“So you’re a three-in-one offer. Charming.” His lips pulled into a lopsided, sarcastic line.
“All I’d need is room and boarding.”
Mr Merivale stared. “You must be joking. You are selling yourself under your value.”
Was she?
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You really have no idea what a governess is commonly paid, do you?”
“Er.” He had her there. She wasn’t used to dealing with money matters. Why hadn’t she researched this better?
“Twenty pounds per annum. No doubt it’s a paltry sum to you, but it is a fortune to me. I’d have to sell my horse, and that won’t be happening. I’m very sorry.” Mr Merivale crossed his arms.
Arabella’s shoulders slumped. “I did say room and board is sufficient.”
He shook his head. “Impossible. I am the least person to care about things done in bread-and-butter fashion, but even I know this isn’t done. I don’t want to be saddled with —” he broke off and cleared his throat. “Miss Weston, or m’lady, or whoever you are. I regret that my daughter has misled you and wheedled you into coming all this way to our corner of Cornwall with the promise of a job, but the truth is, there is no job. And even if there were, I must say, excuse me for being so blunt, you’re of no use to us. You’d be the last person I’d hire.”
Arabella’s head jerked back as if he’d slapped her. He’d just told her she was useless.
She had nothing to offer.
Not even to a blacksmith’s family. He didn’t want her services even if she offered them for free. Tears prickled behind her eyelids.
Arabella held her chin high and allowed the familiar icy veneer of aloofness to fall over her. She was a Duke’s daughter after all. “Very well. There is nothing more to be said then.”
She got up, picked up her satchel and went to the door. “It was nice meeting you, Miss Merivale. Mr Merivale.” She gave him a frosty nod and left.
Chapter 4
Arabella walked along the dusty road to the village. A veil of tears muted the purple splash of the lavender fields, the blueness of the ocean. Her kid boots stumbled over a stone, and she flung her arms out to regain balance. She staggered to a boulder by the roadside and sat on it to rest.
The empty country road stretched in front of her. Was this the right direction? She should’ve reached the village by now. It must be almost noontime. She lifted her head to check the sun’s position, but it was overcast. Clouds brewed over the sea as if someone stirred them in a massive pot, and an odd stillness hovered in the air as if nature was holding its breath.
She really should’ve known better. What had she been thinking?
The moment Lady Arabella Astley had seen the charming, crooked stone cottage, framed by pink rose brambles, she’d known she’d made a mistake. That feeling had been intensified when she stared at the thin slip of a girl who’d opened the door. Somehow, she’d imagined a bigger, more elegant house of the affluent gentry. With servants. This was a farmer’s cottage without domestics. No doubt Mr Merivale was right. A family like his didn’t need a governess.
When she’d sat in the squashed, stuffy stagecoach that took her away from Ashmore Hall, it had first dawned on her she was making a massive mistake. It was the first time that she had travelled without a lady’s maid or companion.
Arabella had been squeezed between a fat man who reeked of garlic and cabbage and a dandy who pressed his velvet-clad thighs against hers and smelled overpoweringly of violets. The woman across from her had gripped a basket full of turnips and grinned at her with blackened teeth. “Where ya off to, lovey?”
“Cornwall,” she replied in a clipped tone that invited no further questions.
The coach had rattled every bone in her body, and she was tired to the marrow. She had dared not sleep for fear her head dropped on the dandy’s velvet shoulder, or even worse, on the man’s with the cabbage breath.
There, in the coach, the rushing high that had flushed through her when she crept out of Ashmore Hall that morning, with nothing but a satchel and a purse full of coins, slowly dissipated. Reality hit her square in the face. Running away in her maid’s clothes wasn’t just a mistake. It was a disastrous decision that she was going to regret for the rest of her life. If anyone ever found out, her reputation would be in tatters.
Her entire life she’d had to focus on maintaining her reputation. She’d had a lonely childhood in Ashmore Hall, raised by her grandmamma, since her mother had died at her birth, and her father wasted himself away with wine, women, and song. Her overprotective brother wouldn’t let her take two steps out of his sight.He’d been more a duke than a brother, and she’d languished in his shadow.
If her brother knew… Arabella shuddered.
But, ‘pon her soul. This feeling of freedom!
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath of salty sea air, mixed with freshly cut grass and lavender. She’d never felt so free before.
Here, she was no longer Lady Arabella, sister of the powerful Duke of Ashmore, whose life was predetermined down to the stockings she wore. She was Miss Arabella Weston. For her, anything was possible, because she no longer had a reputation to lose.
She felt a pang of regret that the job with the Merivales hadn’t worked out. She’d been charmed by the lively children. They weren’t working-class, that was certain, even though the father seemed to be a blacksmith–inventor. Middle class was more likely. Either way, it was simply not the thing for her to live with the family as a governess. She had no chaperone, he had no wife, there was no housekeeper or other female servant around. It was highly inappropriate for a lady to spend even five minutes alone in the presence of a gentleman.
