“I Need a Mother for My Three Sons, and You Need a Home,” the Duke Told the Penniless Governess—But After She Stayed Five Months, She Discovered Why His Eldest Son Had Driven Every Woman Away

PART 1 

Mrs. Ivory told her on the first evening, and she did it deliberately.

She stood in the doorway of the second-floor bedroom with a candle, and she did not come in, and she said it straight.

“You will want to know about the others. There have been three since her grace died, and I am going to tell you about all of them tonight, because you will hear it in about four days from somebody in the kitchen, and I would rather you had it from me.”

Susanna Frail put down her bag.

“Then tell me, Mrs. Ivory.”

“Miss Peele came first. She was here six weeks. She was two-and-twenty, and she cried in this room about four nights out of seven, and she went home to her mother at Salisbury.”

The candle guttered. Mrs. Ivory did not move to steady it.

“Miss Kell came next. She was here four months. She was a great deal tougher than the first one, and she went in the February, and she would not say why to anybody — including me. I have thought about that a good deal.”

“And the third?”

“Miss Ardan was here nine months, and she was the best of the three, and I was extremely sorry to lose her. She went in the autumn and she did tell me why. She told me in this room with the door shut and she cried doing it. She was one-and-forty and had been in four houses and had never cried about anything.”

Susanna waited.

“She said she could bear the tricks.”

“The tricks?”

“That is the word she used. She said she could bear the tricks — and the frogs, and the ink, and the whole of it — and that any woman who has been in service with children can bear those.” Mrs. Ivory’s voice did not change. “What she could not bear was that they never got angry.”

Susanna Frail sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

“Say that again.”

“They are never angry, Miss Frail. Not once. Not one of the three of them in two years. There is no shouting and no temper and nothing thrown. And when they are found out, they are extremely sorry, and they say so properly, and they mean it.” A pause. “And then in about a fortnight there is another one.”

“Miss Ardan said it was like being got at by four lawyers,” Mrs. Ivory said. “And she said the worst of it was that she liked them. She had liked all three of them the whole time. And that was why she had stayed nine months instead of four.” The candle flame leaned. “And she went in the end because she could not work out what she had done.”

The next morning at eight o’clock, Susanna Frail went into the schoolroom and met them.

She was nineteen years old, and she had been a governess in three houses, and she had prepared herself on the coach from Salisbury for about four kinds of boy.

What came through that door was three extremely polite children in clean collars.

Ned was twelve and stood up when she came in. Kit was nine and did the same about half a second later, because his brother had. James, called Jamie, was six and did not stand up, because he was six — and Ned put a hand on his shoulder, and Jamie stood up.

“Good morning, Miss Frail,” said Ned. “I am Edward, and this is Christopher, and this is James.”

“Good morning.”

“Mrs. Ivory says you have come from Salisbury and that you were with the Ashworths before.”

“I was.”

“Then you will find us a good deal behind, because Miss Ardan went in the autumn and we have not had anybody since.” Ned’s hands were folded. “And I am sorry about that, and it is our fault, and I shall not pretend otherwise.”

Susanna Frail stood in the middle of that schoolroom and felt something go up the back of her neck.

He is twelve. He has just apologized correctly for a thing he did, in the first thirty seconds, before I could ask about it — and he has done it so that I cannot ask about it.

She wrote it down that night. She had begun, that spring, to write things down.

I understood the whole of Ned in about the first four minutes, she wrote. And then I spent five months finding out that I had understood nothing at all.