“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 4

The Duke of Caro came into the schoolroom on a wet Tuesday in the fifth month, and he did not knock.

It was about ten in the morning. The boys were with the riding master. Susanna was alone at the table with a page of Kit’s.

Henry, Duke of Caro, came in and shut the door and stood in the middle of the floor.

He was thirty-eight. He had been kind to her in about the ordinary way for five months — he came up twice a week and asked the boys questions and asked her whether they were behaving, and she had said yes every time, which she had thought about a great deal.

“Miss Frail,” he said. “I have got something to say, and I have been arranging it for nine days, and I am going to say it badly.”

“Sir.”

“I need a mother for my sons.” He said it flat, like a figure read off a page. “And you need a home. And I am asking you to marry me.”

Susanna Frail sat at that table with a page of Kit’s Latin in her hand.

She was afterward extremely proud of what she did next, which was nothing at all for about four seconds.

“Say the rest of it,” she said.

“There is not a great deal of rest of it, and I want to be honest about that.” His hands stayed at his sides. “I am thirty-eight. My wife died two years ago and I have not thought about marrying anybody since, and I am not going to pretend I am in love with you. I have got three boys and they have driven out three women in two years, and everybody in this house knows it and nobody says it. And you have been here five months, which is longer than two of the three, and you have never once complained of them to me — and I have watched you not complain of them, and I have understood in about the last fortnight what that has cost you.”

He stopped. Started again.

“You are nineteen and your father is dead and you have got no family living and about four pounds. And I know all of that because it is in the letter you wrote me in the spring.”

The rain moved on the schoolroom windows.

“That is the whole of it,” he said. “It is not a courtship, and I have not dressed it as one. It is a household that wants a mistress, and three boys that want somebody who will not go, and a woman who has got nowhere to go to. And I have been nine days telling myself that this is an honest way to put it.”

Susanna Frail put the page down on the table.

“It is an honest way to put it,” she said.

She looked at him.

“And it is the worst thing anybody has ever said to me. And I am going to explain why, and I should be obliged if you would let me finish, because I shall lose it otherwise.”

The Duke of Caro stood in the middle of that floor.

“Go on.”

“I cannot answer you.” Her voice did not shake. That was the thing she was proudest of. “I beg your pardon — I cannot answer you. Not I will not. I cannot.”

“Miss Frail—”

“And you have not seen it. And you are going to see it in about four seconds. And I am sorry for what it is going to do to you.”

She folded her hands in her lap.

“You are my employer. I am a governess of nineteen with four pounds and no family and no other place to go, standing in your schoolroom. And you have just asked me a question.”

The fire in the grate settled.

“And there is no possible answer I can give you that means anything.”

She made herself keep going.

“If I say yes, then I have said yes to the man who pays me — and who could put me on the road tomorrow. And neither of us will ever know what that yes was.”

She stopped. She made herself go on.

“And if I say no, sir, then I have refused my employer in his own house. And I have got about four pounds. And there is not one woman in England in my position who could stay in a house after that.”

The rain kept on.

“You have not offered me a marriage,” she said. “You have offered me a thing I have got to accept.”

Henry did not say anything at all for about ten seconds.

Then he sat down on one of the boys’ benches, which was too low for him — and Susanna Frail watched a duke of thirty-eight fold himself onto a schoolroom bench and put his head in his hands.

“I have been nine days on it,” he said, to the floor. “I know.”

“Sir—”

“Nine days in my own estate room, arranging it so that I should be honest with you. So that I should not dress it up, and should not pretend to a feeling I have not got.” His voice was muffled. “And I got up this morning extremely pleased with myself about it. And I have walked into this room and put a woman with four pounds in a position where she cannot say no to me.”

He lifted his head.

“And it did not occur to me for one single second of nine days.”

“No,” said Susanna Frail. “It did not.”

He looked at her.

“And I do not think you are a bad man, and I have not thought so for five months.” She said it evenly, because it was true and because he needed it to be true. “It did not occur to you because you have never in your life asked anybody for anything they were able to refuse.”

Henry took his hands away from his face.

“That is exactly it,” he said. “That is exactly the thing. And I have been thirty-eight years not knowing it about myself, and a governess has said it to me in a schoolroom in about nine words.”

He looked at her — properly, the way he looked at a tenant boundary or a bad account.

“Miss Frail. What do I do?”

Susanna Frail sat at that table.

“You have got about four minutes to decide that yourself,” she said. “And I am not going to tell you.”

“And I want to say why.”