Governess Gone Rogue
Page 29
But then, she’d never expected that. She’d known from the start that her place in Jamie’s world was temporary. Posing as a man, she’d hoped to keep her past away long enough to earn the money to make a fresh start in America. That was as far as she’d allowed her expectations to go.
When Jamie had uncovered the truth that she was a woman, she’d let herself believe nothing had changed, that her plan was still viable. But with each passing day, she’d fallen a little bit more in love with him and with his two beautiful, splendid boys. Without realizing it, she’d begun to harbor the ridiculous hope that somehow, she could stay with them forever, that some way, her past could remain undiscovered, but her encounter with Kenneth outside Westminster had brought reality back to her with painful clarity. There was no way to erase her past or prevent it from hurting and shaming Jamie and his sons.
When she decided to leave, she hadn’t expected him to offer her marriage, and though she’d seen his offer for the fantasy it was, in that moment, she’d wanted desperately to accept it, to selfishly choose her own safety and security over what was right. But she could not saddle him and his family with the burden of choices she had made, or ruin his career, or give his sons a stepmother who was notorious.
Walking out of the house in Upper Brook Street had been the right thing to do, but it had felt like tearing herself in half, and though she’d managed to keep the pain at bay long enough to get herself to Holborn, the minute she’d arrived at the lodging house, she’d fallen utterly apart.
Mrs. Finch had taken one look at her face and one glance at her luggage and opened her arms. Amanda had run into them, sobbing as if she were a little girl instead of a mature woman of the world. Half a dozen handkerchiefs and three cups of strong India tea later, her luggage was up in the maids’ attic, and she was in a black dress, white apron, and cap, learning all about what it meant to be a parlor maid.
Ever since her arrival, Betsy and Ellen had been chaffing her about her too-short maid’s dress and teasing her good-humoredly about how much less attractive she was as a woman than she’d been as a man. They had laughed at her first attempts to properly make beds, and Betsy, as head housemaid, had been forced to teach her step-by-step how to remove spilled candle wax with a hot iron and blotting paper and how to clean carpets with a dustpan and brush as if she was the rawest of raw tweenies. But the addition of Amanda to the household staff meant less work for them, and though they were often confounded by her woeful ignorance of even the simplest household tasks, they had cheerfully helped her learn the ropes of domestic service.
She was expected to make the beds of all the lodgers and tidy their rooms. Afterward, her duties seemed to consist mostly of battling dust—shaking it out of draperies, punching it out of pillows, flicking it off of bric-a-brac, and sweeping it up with brushes and dustpans. By the end of her third afternoon dealing with the problem, Amanda decided there had to be a more efficient tool for dusting bookshelves than a bunch of feathers on the end of a stick, and she was contemplating just how her knowledge of engineering could help her design such a device, when the front doorbell rang.
Aside from dust removal, opening the door to callers was also part of her job, so as the chiming of the bell echoed through the lodging house, Amanda stuck the feather duster behind a potted fern, left the parlor, and started across the foyer, but then she caught sight of herself in the mirror and stopped, giving a groan of dismay at her dust-covered face, apron, and cap.
She had no time to tidy her appearance, however, for the bell rang again, and she could only hope whoever had come to call wasn’t anyone important.
That hope was dashed the second she opened the door, for to Amanda’s eyes, the three people standing on the stoop were the most important ones in the world.
“Jamie?” she whispered, staring in disbelief. “Colin? Owen? What are you doing here?”
“We’re here to get you back,” Colin began, but he was immediately silenced by a kick in the leg from his brother.
“Papa said we could only come along if we’re quiet and let him do the talking,” Owen said. “We promised.”
Bewildered, Amanda looked up from the boys to their father, who doffed his hat and bowed. “Jamie, I can’t come back,” she murmured. “We talked about this.”
He smiled a little. “As I recall, you’re the one who did most of the talking.”
She shook her head, taking a step backward. “Either way,” she choked, “we agreed that I had to leave.”
“I wouldn’t say we agreed, precisely. It would be more accurate to say your decision to leave caught me off guard, your news about your past rather shattered me, and then you were gone before I could think of any way to counter your arguments.”
“Counter them?” She sighed. “Jamie, there’s no way to do that. You know the circumstances.”
“Yes, well . . .” He paused and gave a cough. “The circumstances have changed a bit since we last spoke. I changed them.”
“What?” She felt a jolt of hope, then shoved it down ruthlessly. “That’s not possible. You can’t change things like that.”
His smile widened a fraction. “Can’t I?”
She glanced at the boys, then leaned closer to their father, curiosity tugging at her like a mischievous imp. “Jamie, what did you do?” she whispered.
“It’s a bit complicated.” He gestured to the foyer behind her with his hat. “May we come in?”
She hesitated, dying to hear, knowing it wouldn’t matter. Letting him stay would only prolong her pain, it wouldn’t make any difference, and yet . . . and yet . . .
Before she could decide, footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Amanda?” Mrs. Finch called. “Was that the bell? If it’s one of those horrid rag-and-bone men, send him off—oh!”
She stopped halfway down the last flight of stairs, staring at Jamie and the boys through the open doorway. “Your lordship.”
“Good day, Mrs. Finch.” He bowed. “May I introduce my sons to you? Baron Knaresborough and Mr. Owen St. Clair, this is Mrs. Finch.”
“How do you do?” she murmured, descending the remaining stairs as the boys bowed to her. “Would you care to come in, gentlemen?”
“No,” Amanda said sharply, then flushed, remembering that wasn’t her choice to make. Mrs. Finch was looking at her expectantly, and she capitulated, making a sound of aggravation as she opened the door wide for Jamie and the boys to enter the house.
They followed Mrs. Finch into the parlor, Amanda trailing behind them.
“Would you care for tea?” the landlady asked.
“We’d adore tea,” Jamie said at once. “Thank you.”
“I’ll fetch it,” Amanda said, glad of the perfect excuse to compose herself. She moved to depart, but Mrs. Finch stopped her.
“No, no, my dear. I can’t let you see to the tea when your friends have made a special visit. Take a moment with them. I shall go down and see to the tea myself.”
Amanda made a sound of protest, but Mrs. Finch ignored it. When she passed Amanda to depart for the kitchens, she also ignored Amanda’s pleading stare. And when Amanda called over her shoulder, rather crossly, “There’s a bellpull, you know,” Mrs. Finch ignored that, too.
Left with no choice and no escape, Amanda forced her attention back to Jamie and the boys, and the sight of them was so sweet, so wrenching and awful, that she knew she had to get this over with as quickly as possible or she’d come apart right in front of them. Tea could go hang.
“Whatever has happened,” she said, “I can’t see how it matters. I left because of . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Colin and Owen. “I left for very good reasons, Jamie, as we both know,” she reminded. “Reasons nothing can change.”
“You mean us,” Colin said, making a sound of derision as if at the idiocy of adults.
“Colin!” Owen admonished, anguished. “Shut up. I don’t want to go wait in the taxi.”
“But we’re the reason she left,” Colin said, turning to his brother
, his jaw showing that stubborn line Amanda knew so well. “We ought to at least be allowed to tell her we know all about it and we don’t care.”
“What do you mean, you know all about it?” Amanda asked, dismayed. “You don’t know. You can’t. And you certainly couldn’t understand. You’re too young.”
“I explained the circumstances to them,” Jamie said before either of his sons could reply. “I told them what happened to you.”
“Oh no,” she groaned, appalled and mortified, her face growing hot. “What did you say? Why did you tell them anything about it?”
“He had to tell us, because of that man, Notting,” Colin said. “And what happened at Westminster the other night. We saw it happen, so he didn’t have a choice.”
Her mortification and dismay deepened tenfold at the mention of Kenneth, and she couldn’t make heads or tails of what Colin was saying about Westminster. She shook her head, staring at Jamie in bewilderment. “Westminster? The other night? I don’t understand. What happened?”
Jamie turned to his sons. “Boys, go sit down,” he said, gesturing to a nearby settee of crimson velvet. “And keep quiet, as you promised. I will handle this.”
With uncharacteristic docility, they complied, and Jamie returned his attention to her. “I had to explain certain things to them because of this.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a folded sheet of newspaper, and handed it to her. “This was in one of the morning papers yesterday.”
She opened it and stared at the headline in dumbfounded dismay. “Oh my God.”
She read the story—Kenneth’s insulting remarks about her, the presence of the boys, the gathering crowd, Jamie’s hard right hook to Kenneth’s jaw, the certainty of every witness that Lord Kenyon’s unprovoked assault on another peer had ruined his political future forever—she read every lurid detail, and by the time she’d finished, her face was afire. “Oh, Jamie,” she groaned, looking up at last, miserable and heartsick that he’d ruined his future because of her. “What have you done?”
“As I told my friends, I dispensed a little justice to a cad.” He smiled, leaned closer to her, and added in a whisper, “It was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.”
The tenderness of his smile was almost her undoing, but she forced herself to rally, trying to harden her resolve even as she felt it start to crumble. “Fighting is never satisfying,” she said loudly enough for the boys to hear, realizing as she spoke that she sounded like the most rigid schoolmistresses at Willowbank. “And I don’t see how this changes the fundamental issue anyway.”
She held the newspaper cutting out to him, stuffing it into his outside breast pocket when he wouldn’t take it, crumpling his handkerchief. “If I come back, this would just be the first of many such incidents. You know that as well as I do. What are you going to do, Jamie? Get in a fight every time someone insults me?”
“I hope it won’t come to that.”
“It will. Are you going to take on the entire world for the sake of my honor?”
“If I have to, yes.”
Fear gripped her, fear and hope, joy and despair, and inside, she began to shake. “And the boys? You would make them fight for my honor, too?”
“He wouldn’t have to make us!” Colin said stoutly and jumped to his feet. “We’re gentlemen,” he added as Owen followed suit and stood up. “We know what’s right.”
Amanda pressed her hands over her flushed cheeks, watching them as they came to stand on either side of their father, certain they couldn’t understand what they would be taking on. “It’s not that simple,” she said miserably.
“Yes, it is,” Jamie told her with a quiet finality that made her desperate.
Taking a deep breath, she tried again. “You don’t know what it would be like.”
“Yes, we do,” Owen told her. “We saw it for ourselves, the other night. And afterward, Papa talked to us about it, told us that he wanted you to stay with us forever and be our stepmother, but that we had to decide if we wanted that, too, now that we knew what we’d be taking on.”
“And, of course, we said yes,” Colin added.
“But then,” Owen resumed, “Papa explained why Notting had said the things he’d said. Papa explained that you had been be—be—be—oh, blast it, Colin, what’s the word?”
“Besearched. I think.”
“Besmirched,” Amanda corrected gently, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
“That’s it,” Owen said gratefully. “Anyway, Papa told us other people might say things about you to him and to us, and that what he’d done to Notting might happen again, and that even though he’d try not to fight, he might have to sometimes.”
“He also said if we wanted you to stay with us forever,” Colin added, “we might get into fights, too.”
“But that’s what I don’t want!” Amanda cried. “I don’t want your names dragged through the mud. I don’t want you to fight, or have to defend me, or be teased and shamed.”
“But that’s our choice,” Owen said with his usual stoic calm. “Isn’t it?”
She opened her mouth, but her throat was clogging up, and she couldn’t reply.
“So,” Colin added in the wake of her silence, “the three of us talked it over, and we decided we didn’t care about being teased or called names or anything like that. Sticks and stones, you know. And if they call you names, well, they’ll have all three of us to deal with, won’t they?”
“More than three,” Jamie said, reaching into his pocket again to pull out another slip of paper. “I sent a telegram to Torquil, explaining the situation. I felt I must, for what happened at Westminster will appear in the Hampshire papers in a day or two. This was his reply.”
He cleared his throat. “‘Scandal nothing new to our lot. Will do all we can to help of course. Tell Miss Leighton welcome to the family. Torquil.’”
“Family?” Amanda echoed, feeling all her defenses crumbling around her. She bit her lip, glancing from Jamie to the boys and back again, loving them so much, wanting so badly to protect them from what would be their fate with her, fearing that she no longer had the strength to save them from it.
“Let us do this,” Jamie said tenderly. “We are your champions. Let us fight for you. Let us love you, and protect you, and defend you.”
“You would do that?” she whispered, staring at him. “You would fight the world? For me?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“You might have to do it every day,” she choked.
“For a while, yes.”
“For the rest of your life.”
“I doubt that. The furor will die down after a bit.”
“A bit?” She snorted. “After a decade, maybe.”
He shrugged as if the length of time involved didn’t matter.
“Why?” she whispered, miserable and scared and happy all at once. “Why would you do this?”
He looked down, staring at the hat in his hand for a long moment, then he stepped back, placed his hat on a chair, and resumed his place in front of her.
“Do you remember that day in the park when the boys played cricket?”
“Of course.”
“Remember what I told you? That when the real thing comes along, you know it?”
Amanda tried to speak, but the only reply she could manage was a choked sound, halfway between a snort and a sob. She pressed her hand to her mouth and nodded.
“Well, there you are.” He reached out, gently pulled her hand down from her face, taking it into his own. “I love you, Amanda. I love you, and I know it. I first began to fear you would steal my heart that morning when we talked in my study.”
She stared. “The morning after you fired me?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . but . . . that’s not possible! Twelve hours earlier, you thought I was a man!”
He smiled. “I told you I fall in love fast.”
She shook her head, not believing him. How could she?
He paused, hesitating, then went on, “Before I met Pat, I’d never had that. I think I was born cynical, and growing up, I stayed that way. I was wild and reckless, and I did all manner of mad things, and the reason, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was that I was seeking that inner joy of life. I think I’d been chasing it always, but never finding it. It was with Pat that I started to understand what true happiness was, but when she died, I felt as if all the joy had vanished from the world and would never return.” He paused, lifting his free hand to cup her cheek. “Then you came.”
Amanda was astonished and overwhelmed, humbled and proud. She didn’t know what to say in reply to something so beautiful.
“And when I looked into your face that morning in my study,” he went on, “I was seeing you in a whole new light, obviously, but I was also seeing that spark, that joy that was inside of you, and as you talked, I felt it come alive inside of me. For the first time in three years, I wanted to live again. To love again. That was when I first started to fall in love with you.”
As he spoke, she knew just what he meant, for that joy he talked about was squeezing her chest at this very moment, pressing against her heart, making it impossible for her to speak, or even breathe.
“And then,” he went on, “the other day at Westminster when I was about to give my speech, I looked up and saw you in the gallery. I couldn’t really see your face, but I knew you were there, and I knew with absolute certainty that you were part of my future, that you were the woman I wanted to share my life, and my sons’ lives. You were what inspired my speech that day. I love you, Amanda, and I don’t care about your past. I don’t care what other people think, or what they say. And I certainly don’t care about having a political career, because no career would mean a damn thing without you. And, hell, I don’t need a career now anyway, really, because I’m the son and heir of a marquess. The point I’m trying to make is that if you don’t come back, the spark of joy you brought to me will die again, and I will be what I was before you came—a hollowed-out shell of a man.”