Pay the children's school tuition. Help pay back Drake's debts, which Jenny said were considerable.
"For how long?"
"Indefinitely."
"It would be like a betrayal. Miss Hilversham depends on me." Ellen wrung her hands. "She wants me to take over the school." Ellen shook her head. "I can't possibly desert her like that."
"Four times the salary then, to assuage your guilty conscience?"
"Four!"
"Make it five."
She merely gaped.
"My dear girl," Tewkbury yawned, "make up your mind. The issue is quite simple, really."
"Is it?"
"Do you enjoy working there? At that—whatever place." He waved his quizzing glass around.
"Miss Hilversham's Seminary for Young Ladies isn't just any place. It's the best school in the entire kingdom. And of course I enjoy working there." Except she'd been exhausted of teaching lately. Of marking the mountain of papers that never seemed to end. Of dealing with spoiled, snobbish girls who were half adults, half children, who weren't interested in real learning but only in hauling in a husband, who had to be handled with satin gloves so that their equally spoiled parents wouldn't take them out of school; of teaching etiquette and embroidery and all the boring things when she'd rather teach literature and philosophy and visit art galleries. Miss Hilversham wanted her to be the next headmistress. But did she, herself, want that?
"Did you say five times my present salary?" It was a fortune. "You would pay so much for the child's governess?"
His lordship's sleepy eyes popped open. "Oh no. Not as his governess."
Ellen massaged her temples. "No? Then as what? As an overpaid nurse?"
"It would be as my wife, of course," he replied softly. "You did say he needed a mother."
CHAPTER FOUR
"He is mad, I tell you. Mad! Utterly, completely unhinged." Ellen sat in her family's parlour room and stirred her teacup so violently that half the contents spilled onto the saucer.
"And you left the child with a madman?" Mrs Jenny Robinson, fondly called "Stepmother" by Ellen, was a lively young woman, not much older than Ellen, with curly brown hair. She was not really Ellen's stepmother, but Ellen loved her as dearly as if she had been. Jenny cradled her newborn in her arms and bent forward, eagerly listening to Ellen's latest, incredible tale.
After his lordship's indecent proposal, Ellen had bolted from the townhouse and gone straight to her family's home in Cheapside. Jenny had been astonished to find Ellen—who never lost her composure—distraught and exhausted.
"First, we will have some tea. Then you'll tell me all about it," Jenny had said after they'd embraced.
Ellen put down the cup with a sigh. "I shouldn't have left, should I? I should have stayed at least a night or two to see how Noni was settling in. What if he sends him away again, this time to an institution that doesn't care about children as much as we do?"
"I would say it is possible, indeed. But that proposition of his is most interesting." Jenny looked pensive. "What were his conditions?"
"I must confess, I did not stay long enough to hear them."
Jenny took a thoughtful sip from her cup. "Because he may not have meant a proper marriage at all. It's not the first time I've heard such proposals." Before she'd married Jacob Robinson, who was a widower, Jenny had been a seamstress, embroidery beautiful confections for princesses, duchesses, and marchionesses. The stories she'd collected during that time could have filled a book, which would explain why she wasn't at all shocked by Ellen's horrified revelation that she'd just received a most indecent proposal from an Exquisite.
"What, to buy wives?"
"Yes. The whole aristocratic marriage mart is, as the name suggests, a marketplace where they buy and sell young women to the highest bidder. When it comes down to it, it's just a business transaction. Love has nothing to do with it. Sounds like your baron is desperate to fill the position, and now that he has a child, it would make sense that he would need a wife. You happened to be there. So he made an offer."
"He's not 'my' baron!" Ellen exclaimed.
"Well, consider it. The question is whether he needs a fake wife or a real one. Either way, for a man who does not want to settle down, hiring a wife to play the part is not such a mad idea. Though why a lord would ask a schoolmistress is, of course, the question. On the other hand, it would make sense for the good of the child. This way, he gets wife and governess rolled up in one. Saves him the expense of a governess."
Ellen groaned. "You should have seen the man! In fact, you could hardly see him. The man was somewhere underneath all that silk and paint, and I dare say he even wore a wig. That hair can't have been natural."
