rain lashing the windowpanes, but on fine days we would take long walks after we had finished our studies. Sometimes Cook would prepare a basket lunch for us, and Doug and I would lunch on the edge of the moors, the sky a great airy expanse above, gulls circling against the pale blue like scraps of paper tossed by the wind. The moors lay to the west, rugged and forbidding, covered with grayish brown grass and patches of treacherous black bog. They rose slowly to the hills where Roman legions once had their camps. The village was to the north, the clay pits and the squat, ugly factory with its roaring furnaces beyond, black plumes of smoke spiraling against the sky.

  I rarely saw Lord Robert Mowrey. He left early for the factory and spent most of the day there, driving his employees to produce even more pottery, at a faster pace. Once, as I was coming down the stairs to get a book from the library, I heard him reprimanding a footman in a dry, emotionless voice that was far more chilling than noisy anger would have been. On another occasion I heard a parlor maid crying her heart out in a broom closet because she had accidentally broken a vase and feared Lord Robert would dismiss her. He demanded total perfection from the servants, and all of them were terrified of him.

  All except Mrs. Rawson, of course. She blithely ignored his stern looks and clipped, icy comments and went merrily on her way, doing her job superbly and defying anyone to say she wudn’t a bloomin’ treasure. There were plenty who’d love to have her workin’ for ’em and u’d be happy to pay her more wages to boot. She couldn’t stand Parks, Lord Robert’s secretary, and she and Beresford had been feuding for over a decade, but Mrs.
Rawson had taken a fancy to me and liked nothing so much as settling down for a nice long gossip when Doug had been put to bed and both of us were free and she could “give my achin’ feet a rest and exercise my backside.”

  Much of her gossip was highly salacious, and I learned a great deal about the Mowreys.

  Lord Bobbie never did care much for the women, she confided. He was cold and indifferent to ’em even when he was a buddin’ youth. Most young gentlemen hereabouts, they topped a buxom wench or took a whore whenever the itch came upon ’em. Folks expected it, and there was scarcely a squire around who didn’t have half a dozen-a his bastards tendin’ the fields or pitchin’ hay. Not Lord Bobbie. No indeed. No wonder poor Lady Betty’d been so miserable. Who could blame her for seekin’ other men? Pretty, flighty young thing like her had to have attention from a man, and if she couldn’t get it from her husband, she was bound to go lookin’ elsewhere.

  “Lord Bobbie never did pay her no mind, and she tried to please him in the beginnin’, I’ll have to give her credit for that. She’d get herself all dressed up in a fancy new frock and have her hair all piled up in glossy waves and she’d laugh and chatter and try to amuse him and he’d give her that stern, disapproving look and then just ignore her. She felt she was an intruder, and in a sense she was. He didn’t have time for no one but his brother.”

  “It must have been dreadful for her,” I said.

  “It was, luv. Lady B. was frivolous and empty-headed, true, but she wudn’t bad. I knew she was runnin’ out to meet that horny young buck who was stayin’ with the Haddens at Hadden Court, sure I did, and I didn’t blame her, not after the way Lord Bobbie’d been treatin’ her. A woman has needs, too, luv. You’ll find that out one day, mark my words. You may be prim and proper and innocent, but there’s passion seethin’ beneath the surface. It just ain’t been tapped yet.”

  Mrs. Rawson patted her steel gray ringlets and took a sip of port.

  “Lord Bobbie didn’t shed a tear when the fever carried her off,” she continued. “She’d been out to meet that buck—she’d sneak out of the house and meet him on the moors—and one night she got caught in a storm, got drenched to the skin, came in lookin’ like a drowned cat. The fever came on almost immediately. The poor thing got worse and worse, coughin’ and coughin’, her skin on fire—”

  The housekeeper shook her head, a pensive look in her eyes, and then she sighed heavily and finished her port.

  “Lord Bobbie never visited the sick room, never once, and folks didn’t blame him. Folks said she got exactly what she deserved—everyone knew she was carryin’ on, you can’t keep nothin’ secret in these parts. What you sow you’re gonna reap, they said, and they sympathized with Lord B. There ain’t much compassion in this world-a ours, luv. Folks’re eager to blame. Few of ’em ever try to understand.”

  Mrs. Rawson might not approve of Lord Robert, but she plainly worshiped his younger brother. Master Jeffrey wudn’t at all like Lord B. They were as different as night and day. He’d always been quiet and gentle, and he grew even more gentle after Lady Agatha passed on. There was this air of sadness about him that women found irresistible, and there wudn’t an unmarried girl-a his own class who hadn’t set her cap for him after he was widowed. They all wanted to console him, and no wonder. With those sad blue eyes and those delicate features and that manly physique he was like a storybook prince. His soft voice and beautiful manners made him even more appealing.

  “All the women fancy him, and I ain’t sayin’ he hadn’t let one or two of ’em comfort him. A man has to have an occasional piece, they get edgy without it, but he don’t tomcat around. There’s lots-a lasses who wish he would. I was in The Red Lion one evenin’ and someone mentioned Master Jeffrey and that brazen Maggie who works there said she’d pay him for a roll in the hay.”

  Mrs. Rawson spoke of such matters with bawdy relish. Three times married and three times widowed, she had had her share of menfolk in the hay and considered herself an authority. I might not think it, but there were some who still found her appetizin’, that Jim Randall the blacksmith for one. He said she was old enough to know what it was all about and plump enough to make it comfortable, and he wudn’t half bad himself, strong as an ox. She whipped up her skirt to show me the red silk petticoat he’d bought for her, at the county fair, proudly displaying its gaudy splendor. That man was mad for her, couldn’t get enough, and she didn’t mind sayin’ he was about the best she’d had.

  “And believe me, luv, I’ve had more’n my share.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Her salty tongue and earthy delight in things of the flesh didn’t shock me at all. I was reminded of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a lady with whom she had much in common.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “gettin’ back to Master Jeffrey, he should be home any day now, and high time, too. All this travelin’ he’s been doin’, it ain’t good for him, couldn’t be.”

  “Doug misses his father dreadfully.”

  “Sure he does. We all do. It’s time for him to settle down and put-his grief behind him, time for him to start thinkin’-a his son, thinkin’-a the future.”

  “Do you think he’ll marry again?” I asked.

  Mrs. Rawson nodded. “Don’t imagine he’ll waste much time about it, either. Master Jeffrey has a deep need inside him. He’ll marry all right, soon, too, and then he’ll take his wife and young Dougie and start a new life somewhere else.”

  “I don’t imagine his brother would be too happy about that,” I observed.

  “He wouldn’t like it at all,” Mrs. Rawson agreed, “but there ain’t much he could do about it. Mowrey House ain’t been a happy place for Master Jeffrey—that’s one-a the reasons he’s stayed away so much. He broke the tie to his brother a long time ago—only Lord Bobbie don’t know it yet.”

  I thought about all these things as she continued to chatter, and Mowrey House suddenly seemed a dark, brooding place full of tragedy and secret passions. Lady Betty and her desperate adulteries. Lord Robert and his strange, unhealthy obsession with his brother. Jeffrey Mowrey and his terrible grief. Had anyone ever been happy here? It was as though the house itself cast some ominous spell over those who dwelled within these walls. Nonsense, I told myself. Nonsense. You’re imagining things. Besides … even if it were so, I was merely a governess here, still on trial, and it couldn’t possibly affect me one way or another.

  I was quite wrong about that, as I was to discover all too soon.

  Two days later Douglas and I were returning from a walk along the cliffs, and both of us were in a lighthearted, elated mood. We had tossed bread crumbs to the gulls and watched the waves crashing majestically against the jagged rocks far below, and we had seen a ship on the horizon, a tiny white and brown speck against the violet gray haze. We tramped noisily through the stretch of woods and began to race over the lawns toward the house. Hair flew about my head in a mass of auburn curls that caught the sunlight, and the skirt of my sprigged blue muslin billowed up over ruffled white petticoats. We had already passed the rickety trellises when I spotted Lord Robert standing beside the door to the back hall.

  I stopped, clutching a hand to my heart. Douglas darted past me and ran all the faster, yelling like one of the red Indians I had told him about. He didn’t see his uncle. He didn’t slow down as he neared the house. He yelled lustily and looked over his shoulder to see if I was catching up and collided forcefully against his uncle’s legs. Lord Robert caught him by the shoulders and said something with a grim expression on his face, but I was too far away to catch the words. I continued toward the house in a more demure manner, my heart pounding with every step.

  “I beat-ja! I beat-ja!” Douglas taunted.

  “Go up to the nursery, Douglas,” Lord Robert ordered. “I want to speak with Miss James.”

  “Yes, sir!” the child exclaimed. “See you later, Honora!”

  I approached slowly, trying hard to conceal the nervous apprehension welling up inside, trying hard to look cool and
composed and unflurried. He was going to discharge me. He was going to tell me my work hadn’t been satisfactory. A suitable governess wouldn’t race across the lawns with skirts billowing, hair flying, nor would she encourage familiarity with her charge. She would be strict and severe and unsmiling. She would wear drab browns and grays and keep her hair in a tight bun and maintain a lemon-sour expression as she drummed dry knowledge into recalcitrant heads. I felt painfully young and extremely vulnerable as I stopped a few feet away from him, yet I managed to hold my chin high.

  He didn’t speak. He eyed me with open disapproval, and I was acutely aware of my dress. Although the thin muslin was one of my best, it was three years old and quite snug at the waist. The short, puffed sleeves dropped off the shoulder, and while the bodice had been modest enough when the dress was new, I had grown in the past three years and there was now a distinct cleavage. I could feel a blush tinting my cheeks as he continued to examine me, and I was sure they were as pink as the tiny flowers that sprigged the pale blue muslin.

  “You wished to speak to me?” My voice was surprisingly level.

  He nodded, still maintaining that icy silence. His brown black eyes were so dark they made his face seem even more pale. It was so harsh a face—nose sharp, cheeks lean and pitted, the mouth a thin slash. Although he had been out all day, his high black boots hadn’t a speck of dust. The close-fitting black breeches and black coat accentuated his thin, bony frame and unusual height, bringing a beanpole to mind. Chilly, remote, superior—he seemed bloodless, and I couldn’t imagine him smiling, couldn’t imagine him feeling any of the warmer human emotions.

  “Do you fear I’m going to admonish you?” he inquired dryly.

  “I see no reason why you should.”

  “No?”

  “None whatsoever. Children will run and yell, Lord Robert. It’s their nature.”

  “You seem to encourage it.”

  “It does your nephew good to romp and be high spirited after he’s been shut up in the nursery for hours on end.”