The Silent Governess(38)

“You feel an . . . obligation, then?”

He lifted his shoulders as if to shrug off an uncomfortable garment. “Not directly, no. Though how can one help but feel some duty toward children who have lost both father and mother?”

“I think many ‘help it’ with ease. Look at the foundling homes.”

He sighed. “You will think me stranger than you no doubt already do.”

“Impossible,” she teased.

He looked at her, as though to be sure she was jesting. “Well, nothing to lose, then. You see, when I was a boy of eleven, I made a promise to myself. Wrote it down even.”

When he hesitated, she looked up expectantly.

“I know you admire my father, Miss Keene, and I do not deny he has always been exceedingly kind and generous. He is a good man, and I take nothing from him—do not mistake me.”

“But?” She skated to the edge of the pond and stopped to give him her full attention.

He stopped beside her. “But he was away in London a great deal. As a member of parliament, he was obliged to spend January through June or even July there. Six or seven months a year. Sometimes longer. My mother and I did spend several seasons in London with him—it was there I first made the acquaintance of Dominick Howe—but still, we rarely saw Father. Even when he was in the townhouse with us, he was always busy with bills or correspondence or what have you. Mother soon grew weary of town life. I think her health was not very good even then. So we stayed home more and more. And even when Father returned to Brightwell Court, he spent more time with his clerk than with me.” He held up his hand. “I am not criticizing, nor seeking pity, Miss Keene, merely showing the situation that inspired me to write a promise to my future adult self.”

She nodded, and could not help compare his father to hers. He had spent many hours with her, though few of them idyllic—testing her in arithmetic, showing her how to balance the books, how to figure odds, and all those hours at the races and the Crown and Crow. . . .

“I can still see myself, a boy of nine, perhaps,” Lord Bradley continued, “then a boy of ten, then finally eleven, standing with my fishing pole, waiting at the garden door for my father, who had promised yet again to take me fishing—‘tomorrow,’ ‘tomorrow.’ ”

“He never did?”

Edward shook his head. “Hunting a few times, a game of chess now and again, but never fishing. I remember Croome came upon me waiting there, pole in hand, when my father finally came out—but only to tell me that he just could not get away. Croome offered to take me. But my father dismissed his offer. I remember feeling oddly sorry for the gamekeeper, though I had never felt anything but fear of the man before”—he grimaced—“or since.”

Poor Mr. Croome, Olivia thought. An outcast even then.

“Forgive me. I am going on as endlessly as Mr. Tugwell. All this to say, after that I ran upstairs to the schoolroom, found paper and quill, and wrote myself a promise—to remember what it was like to be eleven years old, to remember what summertime was for, and when I had a boy of my own, to dashed well take him fishing.” He glanced at her sheepishly. “I may have said something stronger, but you take my meaning.”

She grinned. “Vividly.”

“I know Audrey and Andrew are not my children, but they are under my roof without a father of their own.”

“I think it wonderful,” she said, and began skating again.

He skated after her. “Not every woman of my acquaintance would agree with you.”

She guessed he referred to Miss Harrington.

“Have you?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“Taken them fishing?”

He expelled a breath bordering on a groan. “Everything but that. I confess I never learnt how.” Clearly uncomfortable, he quickly changed the subject. “And your father, Miss Keene? Did he take you fishing, or whatever the girlhood equivalent is?”

Olivia doubted horse races and taverns were the girlhood equivalent to anything as wholesome as fishing. “I had not really realized it until you described your own childhood, that while my father has many faults, he did spend time with me. Still, my father was . . .” She caught herself. “Is very different from yours. Were I you, I would be grateful indeed for such a father as Lord Brightwell.”

“I am. But do not idealize him. You know him as he is now, the benevolent grandfatherly sort he has mellowed into.”

“Are you saying he was once cruel?”

“No, never cruel. Just . . . imperious, busy, absent. And yours?”

She decided to risk telling him, realizing he might otherwise think she disapproved of her father for no very good reason. “He took me with him to the local public house and there had me display my arithmetic skills to entertain the other patrons.”

“He was evidently proud of you. Wanted all the gents to know what a clever girl he had.”

She bit her lip. That much was true.

“He also took me with him to horse races. Even to the Bibury Course, not far from here, I understand.”

“Did he indeed? As a boy, I would have loved such an outing with my father above all things.”

He was turning everything around on her. Confusing her. “He brought his clerking work home and had me balance the accounts for him. . . .”

“Astounding! Do you realize how rare a thing it is for a man to educate his daughter in his own profession? A son, yes. My father has groomed me to take over for him one day, so this is something our fathers have in common.”

She felt her ire and incredulity rising. “Did the Earl of Brightwell teach you to accept wagers and take a handsome portion of men’s winnings? Did he drink too much and throw things when angry?” She stopped herself. Did he not understand what kind of man Simon Keene was?

“No. That he did not do. Though he did take me to gentlemen’s clubs in London where I was exposed to much the same.”

Andrew skated between them, grasping a hand of each, and the conversation was abandoned.

Later, on the walk home, the children ran ahead, tossing snowballs at one another. Though Olivia had never told anyone the story of that most significant of wagers in the Crown and Crow, she felt compelled to do so now. Compelled to have another person judge the situation more objectively than she ever could. Had she really wronged her father? Or had he treated her unfairly? Lord Bradley listened with interest as she relayed the tale, doing her best to tell him the facts without coloring the story to put herself in better light, nor her father in worse. But Lord Bradley did not react as she might have guessed, or would have liked.

“The young man was a Harrow lad, you say?”

She shrugged. “Herbert something.”

His eyes brightened. “Herbert? Herbert Fitzpatrick?”

“I never heard a surname. Nor his father’s name at all.” The name Fitzpatrick did seem mildly familiar, though she did not know why.

“I’d wager it was my old school chum Herbert.” He laughed. “Boy never could conquer arithmetic. Pale boy. The blackest hair. How he would perspire during examinations! We teased him mercilessly.”

“I cannot credit it. From London, was he?”

“You know, I just saw his father in church on Christmas. Visiting a sister or some such.”

That was the man she had seen from the church gallery at Christmas?—the man she thought familiar but could not place?

“He lives in Cheltenham, I believe. But he mentioned Herbert is managing one of his interests in the north somewhere.”

Olivia frowned, thinking back to what she remembered of the gentleman and his son. “I am not certain it can be the same Herbert. I distinctly remember they were merely passing through on their way home to Harrow and London.”

“If memory serves, they moved to the Cheltenham area a year or two ago.”

She did not respond to this, and after several minutes of silence, he said quietly, “It was not fair of your father to put you in such a position, Miss Keene. But do you not see what confidence he had in you? What pride? But he ought to have realized what you were about in allowing poor Herbert to win and been proud of you for that as well. It was very noble of you, especially for one so young.”

“He was not in the least proud.”

Lord Bradley looked at her, eyes soft in understanding. “I see that you did not have a typical upbringing, nor a typical father, Miss Keene. But as you have caused me to appreciate my father’s qualities anew, I hope you will allow yourself to admit that your father has his good qualities as well.”

“I don’t want to admit it.”

He looked at her, surprised. “Why? What do you risk in doing so?”

“More than you know.” For if she admitted the good along with the bad, then how could she live with herself, knowing what she had done to him?

She did not tell him the most condemning charge against her father—what he had done, or at least tried to do, to her mother. She was too ashamed to form the words.





Chapter 26




Rebuked and saddened, I resigned myself with no good grace

to my routine of instruction.

Where were all the romantic fancies and proud anticipations

with which I had accepted the position of governess . . . ?

—ANNA LEONOWENS, THE ENGLISH GOVERNESS AT THE SIAMESE COURT