The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide (40 page)

Coming soon in early 2017

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN

The sequel to
Four Nights with the Duke

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here
to preorder!

[9780062389466]

Nothing ruins a dinner party like expertise. A lady who has attended fourteen lectures about Chinese statuary will Ming this and Ming that all evening; a baron who has published an essay about vultures in a zoological magazine will undoubtedly hold forth on the unpleasant habits of carrion-eaters.

Eugenia Snowe’s area of expertise, to the contrary, would have made dinner guests squeal with laughter, if only it were appropriate to share. For example, she knew precisely how the Countess of Bedford’s second-best wig had made its way onto the head of a terrified piglet, who dashed across the terrace when the vicar was taking tea. She knew which of the Duke of Fletcher’s offspring had stolen a golden toothpick
and
an enameled chamber pot and, even better, what he did with them.

Not only did she have to keep those delicious details to herself—she couldn’t even burst into laughter until she was in private. As the owner of the most elite agency for governesses in the whole of the British Isles, she had to maintain decorum at all times.

No laughing! Not even when her parlor maid ushered in a boy wearing a tapestry curtain pinned like a Roman toga—although the gleaming, glistening blue that covered the exposed bits of his body warred with the senatorial drape of his clothing.

His mother, Lady Pibble, trailed in after him. Eugenia didn’t see many blue boys in the course of a day, but she often saw mothers with the hysterical air of a woman who has failed to corral the species of wild animal known as an eight-year-old boy.

“Lady Pibble and the Honorable Marmeduke Pibble,” her parlor maid announced.

“Good afternoon, Winnie,” Eugenia said, rising from her desk and coming around to greet her ladyship with genuine pleasure. Her old school-friend Winifred was lovely, as sweet and soft as meringue.

Alas, those are not helpful characteristics when it comes to raising children. Fate or Nature had cunningly matched Winnie with her opposite: Marmeduke was a devilishly troublesome boy by any measure, and Eugenia considered herself an expert on the subject.

“I can’t do it!” Lady Winifred wailed by way of greeting, staggering across the room and collapsing on the sofa. “I’m at my wit’s end, Eugenia. My
wit’s end!
If you don’t give me a governess, I shall leave him here with you. I mean it!” The way her voice rose to a shriek made her threat very persuasive.

Marmeduke didn’t seem in the least dismayed at the idea of being deserted in Snowe’s Registry Office. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Snowe,” he said cheerfully, making a reasonable bow considering that he was holding a homemade bow, a fistful of arrows, and an extremely fat frog. “I’m an ancient Pict and a smuggler,” he announced.

“Good afternoon, Marmeduke. I didn’t realize that smugglers came in different hues,” Eugenia observed.

“Smugglers may not be blue, but Picts always are,” he explained. “They were Irish warriors who painted themselves for battle. My father told me about them.” He held up his frog. “I started to paint Fred too, but he didn’t like it.”

“Fred is looking considerably plumper than last time I met him,” Eugenia said.

“You were right about cabbage worms,” he said, grinning. “He loves them.”

“I can smell beeswax—which I gather turned you blue—but is that odor of river mud thanks to Fred?”

Marmeduke sniffed loudly, and nodded. “Fred stinks.”

“Don’t say ‘stinks,’ darling,” his mother said from the depths of the sofa, where she had draped the handkerchief over her eyes. “You may describe something as smelly, but only if you absolutely must.”

“He smells like a rotten egg,” Marmeduke elaborated. “Though not nearly as rank as Lady Hubert when she came out of the river.”

Winnie gave a stifled moan, the kind one might hear from a woman in the grips of labor. “I almost forgot about the river. Eugenia, I am
not
going home until you give me a governess.”

“I cannot,” Eugenia said patiently. “I’ve explained to you, Winnie, that—”

Winnie sat up, handkerchief clutched in her hand, and pointed to her son. “Tell her!” she said in throbbing accents. “Tell her what you said to Lady Hubert! I wouldn’t drag him here if it was simply a matter of turning blue. I am inured to dirt.”

For the first time, Marmeduke looked a bit fidgety, shifting his weight to one leg and tucking the other up so that he looked like a blue stork. “Lady Hubert said that I should always tell the truth, so I did.”

“That sounds ominous,” Eugenia said, biting back yet another smile. “Where were you when Lady Hubert gave you this inestimable advice?”

“We were having a picnic by Thames, down at the bottom of our lawn,” Winnie said, answering for her son. “Did I mention that Lady Hubert is Marmeduke’s godmother and has no children of her own? We had rather hoped. . .but no. After today,
no
.”

“She gave me a sermon just like those in church except that she’s a lady,” Marmeduke said, apparently deciding to get it over with. “She said as how deceit and hippocrasty are barriers to a holy life.”

“Hypocrisy,” Eugenia said. “Do go on.”

“So I did it.”

“What?”

“Well, first I entertained her by doing the dance of the Picts. They’re wild savages. They howl. Would you like to see?” He gave Eugenia a hopeful look.

She shook her head. “I shall use my imagination. Did Lady Hubert enjoy your performance?”

“She didn’t like it much,” Marmeduke conceded, “but she wasn’t too stuffed. Then she asked me what I thought about the book of church history that she had brought me for my birthday last month, and had I read the whole thing.”

“Oh dear,” Eugenia said.

“I was being honest, like she said to, so I told her that I didn’t like it because it was boring and three hundred pages long. Mother was kerfluffled after that, but she settled down and after a while, Lady Hubert asked me what I thought of her new gown. I said that it would look better if she hadn’t eaten an entire side of beef. Father always said that about her.”

“It was not kind to repeat your father’s comment,” Eugenia said. She had discovered over the years that children learned best from simple statements of fact.

He scowled. “I was being honest and besides, after I did the warrior dance she said that my father likely passed on because he needed a rest cure.”

“That was
truly
unkind,” Eugenia said with her own scowl, “and very untrue, Marmeduke. Your father was a war hero who would have done anything to stay with you and your mother.”

She glanced over at Winnie, who was flat on her back again with an arm thrown over her eyes.

Marmeduke hunched up one shoulder by way of reply.

“Did you throw, push, or otherwise inveigle Lady Hubert into the Thames?” Eugenia said, feeling a wave of dislike for the lady in question.

“No! She fell in all by herself.”

“After a horned beetle that my son had around his person found its way onto her arm and ran inside her sleeve,” Winnie clarified.

“I wouldn’t have thought she could leap like that,” Marmeduke said, with an air of scientific discovery. “Being as she was so large and all, but she did, and into the water she went.”

“Head first,” Winnie added hollowly.

“I wish I’d seen it,” Eugenia said, pulling the cord to summon her parlor maid.

“It was funny,” Marmeduke confided, “because her clothes were all frilly pink underneath, though of course they had turned black by the time we hauled her out. I had to run for the footmen, and then two grooms as well, because the bank was so slippery with mud that it was hard to haul her out. The butler said later that it was like getting a water buffalo out of a mud hole.”

“That’s an extremely vulgar description,” his mother said, with the patient voice of a vicar sermonizing in Latin to an audience of laborers.

The door opened. “Ruby,” Eugenia said, “I should like you to take Master Marmeduke into the garden and throw a few buckets of water over him.”

“Mrs. Snowe!” Marmeduke said, dropping back a step, his eyes widening.

“It’s not only Fred who smells. What did you mix in the beeswax to get that color?”

“Indigo powder from my paint box but the color wasn’t right so I mashed up some blueberries too.”

“A good washing should get off the blueberries,” Eugenia said to Ruby. “I’m not sure about the indigo powder.”

“I don’t want to,” Marmeduke wailed. “Mommy said that I could keep it on until bedtime.”

“Fred is looking very dry,” Eugenia said firmly. “He needs a bath as well.”

Ruby was the eldest of seven; she walked over Marmeduke, took his arm, and marched him straight out of the room.

Winnie sat up to watch him go, blotting her eyes. “He wouldn’t have gone with me, nor with Nanny either. May I borrow your parlor maid for a governess?”

Eugenia sat down beside the sofa. “Marmeduke needs to go to school, dear.”

“He’s my baby,” Winnie said, her eyes filling with tears again. “I merely need a governess, Eugenia. Why won’t you give me a governess?”

“Because Marmeduke needs to be around other boys. Didn’t his father put his name down for Eton?”

“I can’t let him go.”

“You must.”

“You don’t understand,” Winnie wailed. “Darling Marmeduke is all I have left of John. You just don’t know how hard it is to be widowed and all alone!”

There was a moment’s silence.

“I didn’t mean that,” Winnie said hastily. “Of course, you’re a widow too.”

“But it’s different for you,” Eugenia said. “For me, it’s been seven years.”

“That’s what I meant,” Winnie said, blowing her nose. “I just want my son home with me, where he belongs.”

“He belongs with other boys. This is the third time you’ve been to see me in as many weeks, isn’t it?”

Winnie nodded, her blue eyes filling with tears again. “There was that thing that happened to the cat—its fur is all growing back in, thank goodness—and then all the frontispieces of the hymn books. Yesterday the vicar greeted me in a horridly stiff manner. And my Uncle Theodore still believes that we have a monkey as a pet; I daren’t tell him what really happened to his corset.”

Eugenia wrapped her arm around Winnie. “Eton,” she said firmly. “Send them a letter and tell them Marmeduke will attend the Michaelmas Term. I’ll send you a tutor, a young man who can take your son fishing when they’re done with studies.”

“His father planned to teach him to fish, just as soon as he got back from fighting in Portugal,” Winnie said, hiccupping and then dissolving back into tears.

“Oh, honey,” Eugenia whispered, easing Winnie’s head onto her shoulder. When she had begun the registry office seven years ago, she’d had no idea that she’d find herself at the center of so many domestic crises. She could write a book about the hidden dramas of high society.

Of course, when it came to widowhood, birth or place in society was irrelevant.

The desk was piled with letters, and there were undoubtedly parents waiting to see her in the parlor. Eugenia rocked Winnie back and forth as she watched Marmeduke scampering around the back garden.

“I suppose I’ll take him home now,” Winnie said damply, straightening up. “Nanny will not be pleased by what’s happened to the nursery curtain.”

“I think tea and cakes are in order,” Eugenia said. “Eight year old boys are always hungry.”

“I couldn’t! You don’t want him to sit down on your lovely chairs.”

That was true.

“Take him to a tea garden,” Eugenia suggested. “You can sit outside, which means Fred won’t cause a commotion either.”

“Only if you come with us.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I have appointments this afternoon.”

Winnie’s eyes widened. “Oh no, I’m so sorry! There was a lady waiting, but I rushed past her and demanded to see you.” She scrambled to her feet and snatched up her reticule. “My dear, you are such a comfort to me! Send me a tutor!” she called as she trotted out the door.

Eugenia ought to have returned to her desk, but instead she stood at the window and watched as Winnie chased her son, still faintly blue, around and around the fountain where Fred was enjoying a bath.

Even through the beveled glass, she could hear Marmeduke’s screams and Winnie’s laughter.

It seemed to her that widowhood would be bearable if your husband left behind a child, a part of himself.

The door popped open behind her. “Ma’am, may I send in Mrs. Seaton-Roby?”

“Yes,” Eugenia said, turning about. “Of course.”

Theodore Edward Braxton Reeve—Ward, to his intimate friends—walked up the steps to Snowe’s Registry Office thinking about how many governesses he’d chased away as a boy.

He had vivid memories of the dour women who had come through the door of his house—and what their backs looked like as they marched right back out the door.

If his father and stepmother hadn’t been traveling abroad, he would have dropped by their house to apologize, if only because his young wards seemed capable of topping his score, and it was a pain in the arse to be on the other side.

Frankly, his half-siblings Lizzie and Otis—whom he hadn’t known existed until a few days ago—were hellions. Devils. Very small devils with trouble stamped on their foreheads.
Their
governess had been in the household for only forty-eight hours, which had to be a record.

He was greeted by a footman who eyed him sharply from head to foot before ushering him into a reception chamber. Snowe’s wasn’t at all what Ward had expected, from that burly guard posing as a footman to the empty room in which he found himself.

He had envisioned a cluster of women sitting about, waiting to be dispatched to nurseries—and he planned to choose whichever one most resembled a general in the Royal Marines.

This chamber looked more like a lady’s parlor than a waiting room. It was elegantly appointed, from the tassels adorning thick silk drapes to the gilded chairs. In fact, it was about as fancy as any room he’d seen in a lifetime of living in his father’s various houses.

And his father was an earl.

That said, Snowe probably had to put on the dog in order to convince people to pay his outrageous fees. Since Ward needed his young brother to be up to snuff so he could enter Eton in September, he was prepared to pay whatever it took.

A young parlor maid appeared from a side door. “I’m here to see Mr. Snowe,” Ward told her.

It took a few minutes to sort out the salient facts that Mr. Snowe was deceased, that Mrs. Snowe had started the company some years ago, and that no one saw Mrs. Snowe without an appointment.

“They are arranged weeks in advance,” she told him earnestly. “You might request an appointment now, and we would inform you when she had an opening.”

“That won’t do,” Ward said, smiling because her voice took on a reverential tone whenever she mentioned her mistress. “I sacked the governess you sent. I need a new one, but I have a few stipulations.”

Her mouth fell open and she squeaked, “You
sacked
one of our governesses? A
Snowe’s
governess?”

He rocked back on his heels and waited until she stopped spluttering and trotted off to inform someone of his crime.

The front window looked down on two oil lamps positioned on the heads of brass winged horses. Never mind the incongruity: the governess business must be wickedly profitable for Snowe’s to own a building in this neighborhood.

Obviously, he wasn’t the only one prepared to pay virtually anything to a woman who could corral wild beasts posing as young children.

He had planned to spend the day working on incorporating a steam engine into the continuous paper-roller that had made his first fortune. But the sketches were left in his study when he set off from Oxford at the crack of dawn.

Ward jammed his hands in the pockets of his breeches and took a deep breath. Much though he hated waiting, he had no bloody idea where to find another registry office. The last thing he wanted was to hire another random woman who would quit or be dismissed a few days later.

From what he’d heard, Snowe’s had tied up all the good governesses. And to be fair, even given Miss Lumley’s habit of weeping like a rusty spigot, she had been better than many of the governesses he’d had as a child.

All the same, she wasn’t right for this particular position. His siblings were recently orphaned, opinionated, and idiosyncratic, to say the least.

Damn, he wished his father and stepmother were in the country. Roberta had tamed him, and she would do the same for his siblings. In fact, the moment they returned from traveling, he meant to fall on his knees and beg them to raise the siblings he never knew he had.

But meanwhile?

He needed a really fine specimen of a governess, something special.

Eugenia hadn’t moved from her chair in three hours, and yet, to all appearances, the pile of correspondence on her desk had hardly diminished.

She stifled a moan when her assistant, Susan, popped through the door with another fistful of letters. “The afternoon mail has arrived, and Mr. Reeve is asking to see you.”

A drop of ink rolled off Eugenia’s quill and splashed in the middle of her response to a frantic lady blessed with twins. “Bloody hell, that’s the third letter I’ve ruined today! What did you say?”

“Mr. Reeve is here,” Susan said. “We sent him Penelope Lumley a week or so ago, on the countess’s request. I mean your stepmother, of course,” she added, as if there was more than one countess begging Eugenia for favors.

Actually, there was, but her darling Harriet was the only one who mattered.

“Oh, I remember. Reeve has two orphaned half-siblings to raise,” Eugenia said, trying to remember the details.

“Likely born on the wrong side of the blanket, just as he was.” Susan leaned against Eugenia’s desk and settled in for a proper gossip. “Not only that, but he was jilted at the altar last fall. I expect the lady realized what that marriage would do for her countenance.”

“His father is the Earl of Gryffyn,” Eugenia pointed out. She didn’t add that her stepmother had said Reeve was outrageously wealthy, but it was a factor. Registry offices didn’t pay for themselves.

“I would guess he’s as arrogant as if he were an earl himself. I peeked at him, and he’s got that look, as if the whole world should bow to him.”

Eugenia gave a mental shrug. It was unfortunate that the conjunction of a penis and privilege had such a bad effect on boys, but so it was.

Without just the right governess, they never learned how to be normal. Having grown up in a household that prided itself on eccentricity, Eugenia was a fierce proponent of the virtues of normality.

Better for oneself, and infinitely better for the world at large.

“He’s wickedly handsome, which probably plays a part in it,” Susan continued. “I could tell that he always gets his way. Though not,” she said with distinct satisfaction “with the lady who jilted him.”

Rich, privileged, and handsome, for all he was a bastard: that was a formula for disaster, from Eugenia’s side of the desk. She crumpled the blotted letter and threw it away. “I find it hard to believe that he has a complaint about Penelope.”

Some of Eugenia’s governesses were formidable, terrifying women who could be counted on to train a child as spoiled as a week-old codfish.

Others were loving and warm, just right for orphans. Penelope Lumley was sweet as a sugar plum, and, admittedly, about as interesting. But to Eugenia’s mind, grieving children needed love, not excitement, and Penelope’s eyes had grown misty at the very idea of two waifs thrown into an elder brother’s care.

“He told Bessie that he sacked her,” Susan said. “That’s an exact quote. I have a tear-stained note from Penelope to prove it.”

Reeve must be one of those frightful clients who poke their nose into the nursery and wouldn’t let the governess get on with the alchemy needed to turn a cabbage into a rose.

Or worse: several cabbages into a whole rose bush, if more than one child was involved.

It wasn’t easy. Winnie wasn’t the only parent singularly unsuited for the job, in Eugenia’s opinion.

“Did Penelope say what happened?”

“She crossed her lines and wept over it, so I couldn’t make out much beyond a reference to a locust, though perhaps she meant a swarm of them, à la Exodus.”

“Her father is a vicar, isn’t he?” Childhood in a vicarage was practically a prerequisite of employment at Snowe’s, as it so often resulted in ladylike accomplishments without a dowry.

“Yes, and unlike me, the Bible lessons took hold,” Susan said with an impish grin.

Eugenia leaned forward and gave Susan a poke in the hip. “There’s a reason I never sent you out as a governess. You’d unleash a plague of locusts on the man who tried to sack you. I suppose I’ll have to see him, but I shan’t give him another governess.”

“I expect Penelope’s nerves got the best of her,” Susan said, standing up and shaking out her skirts. “She has masses of them and they make her horribly twitchy.”

“That is no reason to dismiss her,” Eugenia said firmly. “She is an excellent governess, and just what those children need.”

In fact, Mr. Reeve should have thanked his lucky stars that she had sent him anyone—twitchy or not—but the fact he’d shown up in the office suggested that he didn’t understand the value of her stepmother’s personal recommendation.

The mother of twins to whom she’d been writing—not to mention poor Winnie—was one of many begging for a Snowe’s governess. Mr. Reeve had been given Penelope only because her own stepmother had appealed on the basis of his orphaned siblings.

Eugenia’s registry office was the most elite establishment of its kind, famous for its vow to take children to majority or marriage, whichever came first. As Eugenia saw it, that vow was a pledge to “her” children. She had been known to keep a governess in place, the salary paid by the agency, even if a family lost its funds.

But if a family simply didn’t
like
their governess? That was a different story. She couldn’t spend all her time shuttling employees around England because an interfering man thought his siblings deserved someone better than Penelope Lumley.

“Please ask him to join me,” Eugenia said, coming out from behind her desk and walking over to the window looking onto Belgrave Square. The crocuses were just coming out. This year she had to make time to walk in the park.

Every year she swore that she would take more fresh air and exercise, and then somehow the days spun by in the whirligig that was Snowe’s.

“Shall I order tea?” Susan asked.

“No,” Eugenia replied. “I mean to dispense with him quickly so I can go for a walk in the park.”

“I doubt you have time,” Susan said apologetically. “You have Lady Hamilton, and I squeezed in the Duchess of Villiers after that.”

“Is there some problem in Her Grace’s nursery? I thought Sally Bennefer was very happy there.”

“Sally has accepted a proposal from the vicar. He must have behaved in a most unvicarish fashion, because she needs to marry spit-spot. Ergo, the duchess needs a replacement.”

“Is unvicarish a word?”

“I expect not,” Susan said. “But the man only took his post a few months ago, so he must have jumped on Sally like a cat on raw liver. My father would not approve.”

“Didn’t you tell me that Genevieve Midge is ready to take another post? She wouldn’t be put off by the irregular nature of the Villiers household,” Eugenia pointed
out. Most of Villiers’s children were now grown up, but he had raised six illegitimate children under the same roof as the three belonging to his duchess.

Susan nodded. “I’ll send her a note and ask if she’s interested. Ruby will bring in Mr. Reeve. I’ll be listening, just in case Reeve’s claim to being a gentleman isn’t as strong as it might be. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a ballroom.”

After a few unfortunate incidents during which degenerates acted on their conviction that any woman engaged in commerce had no morals and would welcome their advances, Eugenia had had a discreet hole drilled in the wall between her office and Susan’s study so that Susan could dispatch their footman if need be.

Eugenia liked to think that she was a brave person, but it had been shocking to learn how easily a man can overpower a woman; it was only by the grace of God that she had escaped serious harm in the early days of the agency before she learned to be cautious.

And fierce, to be honest.

The first time a man lunged at her, she had tried to reason with him, which had absolutely no effect. She had slugged the second one in the eye, and found that both satisfying and effective.

“Don’t worry,” she said now. “I’ll brain him with the poker.” Their fireplace implements were topped solid brass knobs for just that reason.

“Actually, Mr. Reeve is so handsome women likely just drop at his feet,” Susan said with a smirk. “If I hear the thump of your falling body, I’ll be sure to leave the two of you alone.”

Eugenia rolled her eyes. “There are days when I might fall to my knees before a freshly baked crumpet, but never a man.”

Susan took herself away, and a moment later the door opened again. “Mr. Reeve,” Ruby announced, snapping the doors shut behind her. Apparently, Reeve had not made a good impression on their parlor maid.

The man who strode into the room was tall, with thick brandy-brown hair, his eyes marked by darker eyebrows that were the color of tarnished brass.

He had a lean rangy look, but there was something about the way his coat fit across his upper arms that made Eugenia think he was muscled. What’s more, his nose had been broken at some point.

In short, he looked like a boxer.

This was not the sort of man who generally showed up in Snowe’s cultured drawing room. He breathed a different kind of air than did the mothers she dealt with on a daily basis.

Abruptly, Eugenia realized that she was staring, her thoughts straying in directions they hadn’t gone for years.

Since Andrew died.

She didn’t give a damn what Mr. Reeve’s thighs looked like!

And she would do well to keep it in mind. He was a client, for goodness’ sake. Did she see . . .

No she didn’t.

And she didn’t want to, either.