Charlotte Louise Dolan (16 page)

But it was hard, nevertheless, to resist the impulse to explain. Never before had Bronson’s conduct been found wanting, and now, in the space of less than an hour, two different people had virtually accused him of failing to fulfill his obligations. He was not in the least pleased with their opinion of his character.

* * * *

“But if you leave, who’ll teach me to read?” Anne looked at Sally, who was supposed to be helping with the packing, but who instead was expending all her energies on trying to dissuade Anne from her course. They had been going around and around the same arguments for at least half an hour, and it was beginning to give Anne a headache. “I have told you already, I have no recourse but to leave.” “But you told me that a lady can do anything she sets her mind to. Does that mean you don’t want to stay?”

“Whether I want to or not has nothing to do with the case. Circumstances are such that I can no longer stay here, and that is that.” Anne folded her best Sunday dress and laid it in her portmanteau.

“But it wasn’t your fault that Trussell came to your room. Everyone knows it wasn’t, and we’re all willing to vouch for that if m’lord don’t believe you. You ain’t the kind of female to let men kiss you.”

Sally was wrong in her opinion, but Anne could hardly tell her that she apparently was that kind. She had stood there in the library and let Lord Leatham kiss her not once, but twice. It was the second kiss that made it impossible for her to beg to be allowed to stay.

If she so much as hinted that she might reconsider her decision to leave Wylington Manor, Lord Leatham would undoubtedly try to persuade her to stay by kissing her again. Her hands trembled at the thought, but her mind remained resolute.

“Are you going to help me pack, or are you going to stand there arguing all night?”

“Neither.” Sally marched to the door and jerked it open. “If you’re set on leaving the rest of us to try an’ handle them twins, don’t expect me or anyone else in this household to help you pack. And I ‘spect you’ll be having to walk to Tavistock, too, ‘cause I don’t think anyone’s going to drive you, neither. You may have charmed those boys into being good as gold, but ‘thout you here, they’re positively heathenish.”

With that parting shot the maid was gone, leaving Anne to her thoughts.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Anne threw down a stack of neatly folded handkerchiefs and began to pace back and forth in her room. How on earth had she managed to get herself into such a predicament? She had been prepared to humble herself, to beg for another chance, even to admit she had been in the wrong—even though everything that had happened had been Trussell’s fault from start to finish.

In short, she had been ready to do or say anything in order to stay on as the twins’ governess.

Instead of which, in what was obviously a fit of insanity caused by too much kissing, she had told Lord Leatham that she was leaving. Apparently she had sounded convincing, because he had made not the slightest effort to persuade her to remain.

Even if she now ignored the kisses and acted as if they had never happened, there was no way she could seek Lord Leatham out and say she had changed her mind, could she please stay on until the end of the summer?

All that would accomplish would be to prove to him that she was a typical fickle female—moody, hysterical, unpredictable—totally unsuited to taking care of two young boys. Any claims she might have to authority in the household would be thoroughly undermined, even if Lord Leatham did not try to kiss her again.

No, there was nothing for it but to retreat in ignominy to Aunt Sidonia’s. Not that she would be able to tell her aunt what had happened here in Devon.

Oh, Lord, what a muddle everything was in. Well, at least she would have plenty of time on the stagecoach to think up a good story to explain why she had, for the first time in her career, lost a perfectly good position.

For a moment, she could hear in her mind an echo of the speech she had made to the boys about always telling the truth, and she wished with all her heart that she could go back and start the day over again.

* * * *

The entire situation, as bad as it was already, continued to deteriorate. After an hour of staring at the estate books and seeing only angry blue eyes in place of columns of neat figures, Bronson gave up and retired to his own room, where he found Daws waiting.

His normally taciturn valet had, however, become uncharacteristically loquacious, but then after such a day, why should Bronson expect anyone to be acting in a normal manner?

“The general belief belowstairs seems to be that if you lets that governess quit, the twins are going to make life a merry hell for everyone. And it would appear that finding a replacement for her is not going to be an easy task. You should have thought of that before you fired her.”

“I did not fire her!”

There was dead silence in the room following his outburst. Daws stared at him, but Bronson could not read the expression on his manservant’s face.

“She quit,” he added finally.

Daws gave a low whistle. “Then, m’lord, you’ve got yourself in a powerful bad position. I’ve been hearing tales about the mischief those two used to get into before Miss Hemsworth came to take charge of them. Why once they hid in the house for a full sennight and no one could find them. The woman who was supposed to be governess at the time enlisted the aid of all the servants indoor and out, but it was like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Food would disappear, and they heard footsteps at night, but no one caught sight of the twins. ‘Tis a big house, but even when Braithwaite was called in to organize a proper search, they never found out where they’d been staying all those days. Yes, if I was you, I’d find a way to persuade Miss Hemsworth to stay on.”

“I would if I could, but I cannot,” Bronson replied baldly, unable to explain about the two kisses. If it were just a matter of convincing Miss Hemsworth that he really did have the boys’ best interests at heart, it would be a simple matter. But how to convince her he was not merely using the twins’ welfare as a ruse to keep her around so that he would have an opportunity to seduce her?

Especially since the idea of Miss Hemsworth in his bed was so totally appealing?

“Then you’re really in the suds, m’lord. Who’s going to take care of them two little demons, I’d like to know? Ain’t nobody in the household going to want to get near them. They’re bound to be mad as hops, and they’re trouble enough even when they’re just in high spirits.”

“I shall take charge of the boys myself.”

Daws looked at him in astonishment, but he was no more surprised than Bronson himself. On the other hand, now that he thought it over, it was not such a bad idea. The twins could undoubtedly profit from a little man-to-man instruction before they went off to school at Harrow, where it would not do at all for a Roebuck to be thought a sissy. Family pride demanded they make a good showing.

“In fact, I shall go up to the schoolroom and explain the situation to the boys right now, before they hear about it from a servant.”

* * * *

“But we told you how necessary it is for Anne to stay.”

Whichever twin it was, and Bronson had to admit he did not know if it was Anthony or Andrew, the boy made no effort to conceal his displeasure.

“It was not my fault.” Bronson found himself becoming adept at making excuses. He had reached the point that he no longer felt the slightest surprise at such uncharacteristic behavior— acting totally out of character seemed to be normal for this day. “I did not tell her she was fired.”

“Then why is she packing her bags?”

The other twin, either Andrew or Anthony, was equally indignant.

Why had Miss Hemsworth insisted upon leaving? She had babbled something about the twins being neglected, but that was surely no cause to abandon them herself—which left only the kisses he had forced on her. It was not surprising that a lady of the highest moral rectitude would refuse to stay under the same roof as a man who assaulted a woman on the streets of Tavistock and then repeated the offense in his own household.

“I am afraid it may—” Bronson stumbled over the words he had not had occasion to use in years, “—be my fault she is leaving.”

“Then,” one of the twins announced with surprising authority, “it is up to you to make amends.”

“Yes. Anne says that if you do something wrong, then it is up to you to do something right, to do something constructive to fix the problem,” the other twin explained. “You cannot simply pretend that being sorry for what you did is all that is necessary.”

“If you have trouble figuring out what to do, we would be glad to help you think of something.” One of the twins looked up at him calmly.

“Yes, we are very ingenious,” the other one added.

The two of them looked at one another for a long moment, then back at him. “You might keep that in mind.”

His tone of voice was quite bland and their smiles were now sweetly angelic, yet looking at them Bronson felt a strong urge to flee from the house, from Devon, and in fact from England itself. How had he ever, even for a minute, thought the boys might have trouble adjusting to Harrow?

The question now in his mind was whether Harrow was capable of surviving the twins.

* * * *

“The thing of it is, m’lord, that they somehow got hold of my keys, because that morning, ‘twas shortly before Michaelmas last, we woke up to find they’d locked us all in our rooms. What was we to do, I ask you? No one of us could get out and fetch the keys to unlock the doors, so we had to wait nearly till teatime before Mr. Braithwaite came to confer with Cook and discovered our plight. So you see, don’t you, that you really must persuade Miss Hemsworth to stay on. Perhaps if you doubled her salary?”

“Yes, yes, Mrs. Plimtree. I have already said I shall do my best to see that the situation is arranged to everyone’s satisfaction.” Bronson opened the door of his study to signify that the interview was over, but standing outside in the hallway were several more servants waiting to interview him. With a sigh, he waved the next one in.

This was really not the way he preferred to start the day, especially since he had lain awake most of the night, reliving over and over again the events of the previous day.

* * * *

“And then when they were nine, Miss Hemsworth, what did they do, but climb up the ivy on the wall all the way to the top floor, where they drew on my window with soot. When I pulled my curtains back the next morning, like I always do, there was this hideous grinning face staring in at me. Like to scare me to death, it did. Thought some fiend was there wanting to break in and murder us all in our beds. I ‘bout had a seizure on the spot. Screamed so loud, the footmen all came running and Mr. Chorley even, and there I was in my nightclothes! I like to have died of embarrassment, Miss Hemsworth. Please, you can’t go away and leave them two to their own devices. Why, when they were just nine and a half—”

The cook appeared ready to go on for hours describing in detail the twins’ checkered pasts, so Anne attempted to forestall her. “I am sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but the matter is not for me to decide.”

“—they hit on the idea of having a race, using Mr. Barrow’s prize sows as their mounts....”

* * * *

“It had us all buffaloed, m’lord. Every time the wind was out of the northwest, it seemed as if the whole house was crying. Then the twins claimed they found a book in the library, which appeared to explain it. ‘Twas all about how the first Marquess of Wylington had murdered his wife, and she was crying for revenge. I tell you, m’lord, the wailing was so unearthly, you’d ha’ thought it was a dozen poor souls tormented in the fires of hell. Gave us the willies, it did, and several of us was thinking of handin’ in our notice, so bad it was. It went on for weeks, with all of us ready to jump out of our skins, till the roofer came out from Tavistock to replace some slates that had come loose. He discovered someone had tied some pipes up to one of the chimneys in such a way that the wind would blow across them, like the way you can blow across a bottle.”

Bronson looked at the footman, who appeared physically stalwart, but who was apparently easily spooked. “And you suspect the twins? I would not have thought they would be allowed out on the roof.”

“But that’s it. That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you. ‘Thout Miss Hemsworth, it ain’t a question of what somebody allows the twins to do—them boys just do what they please and no one can stop them.”

“Well, you need have no worries. I have decided to take over the day-to-day supervision of the twins myself.”

The footman looked at him, opened his mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut again. Rising to his feet, he left the room, shaking his head all the way.

Once the servant was gone, Bronson could not hold back his mirth. The twins had told him they were ingenious, but he had envisioned something more along the line of fixing buckets of water to fall on people’s heads when they opened doors, or putting frogs in the maid’s pockets, or snakes in the footmen’s boots.

There was a light tap on the door, and Bronson wiped the smile from his face before calling out to whomever it was to come in. It was Chorley, the butler.

“Begging your pardon, m’lord, but I was hoping I might speak to you on Miss Hemsworth’s behalf. You may perhaps be unaware of the fact that your wards are a trifle high-spirited.”

If Bronson had been unaware of the extent of the twins’ mischief before, he could definitely no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.

“It’s not that I don’t like the little marquess and his brother, whichever one is which, but it was rather upsetting last October when I discovered they’d taken apart the great clock.”

“The clock?” Bronson hoped he was managing to keep his amusement from showing.

“The one that has always stood in the blue salon, m’lord, ever since your grandfather, God rest his soul, brought it back from France. No one is even allowed to wind it except me, but those two had not only taken it completely apart, but they had it halfway back together before anyone discovered what they were doing.”