On fine summer days after his talk with his father, Robert had wandered in the paddocks outside, wielding a switch instead of a sword, and challenging white-headed daisies to duels. Sometimes, he imagined himself fighting dragons. But usually, he fought villains—villains and knaves and curs, all named Hugo Marshall. When he defeated him—and Sir Robert always defeated his villains—he brought the right bloody bastard home, trembling and bound, and laid the cur at his mother’s feet.
After that, they all lived happily ever after. No more shouts. No more silences. No more separations.
“Do we stop it?” Sebastian asked.
Three boys turned to look at Robert. Possibly, Robert conceded, they might have looked to him because he was the only duke’s heir at Eton. Maybe it had to do with the clear, blue eyes he’d inherited from his father—eyes that he’d learned made other boys nervous, if he simply stared. But the most likely reason they looked to Robert—or so he told himself—was that they sensed he was innately a knight, and therefore superior in morals and worthy of following.
“No,” he said. “We encourage it. The little lag thinks he’s superior to us. When he’s drummed out, he’ll know better.”
Beside him, Sebastian frowned in puzzlement.
Robert turned away sharply. “You don’t have any questions, Malheur, do you?”
“No,” his cousin said after a long pause. “None at all.”
ROBERT MADE IT A POINT to avoid Marshall for as long as he could. It wasn’t hard—he’d been attending Eton for quite a while now, and the other boy was just starting. Normally, a new boy who arrived might go through the usual rounds of roughhousing, while everyone figured out where he stood. Once he found his place in the pecking order, he might keep it with a minimum of fuss and scarcely a blackened eye.
But Marshall had no place at Eton. Robert was determined that this would be the case. He chanced to remark on the boy’s jacket, and someone cracked an egg on it. He made a comment about how amusing it would be if a soap-seller’s son had to bathe in slops, and Marshall’s soap was replaced with bars of mud.
He had never expected Marshall to recognize that Robert was the instigator of his problems. He was even more surprised when the boy started to fight back like the ill-mannered cur that he was. Marshall began to construct snide insults in Latin—clever enough that the other boys sniggered about them. And after that incident with the mud, someone crept into Robert’s room and stole all his undergarments. He found them in the larder, stuffed into a barrel of pickles—wet, cold, and salty. No amount of laundering could remove the smell of vinegar.
Some things were not to be borne. That was when Robert knew he was going to have to confront the boy directly.
He found his quarry against the far stone wall of the cricket field. He wasn’t the first to have at him; by the time he got there, the boy had his back against the wall. He’d set his spectacles a few feet behind him, and he held his fists in the air.
“Come on, you cowards,” Marshall was saying. “Three-on-one not good enough odds for you?” It was the first time that Robert had seen Marshall this close. His hair was a thin, light orange; his skin was pale and freckled. His eye was ringed with a virulent red bruise; it would be purple in the morning. He spat pink and turned lightly on his feet, facing his attackers. That was when the boy caught sight of Robert.
“Speaking of cowards,” he said.
“I’m no coward.” Robert rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward. “Call me a coward again—I dare you. Don’t you know who I am?”
Everyone else stepped back, giving the two of them a wide berth. Robert circled the other boy, holding his fists up. And that was when he noticed something curious. Marshall’s eyes were blue—an icy blue.
A familiar icy blue. Robert saw eyes like that in the mirror every day.
“I know who you are,” Marshall said with disdain. “You’re my brother.”
Robert had always thought it a ridiculous thing to say in stories—that someone’s world turned upside down. But there was no other way to describe what happened. The other boy’s words hit with the force of a cannonball, crashing through everything he’d known.
“You can’t be my brother.”
But he recalled too clearly the crash of china, his mother’s shouts. Philanderer! Whoreson!
Philanderer. Marshall had Robert’s eyes. He had his father’s eyes.
Marshall sniffed and wiped at his nose. “Don’t your parents tell you anything?”
“No!” He wasn’t sure if it was an answer or a denial. And the other boy said that with such a matter-of-fact air—as if his parents were a single unit, who might sit a boy down and have a conversation with him.
Robert’s head was whirling. “How can you be my brother if your father is Hugo Marshall?”
The other boy spat once again and didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to. Robert had only the faintest notion of what philandering entailed—gambling and drinking and getting wenches with child. He’d never given much thought to the possibility that wenches who were gotten with child ended up having them.
The other boy simply shrugged all this away.
Five hundred days playing alone in the paddock, and he had a brother? It was not just his mother and father who were broken to bits. He was, too. Robert thought of soap turned to mud, of fights, of Marshall’s eye—which would be black by morning.
He thought of the three boys who had been fighting him when Robert arrived. They’d done that ungentlemanly thing because Robert had encouraged it.
Even if this boy wasn’t his brother, Robert was the villain in this piece. And if what Marshall said was true…
Robert was the knave, the cur, the right bloody bastard. Nothing would ever end happily ever after again. Not unless—
Some decisions were not difficult at all. “Hit me,” he said urgently, low enough that the other boys couldn’t hear. “Hit me hard. Knock me down.”
Marshall didn’t even hesitate. He stepped forward and smashed his fist against Robert’s nose. Robert didn’t need to pretend to fall; his legs crumpled of their own accord. When he picked himself off the ground, his nose was running red. He swiped the blood away and pushed himself to his feet.
“Did you really not know?” Marshall asked him.
He’d hit with his left hand.
“Can you hit harder with your right?” Robert asked.
Marshall’s chin went up. “I can hit hard enough with both.”
“Because I’m left-handed, too. You’ve just knocked me down, and I’ve acknowledged it. They shouldn’t bother you anymore. Not after that.” He was babbling. He gingerly extended his hand—his left hand. “Pax?”
The other boy stared at him for a moment. Then, finally, he extended his own left hand. “Pax,” he agreed. “But you break the peace, and I’ll break you.”
“Well,” Sebastian said, coming up from behind them. “This is going to be interesting.”
About The Governess Affair
The Governess Affair is a prequel novella to the Brothers Sinister series, which focuses on Oliver Marshall (Hugo and Serena’s son), the friends he makes at Eton (Robert Blaisdell, the next Duke of Clermont, and Oliver’s half-brother), Sebastian Malheur (his cousin), as well as Oliver’s youngest sister, Frederica Marshall.
You’ll see Serena, Hugo, and Freddy throughout the rest of the series, which is now complete. The whole series is:
1½. The Governess Affair (this book)
1. The Duchess War (Robert & Minnie’s story)
1½. A Kiss for Midwinter (a companion novella to The Duchess War)
2. The Heiress Effect (Oliver & Jane’s story)
3. The Countess Conspiracy (Sebastian & Violet’s story)
4. The Suffragette Scandal (Frederica & Edward’s story)
4½. Talk Sweetly to Me (a companion novella to The Suffragette Scandal)
I hope you enjoy them all!
Welcome
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Chapter One
Somerset, August 1837
SO THIS WAS HOW IT FELT to be a conquering hero.
Ash Turner—once plain Mr. Turner; now, so long as fate stayed Parliament’s hand, the future Duke of Parford—sat back on his horse as he reached the crest of the hill.
The estate he would inherit was laid out in the valley before him. Stone walls and green hedges hugged the curves of the limestone hill where his horse stood, breaking the brilliant apple-green growth of high summer into gentle, rolling squares of patchwork. A small cottage stood to the side of the road. He could hear the hushed whispers of the farm children, who had crept out to gawk at him as he passed.
Over the past few months, he’d become accustomed to being gawked at.
Behind him, his younger brother’s steed stamped and came to a halt. From this high vantage point, they could see Parford Manor—an impressive four-story, five-winged affair, its brilliant windows glittering in the sunlight. Undoubtedly, someone had set a servant to watch for his arrival. In a few moments, the staff would spill out onto the front steps, arranging themselves in careful lines, ready to greet the man who would be their master.
The man who’d stolen a dukedom.
A smile played over Ash’s face. Once he inherited, nobody would gainsay him.
“You don’t have to do this.” The words came from behind him.
Nobody, that was, except his little brother.
Ash turned in the saddle. Mark was facing forward, looking at the manor below with an abstracted expression. That detached focus made him look simultaneously old, as if he deserved an elder’s beard to go with that inexplicable wisdom, and yet still unaccountably boyish.
“It’s not right.” Mark’s voice was barely audible above the wind that whipped at Ash’s collar.
Mark was seven years younger than Ash, which made him by most estimations firmly an adult. But despite all that Mark had experienced, he had somehow managed to retain an aura of almost painful purity. He was the opposite of Ash—blond, where Ash’s hair was dark; slim, where Ash’s shoulders had broadened with years of labor. But most of all, Mark seemed profoundly, sacredly innocent, where Ash felt tired and profane. Perhaps that was why the last thing Ash wanted to do in his moment of victory was to hash through the ethics.
Ash shook his head. “You asked me to find you a quiet country home for these last weeks of summer, so you might work in peace.” He spread his arms, palms up. “Well. Here you are.”
Down in the valley, the first ranks of servants had begun to gather, jockeying for position on the wide steps leading up to the massive front doors.
Mark shrugged, as if this evidence of prosperity meant nothing to him. “A house back in Shepton Mallet would have done.”
A tight knot formed in Ash’s stomach. “You’re not going back to Shepton Mallet. You’re never going back there. Do you suppose I would simply kick you from a carriage at Market Cross and let you disappear for the summer?”
Mark finally broke his gaze from the tableau in front of them and met Ash’s eyes. “Even by your extravagant standards, Ash, you must admit this is a bit much.”
“You don’t think I would make a good duke? Or you don’t approve of the method I used to inveigle a summer’s invitation to the ducal manor?”
Mark simply shook his head. “I don’t need this. We don’t need this.”
And therein lay Ash’s problem. He wanted to make up for every last bit of his brothers’ childhood deprivation. He wanted to repay every skipped meal with twelve-course dinners, gift a thousand pairs of gloves in exchange for every shoeless winter. He’d risked his life building a fortune to ensure their happiness. Yet both his brothers declared themselves satisfied with a few prosaic simplicities.
Simplicities wouldn’t make up for Ash’s failure. So maybe he had overindulged when Mark finally asked him for a favor.
“Shepton Mallet would have been quiet,” Mark said, almost wistfully.
“Shepton Mallet is halfway to dead.” Ash clucked to his horse. As he did so, the wind stopped. What he’d intended as a faint sound of encouragement sounded overloud. The horse started down the road toward the manor.
Mark kicked his mare into a trot and followed.
“You’ve never thought it through,” Ash tossed over his shoulder. “With Richard and Edmund Dalrymple no longer able to inherit, you’re fourth in line for the dukedom. There are a great many advantages to that. Opportunities will arise.”
“Is that how you’re describing your actions, this past year? ‘No longer able to inherit?’”
Ash ignored this sally. “You’re young. You’re handsome. I’m sure there are some lovely milkmaids in Somerset who would be delighted to make the acquaintance of a man who stands an arm’s length from a dukedom.”
Mark stopped his horse a few yards before the gate to the grounds. Ash felt a fillip of annoyance at the delay, but he halted, too.
“Say it,” Mark said. “Say what you did to the Dalrymples. You’ve spouted one euphemism after another ever since this started. If you can’t even bring yourself to speak the words, you should never have done it.”
“Christ. You’re acting as if I killed them.”
But Mark was looking at him, his blue eyes intense. In this mood, with the sun glancing off all that blond hair, Ash wouldn’t have been surprised if his brother had pulled a flaming sword from his saddlebag and proclaimed him barred from Eden forever. “Say it,” Mark repeated.
And besides, his little brother so rarely asked anything of him. Ash would have given Mark whatever he wanted, so long as he just…well, wanted.
“Very well.” He met his brother’s eyes. “I brought the evidence of the Duke of Parford’s first marriage before the ecclesiastical courts, and thus had his second marriage declared void for bigamy. The children resulting from that union were declared illegitimate and unable to inherit. Which left the duke’s long-hated fifth cousin, twice removed, as the presumptive heir. That would be me.” Ash started his horse again. “I didn’t do anything to the Dalrymples. I just told the truth of what their own father had done all those years ago.”
And he wasn’t about to apologize for it, either.
Mark snorted and started his horse again. “And you didn’t have to do that.”
But he had. Ash didn’t believe in foretellings or spiritual claptrap, but from time to time, he had…premonitions, perhaps, although that word smacked of the occult. A better phrase might have been that he possessed a sheer animal instinct. As if the reactive beast buried deep inside him could recognize truths that human intelligence, dulled by years of education, could not.
When he’d found out about Parford, he’d known with a blazing certainty: If I become Parford, I can finally break my brothers free of the prison they’ve built for themselves.
With that burden weighing down one side of the scale, no moral considerations could balance the other to equipoise. The disinherited Dalrymples meant nothing. Besides, after what Richard and Edmund had done to his brothers? Really. He shed no tears for their loss.
The servants had finished gathering, and as Ash trotted up the drive, they held themselves at stiff attention. They were too well trained to gawk, too polite to let more than a little rigidity infect their manner. Likely, they were too accustomed to their wages to do more than grouse about the upstart heir the courts had forced upon them.
They’d like him soon e
nough. Everyone always did.
“Who knows?” he said quietly. “Maybe one of these serving girls will catch your eye. You can have any one you’d like.”
Mark favored him with an amused look. “Satan,” he said, shaking his head, “get thee behind me.”
Ash’s steed came to a stop and he dismounted slowly. The manor looked smaller than Ash remembered, the stone of its facade honey-gold, not bleak and imposing. It had shrunk from the unassailable fortress that had loomed in Ash’s head all these years. Now it was just a house. A big house, yes, but not the dark, menacing edifice he’d brooded over in his memory.
The servants stood in painful, ordered rows. Ash glanced over them.
There were probably more than a hundred retainers arrayed before him, all dressed in gray. He felt as sober as they appeared. Had there been the slightest danger of Mark accepting his cavalier offer, Ash would never have made it. These people were his dependents now—or they would be, once the current duke passed on. His duty. Their prosperity would hang on his whim, as his had once hung on Parford’s. It was a weighty responsibility.
I’m going to do better than that old bastard.
A vow, that, and one he meant every bit as much as the last promise he’d sworn looking up at this building.
He turned to greet the majordomo, who stepped forward. As he did so, he saw her. She stood on the last row of steps, a few inches apart from the rest of the servants. She held her head high. The wind started up again, as if the entire universe had been holding its breath up until this moment. She was looking directly at him, and Ash felt a cavernous hollow open deep in his chest.
He’d never seen the woman before in his life. He couldn’t have; he would have remembered the feel of her, the sheer rightness of it. She was pretty, even with that dark hair pulled into a severe knot and pinioned beneath a white lace cap. But it wasn’t her looks that caught his attention. Ash had seen enough beautiful women in his time. Maybe it was her eyes, narrowed and steely, fixed on him as if he were the source of all that was wrong in the world. Maybe it was the set of her chin, so unyielding, so fiercely determined, when every face around hers mirrored uncertainty. Whatever it was, something about her resonated deep within him.
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