"Stay Out of This, You're Only the Governess," His Fiancée Snapped — The Duke Stood in the Doorway
Chapter 3
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The Duke of Merivale's twins were four years old. Their old nurse's knees had given out, and the house needed a sensible young woman to teach them their letters. To the servants, the boy was Lord Ellingham, and to the world, he was the heir of a dukedom; to the nursery, he was Thomas. His sister was Lady Charlotte to everyone in England but the three people who loved her, and to them, she was simply Charlotte.The Duke himself had lost his wife the day the twins were born. He had been 28. He had loved her, and for nearly six years, he had done his duty by his children with a grave tenderness that did not quite know what to say to them. He saw Miss Fenwick perhaps once a week—a quiet figure in green who curtsied and said, "Yes, Your Grace"—and he thought no more about her than he thought about the clock on the nursery mantelpiece.The children thought about her a great deal. She never lied to them, not even about small things. She taught Thomas his letters with pebbles from the river, and Charlotte hers with the names of flowers. She walked them to the chapel on Sundays and let them put their hands on the cold stone where their mother's name was cut, and she told them what the housekeeper remembered of her: that she laughed easily, and that she had loved the first daffodils best of all.By the time the twins were five, there was one word they used for Miss Fenwick that they used for nothing else in that enormous house. She was not the Hall's, as the footmen were, nor Papa's, as the horses were. She was ours.As for Lady Arabella, the Duke had chosen her as a man chooses a bridge to build across a river. Her father's lands lay on the far bank; the two families had quarreled for a hundred years over a millrace, and the Duke's mother, dying in the spring of 1815, had begged her son to end the quarrel with a marriage. Lady Arabella was 21, accomplished, gracious in every drawing room in which he had met her, and his children needed a mother. He did not pretend to love her, and she did not seem to require it.The engagement was made at Christmas. The wedding was fixed for June. On the 1st of February, the Duke went up to London for the sitting of Parliament, leaving his aunt to keep house, and the Countess and her daughter to stay on at Merivale as guests, so that Lady Arabella might learn the house she was to govern.She had learned it in six weeks. She had learned it very thoroughly indeed.The Duke stepped back from the morning room door as quietly as he had come to it. He crossed the hall, looked once at the footman, and said in a low voice, "You have not seen me." Then he walked out of his own front door into the rain, down the steps, and stood under the portico for a full ten minutes with his hat in his hand, looking at nothing.When he came in again, he rang for the butler and had himself announced, and the house burst into welcome. Doors opened, feet ran, and Lady Arabella came out of the morning room with both hands held out and her face alight.