“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 10

Susanna Frail heard the whole of that from Henry in Marberry about a fortnight afterward.

She said afterward that the only part she could not get through without stopping was the boy asking whether it had been his fault for worrying.

He has been carrying that for two years, she wrote that night. And he has been extremely polite about it the whole time. And not one grown person in that house has asked him one question.

“I know it,” Henry said. “I am not saying it to reproach you. I want that clear.”

She had her hands round a cup.

“You told him,” she said. “That is the whole of it, and I have thought about very little else for a fortnight. You did the thing, and I have not. And I want to say out loud that I could not have done it, and it was not mine to do.”

Henry sat in that room over the saddlers.

“May I ask you something?” he said. “And I want to say first that it is not the question I have wanted to ask you since the spring, and that I am not going to ask that one today, or for some time.”

“Ask it.”

“How did you know about Ned? You told me in this room in the summer that you had a fairly good idea what was the matter with him, and you would not tell me, and you were entirely right not to. But you knew — forty-two miles away, out of about nine letters. And I had him in the house.”

Susanna Frail put her cup down.

“Because he never once said he would stay,” she said.

Henry looked at her.

“They all say it,” said Susanna. “Every governess in England says it in the first fortnight. I am not going anywhere. I shall be here a long while. And we say it because the children are frightened and we want to comfort them. And we mean it at the time.”

She turned the cup a quarter-turn.

“And Ned told me in a letter in the winter that Miss Ardan said it about four times, and Miss Peele said it in the first week — and that I never said it once.” She met his eyes. “I never said it because I did not know. I had four pounds and no family, and I could have been out of that house in a fortnight for anything. And I have been a governess for three years, and I have never once told a child I was staying, because I have never once been in a position to.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“And I have thought about it since the winter. And it is the only reason I lasted five months. Not because I was better than the other three. Because I was the only one poor enough not to be able to promise him anything.”

“That is what I knew, sir. That a boy of twelve had noticed which of four women had not made him a promise — and had kept the one who had not.”

She looked at him across the little table.

“And there is only one thing on this earth that teaches a child to count promises like that.”

Ned wrote to her in the November. It was the shortest letter he ever sent her.

Miss Frail —

Papa has told us how mama died and I know the whole of it now, and so does Kit.

I am not going to write to you about it because I have written it out four times and burned all of them, and I do not think I can.

I want to ask you something and I have been three weeks getting to it, and I shall put it in one line so that I can send it before I change my mind.

Will you come back?

E.

Susanna Frail sat in two rooms over a saddler’s shop with that letter for about an hour.

Then she wrote the hardest letter of her life, and it took her nine days.

Edward,

No.

And I am going to give you the whole of my reasons, because you are twelve and you have earned every one of them, and because you have asked me a plain question and the worst thing I could do is answer it kindly instead of properly.

If I come back to Caro as your governess, then in about six weeks you will begin to find out whether I shall go. Not because you want to and not because you have decided to — but because you have been doing it since you were ten. And it is not a thing a person stops doing by being asked. And I should not blame you for one hour of it.

But you would do it. And I should know you were doing it. And I would rather not put either of us in that room.

So I am not coming back to your house. I have got seven pupils in Marberry and two rooms and about sixty pounds a year, and nobody can put me out of any of it. And that took me a year, and it is the first thing I have ever had.

Your father has asked me nothing since the spring, and he is not going to for some time. And when he does, I shall have an answer, and I have not got one yet. And I want you to know that I have not.

What I shall do is this. There is a Saturday in every week. I shall be in this house on every one of them for as long as I live. And if you and your brothers ever come the nine miles, you will find me in it.

I am not asking you to come. I am telling you where I am.

S. Frail

They came on the fourth Saturday.

All three of them, on the carrier’s cart, with Mrs. Ivory — who had arranged the whole of it herself, and who told Henry about it afterward and not before, which she did once in nineteen years and never again.

They stayed about four hours. Susanna Frail gave them dinner in a room twelve feet by ten. Jamie broke a cup.

They came the Saturday after that, and the one after. Then they missed one, because Kit had a cold, and Ned sent a note about it four days beforehand.

And in the spring, Ned came on his own, on a horse, and stayed about two hours, and did not say very much.

Henry asked her in the summer — two years after the schoolroom.

He did it in Marberry, in the street, in the middle of the afternoon, and he had thought about that for four months.

“Not upstairs,” he said. “Not in that room. Because it is your house, and you would have to be polite to me in it.” He stood with his hat in his hand. “In the street, where you may walk away. And where there are about nine people who can see us. And where I have got no advantage of any kind.”

“That is extremely well thought out.”

“It has taken me two years, and I have not got another one.”

He said the rest of it without stopping.

“Susanna, I have not asked you anything since the spring before last, and I want to say what I have been doing instead, because it matters, and I shall not get it in afterward.” His hat turned in his hands. “I have not sent you anything. Not once in two years. Not money, and not a carriage, and not a coat in the winter when I knew you had a bad one.”

He looked at her.

“And I have wanted to about four hundred times. And Mrs. Ivory has told me twice that I was a fool. And I have not done it, because you built that house out of seven pupils and forty pounds — and every single thing I sent into it would have been a piece of it that was mine.”

He was quiet for a second.

“I am asking you now because you have got sixty pounds a year and a school and three boys who come on Saturdays without being sent. And because there is not one thing I have got that you need.”

“Will you marry me?”

Susanna Frail stood in that street.

“Yes,” she said. “And I want to say four things, and then we may go inside, because there are nine people watching us and I have got to live in this town.”

He laughed — and stopped, when he saw her face.

“The first is that I have known since about the winter. And I have been waiting for you to ask me in a way that let me answer. And you have taken two years over it, and you have got it exactly right, and I want you to know that I noticed every single part of it.”

She held up a second finger.

“The second is that I am keeping the school.”

“Susanna—”

“I am entirely serious. I have got seven pupils, and three of them are girls whose fathers would not spend a shilling on them, and who are getting an education because I charge two guineas a quarter and not four. I shall go on with it after we are married, and I shall go on in this town, and I shall very likely be at it three days a week for the next thirty years.”

“The third,” she said, “is that I am not going to be their mother. And I want that said out loud, in this street.”

The street went on around them. A cart went by.

“You told me in a schoolroom two years ago that you needed a mother for your sons. And I have thought about that sentence about four hundred times since, and it is the only part of the whole thing that you got wrong.”

She said it steadily.

“They have got a mother. She is buried nine hundred yards from your house. And Ned has got her letter, and Kit has got her hand, and Jamie has got about four memories. And I am not going to be put in front of that.”

“I shall be a woman who came into that house and stayed. Which is a different thing, and a great deal harder. And it is what those boys have actually wanted for two years, and it is the only thing I am able to give them.”

She looked at him.

“And the fourth is that I shall not promise you that I am not going anywhere. And I shall never promise it to Ned. And I want you to understand why before you answer me.”

“Nobody knows,” said Susanna Frail. “His mother did not know, and she meant it. And I am twenty-one and perfectly well, and I do not know either. And if I stand in front of that boy and tell him I shall be there for thirty years, then I have said the exact sentence that broke him.”

She put her hand out, palm up, between them.

“What I shall do is turn up. Every day, and on Saturdays, and for as long as I have got. And he may count them — and he will — and in about four years he will have counted enough of them, and he will stop.”

“That is the whole of what I have got,” she said. “And it is not a promise, and I am not going to dress it as one.”

They were married at Marberry in the autumn, quietly. There were about forty people in that church, and seven of them were her pupils.

Ned gave her away.

That was his own asking, and he did it in a letter four lines long in the August, and he had thought about it for some weeks, and he had put it in the last line.

I am asking because papa said I might, and because I want to, and not for any other reason. And if you would rather have somebody grown, I shall not mind.

He was thirteen, and about her own height by then, and he did it perfectly.

The house at Marberry was kept. That was in the settlement Henry drew, and Susanna read every word of it before she signed, and it was hers, and stayed hers — and the school ran in it three days a week for thirty years.

There were two more children, and both of them girls, which caused a great deal of satisfaction to about four people and complete indifference to the boys.

Kit went into the church and kept birds his whole life, and wrote a book about them that nobody read. Jamie went to sea at fifteen and was never any trouble to anybody, and came home about every four years, and was, his mother said, the only one of the five who had never once been complicated about anything.

And Ned was Duke of Caro at forty. He was a very great deal better at it than his father had been. And he was extremely difficult to know — and about nine people knew him well, and every one of them was in that house.

He asked her about it once, when he was about five-and-twenty and she was two-and-thirty, in the schoolroom they still called the schoolroom, although nobody had been taught in it for four years.

“May I ask you something I have wanted to ask you since I was twelve?”

“You may ask me anything, and you know it.”

“Why did you never say you would stay?”

Susanna put down what she was holding.

“Because I could not,” she said.

“That is the answer, and it is not a noble one. And I have been waiting thirteen years for you to ask me, so that I could give you the true one instead of the flattering one.” She folded her hands. “I was nineteen and I had four pounds and no family living and no place to go, and I could have been put out of your father’s house in a fortnight for a broken cup. There was not one hour in those five months when I was in a position to promise you anything, and I knew it every single day.”

“So I did not say it. Not out of wisdom, Ned. Out of not being able to.”

Ned sat on the edge of the schoolroom table — where he had sat since he was six years old.

“That is a great deal better than the flattering one,” he said.

He looked at the floor.

“I thought it might be because if you had said it out of wisdom, then it was a thing somebody clever did to me. And I have spent thirteen years quietly not being able to bear that.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“And if it was because you had four pounds, then it was just true. And I could count the days, because they were real days, and not a method.”

He looked up.

“How many did I count?”

“You stopped in the fourth year,” said Susanna.

“Not in the March. You came in here about a fortnight after your birthday and asked me whether I would look at something in the Latin. And you had never once asked me for anything without a reason before that.”

She set her hands flat on the table.

“And I went upstairs afterward and sat on the bed and cried for about a quarter of an hour.”

“You had counted about one thousand and forty days,” she said.

“And I know, because I counted them too.”

THE END.