“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 6

Susanna went to Devizes at the end of the month.

The hardest part was the boys, and she had not prepared for it at all.

She told them herself, in the schoolroom, on the Monday morning — and she did it because she had asked Henry for that, and had been extremely firm about it.

“You will want to tell them,” he had said. “I shall tell them, and you will not be in the room. And I want to say why. They have had three women go out of this house in two years, and every single time it has been arranged over their heads by grown people, and they have found out afterward.”

He had looked at his hands.

“So I am going to stand in that schoolroom and tell three boys myself that I am going and that I have chosen it. And it is going to be the worst quarter of an hour of my life, and I am going to do it anyway.”

But he let her have the first part.

She told them at about nine in the morning, and it took about four minutes.

Jamie was six and cried immediately and loudly, and had to be held for about a quarter of an hour.

Kit was nine and asked four questions, all of them practical. Where. How far. Whether there were birds there. Whether she would write.

Susanna answered every one of them exactly and truthfully. And the last one she answered with, “Yes — if you write to me first. And I shall answer every letter you ever send me as long as I live.”

And Ned stood by the window and said nothing at all.

He said one thing at the very end, when Susanna had got Jamie quiet and Kit had gone to find a pen because he had decided to write immediately.

“How long have you known?”

“Since Thursday.”

“That is four days,” said Ned.

He was still looking out of the window.

“You have been in this room with us for four days knowing you were going, and you have not said anything.”

Susanna Frail stood in that schoolroom.

“Yes,” she said.

“Miss Ardan did that. Nine days.” His voice was perfectly level. “And Miss Kell did it about a fortnight. And Miss Peele did it and she was crying the whole time, and we could all see it, and nobody said anything.”

He turned around.

“Everybody does it. Every single one of them knows for days, and comes in, and does the Latin.”

“Ned—”

“I am not angry,” said Ned.

And it was, Susanna thought afterward, the most frightening thing she had ever heard a child say.

“I am not angry with you at all. And I want you to know that it is what people do, and I have understood it for two years, and I do not think it is wicked.” A pause. “I am only saying that I knew on Thursday too.”

Susanna stood very still.

“How?”

“Because Mrs. Ivory came up on Thursday afternoon and put fresh candles in your room,” said Ned.

He picked up his slate.

“And she has not done that since Miss Ardan. And she only does it when somebody is going and she wants the room right for the next one.”

Devizes was forty-two miles, and it was a perfectly good house, and Susanna Frail was extremely unhappy in it for about four months.

She said so afterward and never dressed it up.

Lady Merchant was a decent woman of about fifty who paid five-and-thirty and was neither warm nor cold. There were two girls of nine and seven who were pleasant and biddable and entirely uninteresting.

Susanna did that work well for four months, and thought about Caro about nine times a day.

She did not write.

That was her own decision. She made it in the first week, and she wrote out her reasons, because she had begun that spring to write things out.

If I write to him in the summer, I have written to a man who gave me forty pounds a year, and a character, and a place. It does not matter that I have been forty-two miles away for six weeks. He arranged the whole of it, and he arranged it beautifully, and I know exactly what it cost him.

Her pen rested.

And that is not nothing. That is a very great deal. And gratitude is a worse thing to marry on than fear.

She underlined it.

So I shall not write until I do not want anything from him at all. And I have got no idea how long that is going to take. And it may be that it never happens.

What she did instead was work out what she actually thought about three boys.

She had four months and a great deal of quiet and two extremely uninteresting girls, and she spent about an hour of every evening on it.

By about the third month she had got somewhere, and it was not where she had expected.

Nine things in five months. I have got the list and I have read it about forty times since I came here. And I have understood something in the last fortnight that I could not see while I was in that house.

She turned the page and copied the list out again, in order, with the dates.

Not one of them was aimed at me. Every single one was aimed at whether I would go.

She sat with that.

The grammar. And the candle. And the walk in the dark. And the message that was never sent. I have been thinking of them as tricks, and they are not tricks. They are questions.

Her pencil moved fast now.

He was not trying to make me leave. He was trying to find out whether I would. And he wanted to find out early.

She sat with that for about a week. Then she wrote the rest of it.

Which means he was not doing it to get rid of me. He was doing it to know.

And a boy of twelve who must know immediately whether the person in the room is going to stay — who cannot wait, and cannot be told, and has to make them show him — is not a boy who wants people to leave.

Her hand stopped.

He is a boy who has been told something once by somebody, and has found out that it was not true.

She did not know what it was. She wrote that down too, and it was the honest end of four months of thinking.

I have got no idea what he was told. It is not my business and I shall very likely never know it. But I have taught in four houses in three years, and I have never once met a child who tests people that carefully. And the ones who come near it have all had one thing in common.

She wrote the last line slowly.

And the thing is that somebody promised them something, and it did not happen.

Kit wrote to her in the sixth week.

Four pages about a heron, and about a hawk he had seen twice, and about a book he wanted. And one line at the bottom, in a nine-year-old’s hand, that Susanna Frail read about a hundred times.

Ned says I am not to ask you when you are coming back, so I will not ask you.

She answered it inside two days. Four pages back, about the birds at Devizes and about a book he could get from his father’s library.

She did not answer the last line at all.

He wrote every fortnight for four months. She answered every one inside two days.

And about the fifth letter, he stopped putting anything at the bottom.