“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 2 

The first thing happened in the second week, and it was very small.

She set them a page of Latin. Ned did the whole of it perfectly. Kit did about half. Jamie did what a boy of six does. She corrected them and gave the pages back.

On the Thursday, her own Latin grammar — her own, which had been her father’s, which had her name written inside the cover in his hand — was not on the schoolroom shelf.

She looked for it for a quarter of an hour. She did not find it. She did not say one word about it to anybody.

It came back on the Monday, on the shelf, in the right place, with a page turned down at the section on the ablative absolute.

That was the thing Kit had got wrong the week before.

Susanna stood in the schoolroom with the book in her hands for about a minute.

He has taken it and used it and put it back. And he has left the page turned down so that I know he has.

She turned it over in her mind the way she turned over a column of figures, looking for the error.

And there is not one thing in that I could take to anybody. Her thumb pressed the corner of the page flat. If I go to his grace and say my grammar was gone four days and has come back with a page turned down, I am a woman of nineteen complaining about a book.

She said nothing.

On the Tuesday morning, in the middle of the arithmetic, Ned spoke without looking up from his slate.

“Miss Frail. Did you find your grammar?”

“I did. Thank you.”

“I am glad.” He wrote a figure, blotted it, moved on. “Kit was in a muddle about the ablative, and I thought there might be something in it. And I ought to have asked you. And I did not. And I am sorry.”

That was the whole of it.

Susanna Frail sat at that table and understood exactly what she was inside.

He has apologized again. Correctly. Unprompted. In front of his brothers. For a thing I did not accuse him of.

She set her pencil down.

And now I can never raise it, because it has been dealt with. And there is a small piece of ground in this schoolroom that is his and not mine — and he took it in four days, and gave me an apology for it.

“Thank you, Ned,” she said.

The second one was the walk, and it was the only one that frightened her.

It was the seventh week. It was a Thursday. All three of them had been extremely keen to go to the far end of the park, because Kit had seen a heron there in the spring — and Susanna Frail, who had been at Caro seven weeks and had begun to relax, said yes.