“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 7

She heard about the rest of it from Mrs. Ivory, who wrote once in the November, and who had plainly thought about it for some time before she did.

Miss Frail, I am taking a liberty, and I have been three weeks deciding to, and I shall not do it again.

There have been two governesses since you went. The first was here five weeks, and the second was here nine days. I am not going to tell you what happened, because I do not entirely know, and because Master Edward has apologized properly both times and there is nothing anybody can put a finger on, and I have watched his grace try twice and get nowhere.

I shall tell you one thing that I have not told him, and I have thought about it a great deal.

Master James has stopped asking about you.

He asked about you every day for about nine weeks, and he stopped in the last week of October. And I have known that child since he was born, and he has not stopped because he has forgotten. He has stopped because Master Edward told him to.

Susanna Frail read that letter in a bedroom at Devizes, and sat with it for about an hour.

Then she got out her own list and read the whole of it again, and wrote one line underneath everything she had written in four months.

Two more in four months. Five weeks, and nine days.

He is getting faster.

I have been sitting in this house for four months telling myself that I am waiting until I do not want anything from that man. And there is a boy of twelve, forty-two miles away, who is running out of governesses — and is going to run out of something else fairly soon. And I have been extremely careful about my own conscience while it happened.

She gave Lady Merchant a month’s notice on the first of February.

And she did not write to Henry about it.

She wrote to Ned.

The letter to Ned took her four evenings, and she burned three of them.

The difficulty was that everything she wanted to say was a promise — and she had understood by about the second evening that a promise was the one thing that boy would not take from anybody.

I am coming back was a promise.

I have thought about you every day was a promise dressed up as a fact.

I did not want to go was worse than either, because it was true, and because he had no possible way of testing it, and would know that.

What she sent in the end was nine lines, and it was the fourth attempt.

Edward,

I have given Lady Merchant a month’s notice and I shall leave here at the end of February.

I have not written to your father and I am not going to until after you have had this.

I am not coming back to Caro. I want to say that in the second sentence so that you are not reading the rest of this waiting for it.

I am going to take a house at Marberry, which is nine miles from you. And I have got forty pounds a year of my own that your father settled on me in the spring and which he cannot take back. And I shall have to find another twenty pounds a year, and I have not the smallest idea how yet.

I am telling you because you are twelve, and because everybody in your life has arranged things over your head, and I am not going to be another one.

You may tell your brothers or not tell them. That is yours, and I shall not write to them about it.

I do not want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do about any of this.

S. Frail

The answer came in nine days.

It was four lines long, and it was not what she had expected at all.

Miss Frail,

Nine miles is a great deal further than forty-two when there is no carriage. And I have looked it up in the book in Papa’s library, so I know what I am saying.

Why Marberry and not here?

E.

Susanna Frail read that four times.

And she understood exactly what she was being asked, and answered it in one line, and sent it the same day.

Because if I come back to Caro, I am the governess who came back. And in about six weeks, you will have to find out whether I shall go. And I would rather not make you do it again.

S.F.

She got nothing for a fortnight.

And then a letter came that was six pages long, and was the strangest thing Susanna Frail ever received — because about five and a half pages of it were about the tides.

They were extremely good pages.

A boy of twelve had gone into his father’s library and had read four things about the tides, and had got about three-quarters of it right, and had written it all out for a woman forty-two miles away who had once watched him explain it to his brother with a basin of water.

And at the bottom of the sixth page, there were four lines.

Papa has had two more since you, and one of them was here nine days. I did that and I am not sorry, and I shall not pretend to be sorry to you, because you would know. I have not done anything to the one before that. She went by herself, and I want that written down.

Marberry is a market town, and there is a school in it. And I have looked that up too.

E.

Susanna Frail sat in a bedroom at Devizes with six pages about the tides.

He has told me the truth about a thing he has never told anybody, in four lines at the bottom of five pages about the moon.

She read it again.

And then he has told me there is a school at Marberry.

She took the house at Marberry at the end of February. Two rooms over a saddler’s shop, at nine pounds a year.

And the twenty pounds she needed, she got by taking day pupils.

That was Ned’s idea, and she never once let anybody pretend otherwise.

She had four of them by the spring — three girls and a boy, all from the town, at about two guineas a quarter. By the summer she had seven, and had to stop. By the second year she had a room downstairs, and nine.

It was the first money Susanna Frail had ever earned that was not a wage, and she wrote about it once, in the first summer, in about four lines.

I have got seven pupils and forty pounds and two rooms over a saddler’s, and I am nineteen years old, and this is the first place I have ever lived in that nobody can put me out of.

She blotted it.

I have been in four houses in three years, and in every one of them my bed belonged to somebody else.

Henry came to Marberry in the third week, and she had known he would.

She had written to him at last from the new address — four lines, telling him where she was and what she was doing, and that she was extremely well.

He came on the Thursday, and stood in the street, looking up at a saddler’s shop for about a minute before he knocked.

She took him upstairs and gave him tea in a room about twelve feet by ten.

“You have not asked me for anything,” he said.

“No.”

“You have been forty-two miles away for four months, and then nine miles away for three weeks. And you have taken a house and got seven pupils. And you have written me four lines about it.” He turned the cup in his hands. “And I have been sitting in that estate room since the spring, waiting for a letter that asked me for something.”