Mrs. Rigsby had also claimed that the captain paid decent wages, treated his staff well, and didn’t bring loose women home. If he did anything with loose women outside of these walls, Mrs. Rigsby couldn’t say, but she did know that he had briefly been engaged, although she was sketchy on the details because it was before he moved here and so she had no clue why he and his fiancée had split. And that he sometimes sat in the garden for hours and simply stared at the plants. That particular behavior, she had assured Georgie with a shake of her head, was a sure sign that their master had taken too much on and no longer knew which way was up.
Which all felt familiar to her too at this precise moment. She had trained to be a governess for more years than any other governess of her acquaintance, and now that she was one, she had no clue which way was up either. The grateful and well-behaved young ladies in Miss Prentice’s benevolent school were a very different kettle of fish to three actual children, and she’d never had to deal with an employer before.
“Is here all right?” Eager to please, Felix had appointed himself her chief furniture mover as she rearranged their classroom. He had turned up early for the first lesson with Norbert in tow. Partly out of curiosity and a greater part, she suspected, to see what he and his sisters were letting themselves in for. Hence, he had brought the dog as support, even though he had been warned by Simpkins that Norbert had to remain in the yard during lessons. Now that all the desks andchairs had been turned around, they were trying to find a new home for the blackboard on the opposite, and far more interesting, side of the room than the uninspiring location their uncle had chosen.
“Yes. Perfect. We don’t want to block the French doors and this lovely view of the garden.” Or the giant dog currently snoring upside down as he basked in the afternoon sun streaming through them.
She had considered trying to make the captain’s configuration work despite her rebellious need to change it on principle, but knew within minutes of unpacking her books that it would be too constricting and depressing to have her new pupils stare at nothing. Nothing except her and the ridiculously large clock marking time on the wall. A depressing view for even the most scholarly of pupils, let alone these three, who had clearly not had the most conventional education.
According to Felix, who she had been gently quizzing for the last ten minutes, the children had never had a governess before. It was their mother who had taught them all to read and write, and their father who instructed them on the sciences. The eldest Pendleton claimed he no longer had to suffer through mathematics at home because he already knew all that he needed to, so she wouldn’t need to bother making him attend those lessons with his sisters. He would use that time to exercise Norbert just as he did at home. He had said all that with the unconvincing nonchalance of one who would rather pull out his own teeth than solve a mathematical problem, so Georgie suspected he struggled with numbers.
Felix also claimed to have a penchant for the Greek and Roman classics despite being only ten, most especially those that included epic battles. However, he had no time for Plato because he thought the ancient philosopher spent too much time thinking and not enough doing. Homer, however, told tales filled with derring-do, so he wasall right. But his favorite book was more modern—Ornithologica Britannicaby Marmaduke Tunstall—because it was the definitive work on English birds, exactly as the title claimed.
Young Master Felix would obviously prefer a similar book on insects of the British Isles because insects were his whole life, but as one didn’t yet exist, he planned to write it before he reached his quarter century. After that age, he was going to sail the world like his favorite uncle, Harry—but not in the service of the king. Instead, he was going to circumnavigate the globe single-handed while he wrote a seven-volume encyclopedia detailing all the earth’s insects in time for his thirtieth birthday. Thirty, he had explained, was the perfect age to publish your life’s work before you had to settle down. When she had asked why he had settled on seven as the perfect number of volumes for such a herculean task—a deliberate nod to his love of the classics—he had stared at her as if she were daft. Then explained that he would have to sail all seven of the seas to find all the countries within them to record all their insects, so therefore each volume would encompass one voyage.
She admired that ambition and logic too much to point out that it was flawed. It wasn’t her place to crush his dreams when she fundamentally believed that the role of a good teacher was to nurture them. Neither was it her place to quiz him about the current level of his sisters’ educations when getting important and accurate information was always better straight from the horse’s mouth than via hearsay or gossip. Unless there was no other option, of course.
“So tell me…” Georgie threw open the French doors to allow the fresh spring breeze to whoosh into the room and ruffle the snoring Norbert’s shaggy gray fur. “What makes your uncle Harry yourfavoriteuncle.”
“Two things,” answered Felix with all the seriousness of a ten-year-old as he held up a pair of fingers. “Firstly, he reads the best bedtime stories.”
An answer that Georgie hadn’t expected in a million years. “How so?”
“He does all the voices and acts out all the exciting parts.” An image which did not fit with the upright, staid, regimented timekeeper she had disliked at first sight at all. But then, she was sure she had seen him wink at little Grace when she had done her best to walk with decorum this morning, and that did not fit with that image either, so perhaps her first impressions did need some tweaking. He was still eminently dislikable, obviously, but not all bad like the colonel had been.
Yet.
“And the second reason?”
“He’s ouronlyuncle,” said the boy with a shrug, “so has to be our favorite. However, I do believe that even if I had another, I would still like Uncle Harry the best.”
“Why?”
Felix gave that some thought, then shrugged again. “Because he’s ultimately a good egg—that’s what Mama always says when he exasperates her—” He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “But only when he forgets to be a hard-boiled one.”
Georgie chuckled at that fitting analogy. Captain Kincaid was clearly cut from the same unforgiving cloth as the colonel but had been made using a slightly better-fitting pattern.
That he wasn’t a complete ogre was a relief as she didn’t want to have to fully hate her new, and so far, only employer during their limited time together. This appointment was an opportunity and hopefully the boost she needed to finally launch her stalled career as a governess. It would not only provide her with experience, but hopefullyan excellent reference from the captain when she came to leave. With her atrocious inability to impress at an interview, Georgie needed categoric proof that she was employable to tempt another family to take a chance on her. As Miss Prentice had warned repeatedly over the last few days, if she didn’t bite her tongue while in Captain Kincaid’s brief employ and see it through to the duration, then she would bite it off to spite her face. Therefore, no matter what the provocation, she would bite it until it bled if necessary, because beggars really couldn’t be choosers. And a hard-boiled egg was better than a rotten one. At least the rest of the captain’s family were lovely.
“What sort of egg are you, Felix? Only I’ll wager, from our short acquaintance, that you are more a deviled than a coddled one.”
“Deviled for definite.” His toothy grin suited him. “As the baby of the family, Grace is the coddled one. She’s frightened of her own shadow and will cry at the slightest provocation so we have to wrap her in down to protect her.”
“And Marianne?”
He rolled his eyes at the mere mention of his other sister’s name. “Scrambled.” Then he dropped his voice to a whisper in case the middle Pendleton heard. “She’s as mad as a hatter, drives everyone to distraction, and is oblivious because she lives mostly in her own world—but don’t tell her that I told you.”
“My lips are sealed.” Georgie pretended to button them a second before Marianne and Grace came through the door holding hands.
Poor Grace looked terrified and on the cusp of tears, exactly as her big brother had warned. Hardly a surprise when Mrs. Rigsby had told her that this was the first time the children had been left for more than an hour by their mother. Add to that the fact that London was a very different place to the quiet coastal house Felix had told her they usually lived in, and none of them had ever been to anythingresembling a school. Not even a Sunday school, if the boy was to be believed, so the three much-too-large-for-Grace desks and chairs must have appeared intimidating no matter which way they faced.
So too would grilling the poor thing on her abilities with numbers and letters despite Georgie urgently needing to know them to do her job properly. As much as she hated to link anything to time when her confusing employer was so obsessed by it, pitching her classes at the wrong level was a complete waste of it. However, the three test papers she had spent several hours putting together for today had been a waste of hers. They were not used to sitting examinations, and foisting one upon them now could well do more harm than good to their fledgling relationship.
But there were more ways to test the children’s educational abilities, and unlike their old-fashioned uncle, she was nothing if not open to better, less stuffy ways of doing things. “Why don’t we commence our first lesson in the great outdoors?” She pointed to the surprisingly pretty and well-tended garden that the captain liked to sit in. “I read somewhere that the average garden is home to over a thousand different species of flora and fauna. I wonder what lives in this one?”
“Ants and wood lice and earwigs, for certain.” Felix was already out the door and keen to go hunting for them. As he bounded off, Norbert rose from his prostrate position, stretched his ridiculously long limbs, then chased after the boy with his big tongue lolling.
“And butterflies,” added Marianne, prancing after her brother down the neat lawn and flapping her arms gracefully as if she had become one, completely forgetting her terrified little sister whose bottom lip was trembling because she had no earthly idea what to do now that she had been left alone.
