"Stay Out of This, You're Only the Governess," His Fiancée Snapped — The Duke Stood in the Doorway
Chapter 9
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"You were there?" Lady Arabella whispered. "You were there, and you said nothing?""I wished to be sure that I had seen the whole of you. I have been sure since Friday." He turned to her father. "My lord, I release your daughter from her promise, and I ask her to release me. I am aware of what the law allows. If you think this a matter for the courts, I will state under oath before any judge in England what I saw on Thursday, and my servants will state it with me. I do not think you will wish that."The Earl looked at his daughter for a long moment, and then at the governess in the doorway with two children holding her skirts, and he was not a wicked man."No," he said heavily. "No, we shall leave at first light." And to his daughter, in a voice nobody at that table ever forgot: "You raised your hand to a child. In another man's house."Lady Arabella stood up. She was white to the lips and still, even then, extraordinarily beautiful. "You would break with me," she said, "before 30 people? For a governess?""No, madam, for my children. The governess only showed me how.""She is nothing," Lady Arabella said. "She is only the governess."The Duke of Merivale looked down the whole length of his table to the woman in the doorway. "On Thursday," he said, "she was the only person in this house who stood between my children and harm. There is no only in that. There never was."He sat down. He said to the company quite steadily that the dinner was good, and the cook had worked three days upon it, and that he hoped they would do it justice. Then he reached out and moved the dripping jug of daffodils a little nearer to his own place, and left it there.The Earl's carriage left at 6:00 the next morning. It is written in the housekeeper's book that the lady's maid with the mark on her cheek did not go with it, having been given a place at Merivale Hall that very night.He did not speak to her of anything but the children for ten weeks. A gentleman who has broken an engagement before 30 witnesses does not pay his addresses to the governess on the following Monday, however much the county may be saying that he will. The county said a great deal; the Duke let it.The old nurse came back to her room beside the nursery. The chapel walks began again, and the dog returned from the stables as though he had never been exiled. Thomas went back to his pebbles and Charlotte to her flowers, and Miss Fenwick went on saying, "Yes, Your Grace," and the Duke went on looking at her a moment too long when she said it.By the last week of May, the hawthorn was white along the river walk, and the daffodils under the chapel wall had long since gone over. He found her there one afternoon with the twins racing ahead of her and the dog racing ahead of them, and he fell into step beside her and said nothing for a hundred yards.