“I want to play,” Lady Pamela demanded when Fleur’s fingers finally fell still.
Fleur smiled. “Have you had any instruction?” she asked.
“No,” Lady Pamela said. “I want to play. Get up.”
“Please,” Fleur said.
“Get up!” the child said. “I want to play.” “Please,” Fleur said again.
“You are a servant,” Lady Pamela said haughtily. “Get up or I will tell Nanny.”
“I will gladly get up,” Fleur said, “if you will ask me rather than tell me.”
The child flounced off in order to scold and slap a shabby doll she had brought to the schoolroom with her.
Fleur sighed inwardly and resumed her quiet playing. It all reminded her of so much. Cousin Caroline and Amelia, haughty and imperious because they were suddenly Lady Brocklehurst of Heron House and the Honorable Miss Amelia Bradshaw after the death of her parents.
And they had treated her just so because they were obliged to offer her a home in the house where she had always lived. Amelia had taken her lovely Chinese bedchamber and relegated her to a plainer room at the back of the house.
She had a few good days with her pupil. Lady Pamela had been excited one morning because her mother was to take her visiting in the afternoon, but word came to the nursery at luncheon time that her grace was feverish and had been told by the doctor to rest during the afternoon.
Fleur, who was taking her luncheon upstairs, saw the look of intense disappointment on her pupil’s face and the tears that formed in her eyes and her trembling, pouting lip. The child saw far too little of her mother. But Fleur knew that the chief disappointment would be in not seeing the Chamberlain children and their dogs after all. Lady Pamela also saw very little of other children.
“Would it be possible for me to take Lady Pamela to visit the children?” she asked Mrs. Clement when the child could not hear her.
She expected a rebuff, but the nurse looked at her consideringly and said she would consult her grace. Within half an hour Fleur had the pleasure of seeing the child’s face light up so that she had looked almost pretty. She jumped up and down on the spot, cheering until her nurse cupped her face in her hands and told her not to get overexcited.
She had done one thing at last, Fleur thought, that had won her pupil’s approval.
They set out as soon as they were ready and the carriage had been brought around. And Fleur smiled as she watched Lady Pamela sit forward in her seat, looking at the scenery pass the window, waving at the gatekeeper’s wife, and chattering intermittently about the Chamberlains’ dogs.
“Mama will not allow me to have a dog,” she said, “or a cat. Or a rabbit,” she added a moment later.
For almost the first time in their acquaintance, Fleur felt, her pupil looked like a child.
Mr. Chamberlain was a widower of about forty years, who lived with his sister and his three children in an elegant manor that looked remarkably like the cozy manor of her dreams when she had been traveling into Dorsetshire, Fleur thought.
She explained to Miss Chamberlain, an elegant lady in her mid-thirties, who wore a lace cap on her smoothly parted dark hair, that her grace was indisposed and that Lady Pamela had been disappointed at the prospect of losing the treat of playing with the children. She asked to be allowed to sit in the servants’ quarters for an hour.
“In the servants’ quarters?” Miss Chamberlain said with a laugh. “I would not hear of any such thing, Miss Hamilton. You are Lady Pamela’s new governess? We heard that there was one. You will take tea with Duncan and me, if you please, while the children play.”
Fleur followed her hostess into the drawing room, where they were soon joined by Mr. Chamberlain, who bowed to her and showed no outward chagrin at being forced to take tea with a mere governess.
“Our conversation will doubtless be drowned out by barkings before long, Miss Hamilton,” he said. “The poor dogs will be dragged inside to the nursery to be played with. It is always so when Lady Pamela is here. She does not have the chance to mingle with other children or with animals often enough, I believe.”
“And she had been taught that horses are dangerous,” Miss Chamberlain added, handing Fleur her cup and saucer.
Her brother smiled at her. “I suppose it would be easy to be overprotective of an only child,” he said. “It is a pity Adam is not home more often. Have you heard if he is to return for the ball, Miss Hamilton?”
“I am afraid I do not know, sir,” Fleur said.
“It will not be the same without him,” he said. “But the Willoughby balls are always the most splendid of occasions. Opinion seems to be evenly divided in the neighborhood as to whether the indoor balls or the outdoor are the more so. Emily believes the outdoor ones far more romantic, don’t you, my dear?”