“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 5

“Because if I tell you how to ask me properly, then I have arranged my own proposal,” she said. “And that is the second worst thing I can think of.”

He was silent.

“And I have been thinking about it since you came through that door. So you shall go away and work it out. And if you cannot, then I shall stay until the summer, and neither of us will ever mention this again, and I shall be extremely careful with you for the whole of it.” She paused. “And you will not enjoy that at all.”

Henry got up off that bench.

“Will you give me a fortnight?”

“I will give you as long as you like, sir.” She said it quietly. “I am not going anywhere. That is the whole of the difficulty, and both of us know it now. And I would rather we said it out loud than pretended I had a choice about the fortnight either.”

He took nine days.

And he did four things, and Susanna Frail found out about all four of them on the same afternoon.

He came up to the schoolroom at about four o’clock on a Thursday and asked whether she would come down to the estate room. She went.

Mrs. Ivory was in it.

Susanna understood the moment she saw her.

“I have asked Mrs. Ivory to be here,” said Henry, “and I want to say why before anything else. It is not because I want a witness to protect myself. It is because every single thing I am about to say ought to be witnessed by somebody who is not me and not you. And there is one person in this house who has been in it nineteen years and is not frightened of me.”

Mrs. Ivory said nothing at all and sat down.

“Now,” he said. “Four things. I have been nine days on them, and I want you to hear the whole of it before you say anything.”

He put a paper on the table.

“The first is a character. It is written, and it is signed, and Mrs. Ivory has read it and will swear to it. It says that you have been governess at Caro for five months and that you have been entirely satisfactory in every particular. It is the sort of character that gets a woman a place in any house in England.”

His hand stayed flat on the paper.

“It is yours now. Today. It does not depend on one single thing you say to me in the next hour or the next year.”

Susanna looked at that paper and did not touch it.

“The second,” he said, “is an annuity of forty pounds a year, settled on you in your own name, irrevocable, drawn by my own attorney and executed this morning.”

He put down a second paper.

“Mrs. Ivory has seen the deed. My attorney has it. And it cannot be undone by me, or by anybody after me.” He paused. “Forty pounds is not a fortune, and I have thought about that a great deal. It is enough that a woman of nineteen need never take a place she does not want. And it is not enough to buy anybody. And I have spent about four days getting that figure right.”

Susanna did not move.

“The third,” said Henry, “is that you are dismissed.”

Her head came up.

“Sir—”

“You are dismissed from my employment as of this afternoon. It is in the household book in Mrs. Ivory’s hand and dated, and there is a quarter’s wages with it.” His hands went flat on the table. “Not sent away. Dismissed as an employee. You may stay in this house tonight, and for a fortnight, and for as long as you like — as a guest, and not a servant.”

He looked at Mrs. Ivory, who looked back at him.

“Mrs. Ivory has been told so and will treat you accordingly, and has already had it out with me about the bedroom. Because you said in that schoolroom that you could not answer your employer — and you were entirely right. And the only thing I could think of in nine days was to stop being your employer before I asked you anything.”

Susanna Frail sat in that estate room.

“And the fourth,” said Henry.

He stopped.

“The fourth is that I am not going to ask you.”

Nobody in that room said anything.

“Not today. And not in a fortnight.” He was looking at the table, not at her. “I have thought about this longer than the other three together, and I have got to a thing I do not much like.”

“Sir.”

“You have been in this house five months, and you have had four pounds the whole time, and no other place, and nowhere to go. And I have been the man who paid you.” He turned the pen on the desk a quarter-turn. “And it does not signify that I have dismissed you this afternoon, because you have still spent five months in a house where I was that. And if I ask you next week, in this room, with forty pounds a year that I have just given you — then you are still answering the man who arranged the whole of your position.”

He looked up.

“So I am not going to ask you here.”

“Then where?”

“Nowhere,” said the Duke of Caro.

Susanna Frail sat very still.

“That is the fourth thing, and it is the one I have been dreading since Tuesday. You are going to take another place.”

He picked up the pen and set it down again.

“I have written to four people. Not about you — about a governess, in the ordinary way, as a man does when a good one is leaving him and he wants her well placed. And there are two houses that would take you. One of them is Lady Merchant, at Devizes. She is a decent woman with two girls, and she pays five-and-thirty, and she wants somebody in the spring.”

He said the rest of it without stopping.

“You will go there. You will be a governess with a character, and forty pounds a year of your own, and a place you took because you chose it. And you will be forty-two miles from this house, and you will owe me nothing whatever.”

A pause.

“And in the summer, if you want to, you will write to me. And if you do not write, I shall not write to you, and that will be the whole of it.”

The estate room at Caro was entirely silent.

“That is a great deal to arrange,” said Susanna Frail at last, “and you have done it in nine days. And I want to ask you something, and I want the true answer.”

“Ask it.”

“Do you want me to go?”

Henry looked at her.

“No,” he said. “I have got three boys who have driven out three women in two years, and you are the fourth, and you have lasted five months. And I have been watching you not complain of them since the spring. And I have not the smallest idea how I am going to manage the summer.”

He straightened.

“And I have spent nine days building the only arrangement I could think of in which your answer means anything. And every single part of it costs me something. And that is the whole of the point.” He paused. “If it does not cost me anything, then I have not solved it. I have only made it look solved.”

Mrs. Ivory spoke for the first time.

“Your grace,” she said. “I want to say a thing, and then I shall not speak again.”

“Say it.”

“I have been in this house nineteen years, and I was her grace’s woman for nine of them.” The old woman’s hands were folded in her lap. “And I have been extremely hard on Miss Frail since the spring, and I want that said in front of her. Not unkind. Hard. I have watched her for five months, waiting for her to be like the other three, and she has not been. And I have gone on watching.”

She looked at Susanna.

“And I have sat in this room for a quarter of an hour, and I have listened to you take a character, and an annuity, and a dismissal, and a place at Devizes, out of your coat.” She turned back to the Duke. “And I want to say that in nineteen years, I have never seen anybody in this family give anything away that they were not obliged to.”