“No,” she told him. “I teach my children myself. It is the way I spend my mornings.”
“And I am interrupting this one,” he said. “Why have you chosen not to hire a governess?”
She compressed her lips and looked down at the hands she had set in her lap, the back of one resting on the palm of the other. “Governesses cost money, my lord,” she said.
“And the estate cannot bear the cost?” he asked her.
She looked up at him with her dark, unreadable eyes. But he read what was in them nonetheless. He understood her though she had said nothing. And he was angry.
“You would not ask?” he said, frowning. “Pride, my lady? Monck would surely not even have questioned the expense.”
“Mr. Monck,” she said, “has no authority to act on his own. He is merely the steward here.”
“And you were afraid,” he said, frowning, “that if he had asked me, I would have said no? You must think I have petty notions of revenge, my lady. Or perhaps you enjoy the image of yourself as martyr, your needs spurned by the manyouspurned years ago. I have recently given Monck far wider powers than he once enjoyed—I understand that Gilbert kept a very tight rein on him. It would be inconvenient for me to do so, when the Atlantic Ocean will soon separate us. You might have asked him for all sorts of things and been granted them. Chances are that I would never even have known.”
She did not answer him.
“After Christmas,” he said, “you will employ a governess of your own choosing. In future years you will employ drawing teachers, music and dancing teachers, whoever is needed for the education of your children. I shall give instructions to Monck. I daresay the expense will not beggar me.”
“Thank you,” she said so coolly that he could read no gratitude in the words. But he did not want her gratitude.
He had a sudden thought. It was something he had not noticed in the account books Monck had brought to London, although he had studied them in some depth. But then it was not something he had been looking for.
“What allowance did Gilbert make you?” he asked. “Is it still being paid you?” By God, she would not lay any charge of that sort of spitefulness at his door.
She studied the hands in her lap again, though her chin was still up. “Gilbert paid all my bills for me,” she said.
He realized the significance of her words, appalled. It was not that her allowance had been cut off after Gilbert’s death and she had been too proud to ask for its restoration. Monck, it seemed, was not the only one who had been kept on a tight rein.
“I see,” he said. “Perhaps that would work admirably in a close marital relationship, but I would find such an arrangement distasteful. I have no intention of feeding your hostility by having you run to me—ornotrun to me—with every need. I shall arrange that you have a quarterly allowance sufficient to your needs and those of your children. Do the same conditions apply to Margaret and my aunt?”
“Aunt Hannah was left a small legacy by her husband, I believe, my lord,” she said. “I have no idea if it is adequate to her needs. If it is not, she does not complain.”
“Tell me,” he asked her, changing the subject. “Why has Margaret never had a Season? She is twenty years old. Most young ladies of her age can expect to be already married. Gilbert died when she was nineteen—in the summer. Why had she not made her come-out during the spring? Or the year before, when she was eighteen? Did you not think it important to persuade your husband to take her to town?”
She looked up at him with a strange half-smile on her lips.
“You preferred to stay selfishly at home in the country with your children?” He frowned down at her. “Didshenot try to persuade her brother?”
“If she did,” she said, “she was not successful, was she?”
“Too expensive?” he said, suddenly suspicious. Had Gilbert really been such a nip-farthing? After being a sneak thief in his boyhood? There was some amusement in the thought.
“That was part of it,” she said.
“And the other part?”
“Life in town,” she said, “is too frivolous, too—ungodly.”
“Was that Gilbert’s description of it?” he asked her, frowning. “Or yours?”
“My husband and I thought alike,” she said stiffly, but she would not look him in the eye and say it, he noticed.
“Frivolous?” he said. “Expensive? Ungodly?Ungodly, my lady? Gilbert was never much of a one for God when I knew him. He developed stomachaches and headaches with great regularity on Sunday mornings, as I recall.”
“People can change, my lord,” she said.
Good God! He gazed at her with distaste. Did this, then, explain the stark black garments, the stiff spine, the lack of smiles, the cold discipline? Wasthiswhat she had come to? Willingly? He really had never known her at all, had he?
