Seven Minutes in Heaven(4)

This chamber looked more like a lady’s parlor than a waiting room. It was elegantly appointed, from the tassels adorning striped silk curtains to the gilt 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, Lord Gryffyn, was an earl.

That said, Snowe probably had to put on airs in order to convince people to pay his outrageous fees.

Since Ward needed to impress the House of Lords with his nonexistent parental abilities in order to secure guardianship of his siblings—not to mention getting Otis up to snuff before his brother entered Eton in September—he was prepared to pay whatever it took to get a first-rate governess.

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

A few minutes were needed to sort out the salient facts that Mr. Snowe was deceased, that Mrs. Snowe had opened the agency some years before, 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 if she had an earlier 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 require 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 ran off to inform someone of his crime as regards Miss Lumley.

To be fair, even withstanding Miss Lumley’s regrettable 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 hadn’t been right for this particular position. His recently orphaned half-siblings were opinionated and idiosyncratic, to say the least.

He needed a really fine specimen of a governess, someone 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, entered with another fistful of letters. “These arrived this afternoon, and Mr. Reeve is asking to see you.”

A drop of ink rolled from 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! Would you please repeat that?”

“Mr. Reeve is here,” Susan said. “You will remember that we sent Penelope Lumley to him a week ago, on an emergency basis.”

“Of course. He’s the Oxford don with two orphaned half-siblings to raise,” Eugenia said.

“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 Reeve was jilted at the altar last fall. I suspect the lady realized what that marriage would do for her reputation.”

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

“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 an unfortunate 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 conventional living.

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 added with satisfaction, “with the lady who jilted him.”

Rich, privileged, and handsome, for all he was a bastard: a formula for disaster, from Eugenia’s side of the desk. She crumpled the ruined 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, even 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 sugarplum, 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 unknown brother’s care.