“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 9

Susanna Frail heard it in Marberry six weeks later. She put down what she was holding.

“Why did you ask that?”

“Because I had nothing else,” said Henry.

He said it without dressing it.

“I had asked him about the tides and he had answered it. And I understood, on that floor, that if I asked him about a governess, the whole thing was finished. And it was the only question in my head that I did not know the answer to.”

He looked at the table between them.

“I do not know what my wife’s handwriting looked like to my children. I know what it looked like to me. And I sat on that floor and understood that I had no idea whether they could remember it.”

“And what did he say?”

Henry was quiet for a moment.

“He said, ‘I have got a letter.'”

Caroline, Duchess of Caro, had written to her eldest son about a week before she died.

She had given it to him herself. She had told him not to read it until she said.

She had never said.

Ned had had that letter for two years, and had read it perhaps four hundred times, and had never once shown it to any living creature.

He showed it to his father on the floor of the schoolroom, on a Sunday afternoon in the summer.

It was four lines.

My dear Ned,

I am going to be perfectly well and there is nothing at all the matter, and I want you to stop worrying, because I have watched you worrying since the spring and you are ten years old and it is not your business.

I shall be up by the end of the month and we shall do the tides again.

Your loving mama.

Henry read that on the floor of his own schoolroom and could not speak for about a minute.

And Ned — twelve years old, entirely level, in the voice he had used on four governesses — said:

“She said she was going to be perfectly well, and then she was not.”

“Son—”

“And I have thought about it for two years.” His hands were in his lap. “And I know she was not lying. She thought she was going to be well. Everybody thought so. Dr. Reed thought so. You thought so.”

He looked at his father.

“So she was not lying, and it was not true. And I have not been able to get past that since I was ten. Because if a person can say a thing like that and mean it and be wrong — then there is no possible way to tell ever about anybody.”

Henry sat on that floor.

“That is why the governesses,” he said.

“Yes.”

And then Ned said it — properly, the way he did everything.

“I want to say it properly because I have never said it,” he said. “They all say they will stay. Every single one of them. Miss Peele said it in the first week, and Miss Kell said it, and Miss Ardan said it about four times. And Miss Frail never said it once. And that is why she was here five months.”

He was not crying. He was perfectly composed, and that was worse.

“And I have got no way of knowing which of them means it. Because mama meant it.” He paused. “So I find out early. That is all it is. I would rather know in six weeks than believe somebody for four years and find out at the end.”

Henry told his sons how their mother died in the autumn.

It took him four days to get to it and about a quarter of an hour to do.

He did it badly, and Susanna Frail always said that this was the best thing about it.

He got Dr. Reed to come first — not to be in the room, which Ned would have hated, but to sit with Henry in the estate room for an hour on the Tuesday and tell him the whole of it exactly, in order, in words a boy of twelve and a boy of nine could carry.

Amos Reed was three-and-sixty and had attended the late duchess, and had been the family’s physician nineteen years.

And at the end of that hour he said one thing that Henry repeated to Susanna about four times over the following year.

“Your grace, I have been asked to explain a death in a house about four hundred times in nineteen years. And I have never once been asked to explain one to the children. Not once. Not in nineteen years.”

The old physician had picked up his bag.

“And I have sat in a great many houses afterward and watched what happens in them. And I want to tell you that about half the difficulty in about half of those houses came out of that, and out of nothing else.”

Henry told them on the Friday, in the small parlor, with the door shut and nobody else in the room.

He told them that their mother had been going to have a fourth child. He told them that this was not a thing that was usually dangerous, and that everybody — including the physician — had believed she would be perfectly well. He told them that something had gone wrong in the birth that Dr. Reed had explained to him twice, and that he would explain to them as often as they wanted.

He told them it had happened quickly, and that she had not been frightened at the end, because she had not known.

And he told them that the baby had been a girl, and had not lived either — and that this was a thing they had never been told, and that he was sorry about it, and could not explain why he had not.

Kit was nine and asked about four questions and then cried.

Jamie was six, nearly seven, and did not understand most of it, and cried because his brother was crying, and Henry held him for about a quarter of an hour.

And Ned listened to the whole of it, standing by the window, and said nothing at all until the end.

And then he said one thing.

“Was it my fault for worrying?”

Henry — who had prepared about nine answers over four days, and had not prepared that one — said the only thing he had.

“No, Ned.”

He crossed the room and crouched down to his son’s eye level.

“No. Look at me. No. She wrote you that letter because you were worrying, and she wanted you to stop. And she was right that it was not your business. And she was wrong that she was going to be well. And neither of those has got one single thing to do with what happened.”

He said it slowly, so it could be taken in.

“Nothing you did or did not do made any difference to it whatever. And I shall say that to you every day for the rest of my life if you want me to.”

“I do not want you to say it every day,” said Ned.

He was looking at his father.

“I want you to say it about four times and then stop. Because if you say it every day, I shall stop believing it.”