“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 8

“I know it,” said Susanna Frail. “And I have known since about the third month that you were waiting for it. And I have thought about it a great deal, and I want to tell you why there was not one.”

He waited.

“You gave me forty pounds a year so that I need never take a place I did not want. And the whole of what that money is for is undone the first time I use it to ask you for anything.”

She set her cup down.

“So I have taken two rooms over a saddler’s at nine pounds, and I have found another twenty pounds a year through my pupils, and I am now a woman of nineteen with about sixty pounds a year and a house nobody can put me out of.” She looked at him. “And I want you to understand that this is not pride and it is not a rebuke. It is that in about a year, if you ask me something, I shall be able to answer it. And there is no other road to that, and I have looked for one since the spring.”

Henry put down his cup.

“May I say something?” he said. “And it is going to be extremely selfish, and I have been three weeks deciding whether to say it at all.”

“Say it.”

“I have had five governesses since Caroline died. Two of them since you went. The last one was in the house nine days.” He said it steadily. “And I have understood something in the last month, and it has very nearly finished me.”

“Sir.”

“I have got no idea what is the matter with my sons.”

Susanna Frail sat very still.

“None whatever,” said the Duke of Caro. “I have watched it happen five times. I have talked to Ned four separate times in two years, and he has been perfectly reasonable and perfectly sorry, and I have got nowhere at all. And about a month ago I sat in my own estate room and worked out that I have not the first idea what that boy thinks about anything.”

His hand closed on the arm of the chair.

“He is twelve. He has been in my house every day of his life, and I could not tell you one true thing about him.”

“He writes to me,” said Susanna.

Henry’s head came up.

“Since the winter. About every fortnight. And I answer every one.” She held his gaze. “And I want you to know that I have never once asked him about you, or about the house, or about any of it. And I am not going to.”

“Miss Frail—”

“And I am going to say something now that you will not like, and I have been waiting three weeks for you to give me an opening.” She folded her hands. “He has told me two true things in four months, and both of them came at the bottom of pages about something else. And I have got a fairly good idea what is the matter with your eldest son. And I am not going to tell you.”

He was silent.

“And I want to explain why before you are angry with me.”

“Then explain it.”

“Because it is his,” said Susanna Frail.

The room was very quiet. Below them, someone in the saddler’s shop was hammering a rivet.

“He has told me things at the bottom of pages about the tides. And if I take those and hand them to you across a table in Marberry, then I am the fifth grown person who has arranged that boy over his own head.” She paused. “And he will find out. He always finds out. It is the only thing he is really good at.”

Henry did not speak.

“And I shall be finished with him. And so will you.”

“He has got to tell you,” she said. “Not me, and not Mrs. Ivory. You.”

“He will not.”

“No,” said Susanna Frail. “He will not. Because he has been talking to you for two years, and you have been talking to a boy who is sorry.”

She said the rest of it without softening it.

“And I have got exactly one thing to say about that, and then I shall not raise it again. You have never once asked him a question you did not know the answer to.”

Henry, Duke of Caro, sat in a room over a saddler’s shop.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Four conversations in two years, you have just told me. And every single one of them was about a governess who had gone. And you knew what had happened, and he knew you knew, and you were asking him to admit it.” Her voice was level and it did not let him off. “That is not a question, sir. That is an examination. And he has passed four of them.”

Henry looked at the floorboards.

“Ask him something you do not know the answer to.”

“Such as what?”

“I have no idea,” said Susanna Frail.

She said it plainly.

“That is the whole of it, and it is the only honest thing I have got. I am not going to write you a question, because a question you have been given by a governess is not a question either.” She stood up and took the cups. “You have got a boy of twelve and you have not asked him anything in two years that you did not already know. Start there. And I shall not help you, and I am sorry — and I have thought about this for a month, and it is the only thing I am certain of.”

Henry went home and did nothing at all for about six weeks.

And then he did it, on a Sunday afternoon, in the schoolroom, with a basin of water.

He told Susanna about it afterward, in Marberry, in about a quarter of an hour — and she made him tell her twice. He had found the basin. That was the beginning of it. He had been in the schoolroom for some other reason and had found a basin on the shelf, and had asked Kit what it was for.

And Kit had said, “Ned does the tides with it.”

So Henry had said to Ned, on that Sunday: Will you show me the tides?

And a boy of twelve had looked at his father for about four seconds.

And had then gone and got the basin.

It took about half an hour. Ned did the whole of it — the moon and the sun and the spring tides and the neaps — and got about three-quarters of it right, and was wrong about one thing in a way that took him four minutes to explain, and that was extremely interesting.

And at the end of it, Henry said, “Where did you get the last part? The bit about the bay?”

“Out of the book with the green spine, in the third case.”

“I have never read that book.”

“No,” said Ned. “I know.”

And Henry sat down on the floor of his own schoolroom beside a basin of water, and said the thing he had been six weeks working up to without knowing it.

“Ned. What does your mother’s hand look like?”