“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 3

The far end of the park was about a mile and a half.

They went at two. They should have been home by four.

What happened was that Jamie was six and got tired, which is what a boy of six does. And Kit found the heron and would not come away from it. And at about a quarter past three, standing at the water with his hands in his pockets, Ned said:

“Miss Frail, there is a shorter way back by the barrow gate. It comes out by the stables.”

There was. Susanna checked it afterward on a map in the library, and it was about four hundred yards shorter.

It was also across a water meadow that had been under an inch of water since the spring.

By the time they were halfway across it, Jamie was wet to the knee and crying. It was going dark. They came into the yard at about a quarter to six, with a boy of six who had to be carried the last two hundred yards.

Mrs. Ivory met them in the yard.

Nobody said one word to Susanna Frail.

That was the thing. Mrs. Ivory took Jamie and got him upstairs and into a bath. Kit was sent to change. Ned went with him. And Susanna stood in that yard in the dark with wet boots, and nobody said anything to her at all.

The Duke spoke to her on the Saturday.

He did it kindly. He did it in about nine words.

“Master James is not to be out after dark in the spring.” And then: “I am sure you did not know. It is of no consequence.”

Of no consequence.

She wrote it down that night and read it about four hundred times over the following year.

He said it was of no consequence, and he meant it, and he was being kind.

She sat with the page.

And what has actually happened is that there is now a thing in this house that I did. And it is in his head. And in about four months there will be another one. And Ned told me about that gate at a quarter past three, standing at the water, in one sentence — and did not mention it again. He did not tell me the meadow was wet. He told me it was shorter. And it was shorter. And I am nineteen, and I have been in four houses, and I said yes.

Ned apologized on the Monday.

He did it in front of his brothers, at the beginning of the arithmetic, unprompted — and Susanna thought afterward that it was very nearly the best piece of work she ever saw him do.

“Miss Frail, I ought to have said about the meadow being wet.” His voice was level and unhurried. “I have been over it since Thursday, and I knew it was wet, because Kit and I went round it in the March. And I did not think about Jamie’s legs, and I ought to have. And I am sorry that you were spoken to about it. Because it was my gate, and not yours.”

It was my gate, and not yours.

Susanna Frail sat at that table and said, “Thank you, Ned.”

And she understood, with a coldness she wrote down that night, that she had just been handed an apology so exact and so generous that if she ever repeated one word of that Thursday to anybody, she would be a woman complaining about a boy who had already said sorry.

There were about nine of them in five months, and every single one had the same shape.

Nothing was ever broken. Nothing was ever taken and kept. Nobody was rude, and nobody was late, and the work was done. Ned’s beautifully. Kit’s adequately. Jamie’s the way a boy of six does it.

And about every ten days, there was a thing.

A candle moved in her room, which she could not prove and would not have mentioned. A message from Mrs. Ivory that had not been sent. An afternoon when all three of them were extremely willing to walk to the far end of the park — and she got them home in the dark, and was spoken to about it by the Duke, kindly, once.

And every time — every single time — there was an apology inside about two days. Unprompted. Correct. Offered in front of the other two.

She wrote it down in the fourth month, because she had begun to think she was inventing it.

Nine things in sixteen weeks, and not one of them is anything.

Her pencil hovered.

If I put the whole list in front of his grace tomorrow, he will read it and he will be perfectly civil, and he will think — and he will be entitled to think — that a woman of nineteen has made a list of nine trifles about three motherless boys, and that the last three governesses went for a reason.

She underlined the next line twice.

And he would be half right. That is the part that frightens me.

Miss Peele went in six weeks. Miss Kell would not say why. And there is a version of this in which four women have come to this house and found children they could not manage, and have gone away and called it something else.

She sat back.

I do not know which of those I am in. I have been here five months and I still do not know.

She liked them.

That was the whole of the difficulty, and she wrote that down too, in the same week, and underlined it.

Kit was nine, and was the easiest child she had ever taught. He would talk to anybody about anything for an hour. He had a passion for birds that was entirely his own, and that nobody in that house had encouraged or noticed.

Jamie was six and had no idea what was going on and followed his brothers.

And Ned was twelve, and was the cleverest child she had met in three years of teaching. He was funny. And he was kind to his brothers in about four ways a day that nobody saw.

Once, in the third month, she had come to the schoolroom door and stopped.

Ned was explaining something about the tides to Jamie. He had a basin of water on the table, and he was doing it slowly, with his hands — how the moon pulled, and how the water answered, and why it did it twice. Fifteen minutes of it. Patient. Entirely serious.

Jamie was watching his brother’s hands the way other children watched a fire.

Susanna had stood in the doorway and watched it, and had liked him so much that it had frightened her.

She wrote that down as well.

I have been got at by that boy nine times in five months, and I like him better than any child I have ever taught. And I do not think those two things are separate. And I have not got any idea what to do about it.