She could feel herself bristling again in zealous rebellion, because “children should be seen but never heard” was another one of the unimaginative colonel’s lecturing mantras and yet another old adage she fundamentally disagreed with. Children should be both seenandheard. Listened to. Engaged with. Their rampant curiosity about everything nurtured and encouraged. Fed with all the answers and then emboldened to ask all the questions, even those that had no answers yet. Because, if history had taught the world anything, it was that independent thought was something to be celebrated, not oppressed.
Where would civilization be if some unique thinker hadn’t invented the wheel? Or spread forbidden knowledge to the masses via the printing press? Or the brave souls through the ages who haddrawn a line in the sand and stood up to the rampaging tyrants intent on taking what wasn’t theirs? They would still be oppressed serfs living in the Middle Ages! Independent thinking and progress went hand in hand and…
Georgie almost groaned aloud as she wrestled St. Joan back into her box so that she could temper her answer. “Respect always commands more discipline than the rod ever could, and makes for a much better and more sustainable environment for learning.” Georgie believed that to her core. “You have never been one for draconian punishments or rule by fear either, so I know you agree with me, Miss P. At least on the fundamentals.” Even after seven years, Georgie still chafed against the rigid stricture of the FourD’s. Decorum and discretion, especially, had never come easy to her. “I politely tried to explain my ethos to Lady Steadman but—”
Her mentor stopped her with a lackluster raised palm. “An untried and untested governess has no right to claim anethos, Georgina. Until you have put it into practice outside of these walls, and reaped the rewards of it, it is still atheory. An unproven one at that. That it is an ethos that I also happen to subscribe to is by the by in this instance. I have a reputation as a successful educator with decades of experience, and you do not. Not yet at least, and you will never achieve that reputation unless you actually get a job doing it, dearest.”
“So I must pretend that I shall beat my charges within an inch of their lives if they dare to put a foot wrong to placate their disinterested parents? Pretend that I subscribe to all those silly old doctrines and archaic, nonsensical customs during an interview simply to get hired? Lie to a potential employer’s face from the outset? Be disingenuous and dishonest?”
Miss P glanced skyward as if seeking strength from the heavens. “There is an ocean of difference between lying and tactful diplomacy, dear. When Lady Steadman suggested that you should not spare the rod or spoil the child, you could have nodded and said that you firmly believe that good discipline forms the foundation of a good education—because it does and you wouldn’t be lying. No child will learn anything if they are allowed to run riot or swing from the chandeliers. Whether you use the rod to keep them in check or your yet-untested ethos will make no difference so long as the children learn. And so long as the chandeliers remain unswung on, and all appears on the surface to be running precisely as they envisage it, their parents are unlikely to ever set one foot into the nursery, so how you intend to run that is a moot point. Once you have their confidence, the nursery shall be your kingdom to rule over as you see fit. That has always been the way of things.”
“Just because something has always been done a certain way does not necessarily mean that way is right.” She believed that to her core too. How on earth could one embrace all the potential possibilities if one plowed the same old furrow day after day? Obviously, there should be rules and boundaries—but surely they, too, should have the capacity to bend and change according to circumstances. Change was always four-fifths for the better, especially when the march of progress was relentless.
“Of course it doesn’t. However, the purpose of an interview is to make those parents see you asemployable, Georgina. Taking issue with them during it is never going to get you the job—as this is proof.” She picked up the letter and waved it. “You are an excellent teacher. The best I have ever trained—canny, adaptable, unflappable, intuitive, imaginative, and always top of every class. You possess that rare and unique talent of getting the best out of your students. That is a gift. A miraculous gift that I envy because I was not blessedwith it. With your talent, you should have your pick of positions. Employers should be beating a path to your door, begging you to deign to work for them and weave your phenomenal magic on their children, yet you are the only one of my protégés who has never been offered a single position. In the decade since this school was founded, thirty-three consecutive rejections is a record, young lady, and not one that you should be proud of.”
Miss Prentice had her there. If anything, Georgie was mortified by her abysmal record. Since she had technically graduated almost two summers ago, she had watched all her classmates secure positions and leave the school for better things. Her best friends, Lottie, Portia, and Kitty, had all been employed within weeks of their graduation. Lottie and Kitty had even been dismissed from their posts in the last eighteen months—in Kitty’s case, repeatedly—and they still managed to quickly find reemployment simply because they were protégés.
Georgie had been forced to watch all the protégés from the year below her do the same. Soon she would watch the next cohort flap their wings and flee the nest and, if Lady Steadman’s assessment was correct, she’d be left behind again because she did not pass muster at all. Which all rather suggested the fault for Georgie’s persistent lack of employment lay squarely at her door. Or, more precisely, at her outspoken flapping jaws.
“I will get the next job, Miss P, I promise.” She had to, because she couldn’t impose on Miss P’s charity forever despite her mentor never once telling her that she felt imposed upon. She also had to start her own life. Find her own place to belong. Not romance and family, of course, because impoverished governesses rarely left the station they had been forced into and hardly ever married, so she never tortured herself with those unattainable dreams, like her friend Kitty did. But there were other routes to happiness and fulfillment;nurturing other people’s children to be the best version of themselves was hers. If only she was given the chance. “Even if it means biting my wayward tongue so hard I snap it off.”
The older woman smiled kindly across her desk as she rang the bell for tea. “We can always live in hope, dear, can’t we? In the meantime, you might as well make yourself useful by taking today’s geography class.”
Despite leaving for the Admiralty at the crack of dawn, it was close to midnight by the time Harry’s carriage dropped him back home in Hanover Square. But it couldn’t be helped. Not when he had work coming out of his ears and not enough hours in the day to do it all. The current bane of his life and the root of his growing dissatisfaction with it, if one ignored keeping each of His Majesty’s ships stocked with enough supplies to keep them sailing, was the HMSBoadicea.
Construction of the one-hundred-and-twenty-gun first-rate ship of the line was running behind schedule. Grossly behind schedule. It should have set sail on its training maneuvers two months ago, and they had been postponed twice. If the shipbuilders continued to drag their feet and they were postponed for a third time, he’d have no choice but to visit the dockyard in Plymouth himself to give the lazy landlubbers a swift kick up the backside.
Just the thought of heading back to Devon made him shudder.
Oh, how he loathed that place! It was filled with nothing but bad memories, which he much preferred to forget, and his biggest humiliating mistake, which he couldn’t. Every time he heard fresh news of the bloodyBoadicea, the specter of Plymouth loomed on the horizon to taunt him, and it never failed to sour his mood.
He wouldn’t have to think of any of those memories at all if it weren’t for the bloodyBoadicea. Those work-shy shipwrights had shilly-shallied long enough that if that troublesome ship wasn’t leading the fleet by summer, he might well be the one to bring back keelhauling! A nice dunk in the Channel might encourage those slothful slackers to step lively. They’d had four years, for pity’s sake, which was surely enough to build a whole flotilla of gunships? When he became admiral of the fleet, those who did not do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay would have no place inhisnavy.
But as the great military philosopher Sun Tzu said, victory comes from finding opportunities in problems, and that was Harry’s particular skill. That was what the Admiralty paid him handsomely for and would soon, if he continued to impress them, promote him handsomely for too. Where others saw only the insurmountable, he always found a way around, even if he had to resort to blasting his way through! Or venturing to blasted Plymouth and the hornet’s nest that awaited him there!
Annoyed, he bounded up his steps and then had to stand there because nobody came to open the front door. Harry was forced to hammer on the door until Polly, the young scullery maid, finally let him in.
“Begging your pardon, Captain, sir. I was tidying the drawing room and did not hear you.” She bobbed an apologetic curtsy as he stalked inside, then stopped dead again at the haphazard mountain of mismatched luggage littering his hallway.
Instantly, his shoulders slumped because there was only one person on the planet capable of making this much mess—and that was his only sibling, Flora. The sheer size of the pile also suggested she wasn’t alone.
God help him.
As a harried Simpkins finally made an appearance on the landing, his butler’s tight, ever-so-slightly beaten expression confirmed his suspicion.
“Please tell me this is just a fleeting visit, Simpkins, as I’m still not fully over the last.” When he had, once again, found a million excuses not to venture back to Devon at all last year, Flora and her chaotic brood had stayed for two weeks at Christmas, and it had, for want of a better phrase, been pure, unmitigated torture. Harry loved his older sister. Adored her, in fact, because Lady Flora Pendleton was as sharp as a tack, had a heart of pure gold, and a sparkling personality that lit up a room. Unfortunately, along with those admirable traits, she was also as undisciplined and disorganized as their bohemian artistic parents had been, and he could only ever cope with that amount of chaos nowadays in small doses.
Exceedingly small doses.
“Lord and Lady Pendleton are bound for Egypt until July, Captain, as his lordship’s latest quest is to find the source of the Nile.”
“Hallelujah! Somebody has to, so it might as well be him.” Harry didn’t give two figs where the Nile started, or where it ended for that matter either, but he was over the moon that an expedition to the land of the pharaohs guaranteed him several months of blessed peace from his family’s unexpected and frequent invasions. Flora on her own was a nightmare. When you added her nomadic, scatterbrained, academic husband and her three practically feral children into the mix, that nightmare always turned into all-out Armageddon. The children, in particular, ran him ragged. Probably because the little Machiavellis knew that all they had to do was stare up at him with their wide, soulful eyes and he was basically putty in their manipulative, grubby little hands. They had made him read them so many stories over Christmas his voice had been hoarse for weeksafterward, and his left knee was still a trifle stiff from all the crawling around on the floor they made him do when he had stupidly allowed them to climb on his back so they could ride him like a bloody horse.
An irony which wasn’t lost on him.
He’d slept on the cold, hard floor under the desk in his office at the Admiralty for two nights over New Year’s simply to get some peace. “When do they leave?”
“I am afraid they have already left, Captain Kincaid. Your sister waited all morning to say her goodbyes to you, but had to leave several hours ago as her ship departs Tilbury on the dawn tide.”
