The Game and the Governess (2 page)

“Happiness?” she replied. “In being alone? In being a governess?”

“Yes.” Miss Earhart gave a ghost of a smile. “If happiness is in one’s nature—as it is in yours.”

Phoebe could only scoff.

“Once upon a time, you were one of my happiest students. You took pleasure in little things and found joy where you could.” Miss Earhart laid a tentative hand on Phoebe’s shoulder. “You can let this break you, leaving you bitter and hateful. Or you can try to find some good in the world, and let that comfort you. Life will be hard either way, but I hope you find your happiness again.”

Phoebe looked at the hand on her shoulder, at the woman before her, who had somehow lost some of her pinched disapproval in the last few minutes. Now she wore her concern plain as day.

Then Phoebe’s eyes drifted to the letter in her hand. Addressed to an earl. The man who was the reason she was faced with a different letter now. A different future.

“Thank you, Miss Earhart,” she said, taking the letter with the address near Portsmouth. “But I cannot think there is any good left in the world.”

She turned to one of the houseboys behind Miss
Earhart and handed him the earl’s letter, with one of her few pennies for his trouble. “Please see that this makes its way into the morning post.”

Then she picked up her small valise and marched past Miss Earhart.

She would go to this family in Portsmouth. It was the only option she had. But Phoebe knew that from now on, she would be alone. As Miss Earhart had said, her security and future were up to her now. No one else was looking after her.

After all, who gave a damn about the governess?

TO LORD EDWARD GRANVILLE,

EARL OF ASHBY

GROSVENOR SQUARE

LONDON

1817

Sir –

This will be a short letter. I have little time to write and not much to say. Other than “damn you.” Damn you for what you have done—directly or indirectly, you have caused the greatest possible pain, and it is you who should bear the blame for it.

My father, God rest his soul, has left this world. Although he quit this world miserably, and I fear God will not let his soul rest.

I read the letter you wrote to my father. What I found most telling in it was that, in your warning to stay away from Mr. Sharp, you gave information that implied he had rooked you too. That he had stolen from you, in the guise of investments gone bad, and diverting funds from your estates. But none of that made the papers. It was discreetly hushed up. Mr. Sharp was never taken away and made to pay for that crime. Doing so would have made you a laughingstock. Instead, he was let loose into the country, where he could use your name and association to take advantage of those of us who are not as connected as those in town. Who are not as clever.

You protected your precious reputation, and let my father pay the price for it.

I doubt you and I will ever have the chance to meet. My circumstances are changing swiftly now, and I must make my own way in the world. I want nothing from you. I simply wish for you to feel the horror of your carelessness. And I want you to know one simple truth:

If I ever have the opportunity to cause you pain, know it will happen. I will take the chance as God given and my right as my father’s daughter. But it will not be malicious.

It will be justice.

Miss P. Baker

Mrs. Beveridge’s School

Surrey

      1

It begins with a wager. . . .

LONDON, 1822

I
t has been said that one should not hire one’s friends.

No doubt, those who have said this have a deep wisdom about life, a spark of intelligence that recognizes inherent truths—or perhaps, simply the experience that proves the veracity of such a statement.

The Earl of Ashby had none of these qualities.

“Determined I was. And luckily, I came of age at the very right moment: I join the army, much to my great-uncle’s dismay—but two days later, Napoleon abdicates and is sent to Elba!”

What the Earl of Ashby did have was luck. In abundance. He was lucky at cards. He was lucky with the fairer sex. He was even lucky in his title.

“Of course, at the time, I did not think of it as lucky, although my great-uncle certainly did, I being the only
heir to Ashby he could find in the British Empire. At the time I would have believed that the old man had marched to the Continent and locked Boney up himself to thwart me.”

It was nothing but luck that had the old Earl of Ashby’s son and grandson dying in a tragic accident involving an overly friendly badger, making the nearest living male relative young Edward Granville—or Ned, as he had always been called—the heir to one of the oldest earldoms in the country. It was just such luck that had the old earl swoop in and take little Ned away from the piddling town of Hollyhock and his mother’s genteel poverty at the age of twelve, and raise him in the tradition of the aristocracy.

“But then that French smudge manages to weasel his way off the island, and this time, true luck! I actually get to go to war! But the real luck was getting placed in the same regiment as Dr. Gray here. And— Oh, Turner, stop standing back in the shadows, this story is about you too!”

It was luck, and only luck, that found Ned Granville in the right place at the right time to save his friend and commanding officer, Captain John Turner, as well as seventeen others of their regiment on the last battlefield.

“So there we are in the hazy mist of battle on a field in Belgium, of all places—and thank God too, because I was beginning to think war was going to entirely be marching in straight lines and taking Turner’s and Gray’s money at cards—and suddenly, our flank falls behind a rise and takes a hail of fire from a bunch of Frenchies on top of it.

“So we’re pinned down, waiting for the runner with
extra ammunition to arrive, when Turner spots the poor runner shot dead on the field a hundred feet away. And Turner, he jumps up before the rest of us can cover him, and runs out into the field. He grabs the ammunition and is halfway back before a bullet rips through the meat of his leg. There he is, lying on the field, and holding our ammunition. But all I see is my friend bleeding out—so of course, I’m the idiot who runs into the fray after him.”

His actions that day would earn him commendations from the Crown for his bravery. They would also earn Ned Granville his nickname.

“It was just luck that none of their bullets hit me. And once I got Turner back behind the line, and the ammunition to our flank so we could hold our position, we beat the enemy back from whence they came. The next morning, Rhys—Dr. Gray here—had patched Turner up enough to have him walking, and he came over, clapped me on the shoulder, and named me Lucky Ned. Been stuck with it—and him!—ever since.”

It was from that point on that “Lucky Ned”—and everyone else around him—had to simply accept that luck ruled his life.

And since such luck ruled his life, it could be said that Lucky Ned was, indeed, happy-go-lucky. Why bother with worries, when you had luck? Why heed those warnings about hiring your friends? Bah—so bothersome! It would be far more convenient to have a friend in a position of trust than to worry all the time that the servants would cheat you.

Yes, it might breed resentment.

Yes, that resentment might fester.

But not toward Ned. No, he was too good, too lucky for that.

Thus, Ned Granville, the Earl of Ashby, hired his best friend, John Turner, formerly a Captain of His Majesty’s Army, to the exalted post of his secretary.

And he was about to regret it.

They were at a club whose name is not mentioned within earshot of wives and daughters, in their private card room. Well, the earl’s private room. And the earl was engaging in that favorite of his activities: telling the tale of his heroism at Waterloo to a room full of jovial cronies.

But as the night wore on, said cronies moved off to their own vices, and soon only three men remained at the card table: Mr. John Turner, silent and stiff-backed; Dr. Rhys Gray, contemplative and considerate; and the Earl of Ashby, “Lucky Ned,” living up to his name.

“
Vingt-et-un!
” Lucky Ned cried, a gleeful smile breaking over his features, turning over an ace.

The two other men at the table groaned as they tossed their useless cards across the baize. But then again, the men should be used to such results by now. After all, they had been losing to Ned at cards for years.

“That’s it,” Rhys said, pushing himself back from the table. “I will not play anymore. It’s foolish to go against someone with that much luck.”

“It’s not as if I can help it.” Ned shrugged. “I was simply dealt a better hand.”

“It would be one thing if you shared your luck,” Rhys replied, good-naturedly. “But you have always been the sole man left at the table, even when we were playing for scraps of dried beef in camp.”

“I take exception to that,” Ned replied indignantly. “I do so share my luck. If I recall correctly, Turner here pocketed a number of those beef scraps.”

“And little else since,” John Turner said enigmatically.

Annoyed, the Earl of Ashby gritted his teeth slightly. But perhaps that was simply in response to his latest hand of cards, which the good doctor was dealing out.

“Besides”—Ned instead turned to Rhys—“you were so busy tending to the wounded that you likely saw little of those games. Even tonight you refuse to play for barely more than dried beef.”

“As a man of science, I see little point in games of chance. I have long observed their progress and the only consistent conclusion I come to is that I lose money,” Rhys replied with good humor.

“Little point?” Ned cried on a laugh. “The point is that it’s
exciting
. You go through life with your observations and your little laboratory in Greenwich and never play for deep stakes. What’s the point of that?” He looked over to the stern-mouthed Turner across from him. “What say you, Turner?”

John Turner looked up from his hand. He seemed to consider the statement for a moment, then . . .

“Yes. Sometimes life is made better by a high-stakes gamble. But you have to choose your moment.”

“There, Turner agrees with me. A rarity these days, I assure you,” Ned replied, settling back into his hand. “Honestly, you are such a stick in the mud of late, Turner, I even thought you might stay home tonight poring over your precious papers—the one night Rhys is in London!”

“If you had chosen to go to any other club, I would have had to,” Turner replied, his voice a soft rebuke. “You know the realities as well as I. And I am afraid being a stick in the mud goes with the territory of being a secretary, instead of—”

The silence that fell on the room was broken only by the flipping over of cards, until Rhys, his eyes on his hand, asked in his distracted way, “Instead of what, Turner?”

A dark look passed between the earl and his employee.

“Instead of a man of my own,” Turner finished.

The earl visibly rolled his eyes.

“Whatever do you mean?” Rhys inquired. As a doctor, he was permanently curious, yet amazingly oblivious to the tension that was mounting in the dark and smoky room.

“He means his mill,” the earl answered for him, taking a loose and familiar tone that might seem odd from a man of the earl’s standing, but that was simply how it was with Ashby. With these two men, the wall had come down long ago.

Or so he had assumed.

“He’s been whining about it for three weeks now. And if you, Turner, had been a mill owner and not my secretary, you would not have been admitted even here . . . so . . .”

“What about the mill?” Rhys asked, looking to Turner.

“My family’s mill has suffered another setback,” Turner sighed, but held his posture straight.

“But I thought you had rebuilt after the fire?” Rhys questioned, his blond brow coming down in a scowl.

“I had, but that was just the building, not the equipment. I sank every penny into purchasing new works from America, but last month the ship was lost at sea.”

“Oh, Turner, I am so sorry,” Rhys began. “Surely you can borrow . . .”

But Turner shook his head. “The banks do not see a mill that has not functioned in five years as a worthwhile investment.”

It went unasked about the other possible source of lending; the source that was present in that very room. But a quick look between Turner and the good doctor told Rhys that that avenue was a dead end as well.

“Turner maintains that if he had the ability to save his family mill, he would be far less of a stick in the mud, and more pleasant to be around. But I have to counter that it simply wouldn’t be true,” Ned intoned as he flipped over an ace.