When they entered the great hall from the horseshoe steps sometime later, his grace happened to be crossing it. He looked at her and at Matthew tight-lipped.
“Miss Hamilton?” he said. “I thought you were upstairs with my daughter.”
“I have been walking with Lord Brocklehurst, your grace,” she said.
He nodded curtly. “She was eager to talk to you,” he said. “You had better go up without delay.”
“Yes, your grace,” she said, curtsying. She fled from the hall and up to the nursery, her cheeks burning from the look of cold disapproval on his face. And she wondered if Matthew would explain to him that the invitation had come from him with her grace’s permission.
She looked forward so much to the following day and a whole afternoon away from Willoughby.
MASTER TIMOTHY CHAMBERLAIN WAS celebrating his seventh birthday with his brother and sister, Lady Pamela Kent from Willoughby Hall, and five other children from the neighborhood, including the vicar’s two.
It was entirely a blessing for their sanity, Mr. Chamberlain told Fleur when she arrived with her charge, that the weather had decided to cooperate. They would move outside once Timmy had shown the children the nursery, which they had all seen before, and the large bag of colored wooden building bricks that was his birthday present.
Miss Chamberlain greeted Fleur with a smile. “You would not guess from listening to him, would you, Miss Hamilton,” she said, “that the idea for a party was all Duncan’s? He revels in such occasions.”
Mr. Chamberlain grimaced as Fleur laughed. It had not taken her longer than her first day of acquaintance with him to realize that he quite doted on his children.
She was feeling wonderfully happy. She and Lady Pamela had left almost immediately after luncheon and would not return until almost dinnertime. And his grace had not come.
“Timothy had bricks. I am going to get Papa to buy me some,” Lady Pamela announced to Fleur in a shriek when the children came hurtling downstairs with demands to be taken outside.
They played hide-and-seek and chasing and ball in the large grounds behind the house, and Mr. Chamberlain organized races of various kinds until several of the children were stretched out on the grass, panting, while the others shrieked more loudly than ever.
Miss Chamberlain formed them all into a large circle to play some singing games—“to quieten them down,” she explained to Fleur, who had helped with the races. “Duncan always fails to realize that tiring children does not necessarily quieten them, but frequently has just the opposite effect.”
“Well,” Mr. Chamberlain said, ignoring the outstretched hand of a small girl with a hair bow almost as large as her head and pinching her cheek instead, “dancing and chanting in a circle is quite beneath my dignity, I am afraid. Miss Hamilton and I are going to leave you to it, Emily. We will all have tea after this. Ma’am?” He held out an arm for Fleur’s.
“There are limits to the depths to which I will sink,” he said, strolling with her toward the rose arbor at the side of the house. “ ‘Ring around the rosy’ is definitely below that limit.”
“I do believe your son is having a wonderful time,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “One is seven only once, I suppose. Tomorrow he will be his normal boisterous self again. The hysteria will have passed.”
Fleur chuckled.
They were inside the arbor, surrounded by the heady smell of roses. He released her arm, cupped her face with his hands, and kissed her briefly and warmly on the lips.
“I have missed you,” he said.
She smiled.
“If you were not a governess,” he said, “and did not have daily duties to perform, I would probably have haunted Willoughby Hall in the days since our theater visit.” He touched her lips with his thumbs.
She looked into his eyes and knew with regret that there were limits for her too beyond which she dare not go.
“Don’t,” she said as he drew breath to speak again. She lowered her eyes to his chin. “Please, don’t.”
“What I am about to say is not welcome to you?” he asked.
She hesitated. “I cannot,” she said.
“Because of inclination?” he said. “It is something about me? Or my children?”
She shook her head and bit her lip.
“There is some obstacle?” he asked.
Her eyes dropped to his neckcloth. Yes. There were the charges of theft and murder hanging over her head. There was the loss of her virginity. There was the profession she had sampled briefly before becoming a governess.
She nodded.
“Insurmountable?” he asked.
“Yes.” She looked up into his eyes again and knew a great sadness of regret. “Quite insurmountable, sir.”