Mrs. Tullock watched her collect the pieces. “You needn’t master it in one sitting, Your Grace.”
“I would rather die than let this book defeat me,” Nancy replied, stacking the pages with a soldier’s precision. “I have survived Greek, Latin, and my mother’s Scottish temper. I refuse to be bested by arithmetic.”
She found her place, copied the numbers, and felt—slowly, to her great annoyance—that they finally began to makesense. Patterns emerged; what once looked like gibberish now resembled a system. It was, she realized, simply a matter of learning the shape of the thing, then forcing it to obey.
She looked up to see Mrs. Tullock regarding her, not with skepticism, but a sort of grim pride. “You’re getting it.”
“I am?” Nancy tried to sound only mildly desperate.
The housekeeper nodded. “You’ll make a proper mistress of this house yet.”
Nancy smiled, for real this time. “That is the plan.”
Mrs. Tullock gathered her skirts and moved toward the door. “I’ll leave you to your battle, then. But do call if you require a medic.”
When the housekeeper was gone, Nancy sat very still for a long moment, pen poised above the figures.
She could not have named the feeling, but it was somewhere between triumph and fear. She wanted, fiercely, for everything to be perfect—for the children, for the house, even for Oscar, though she would die before confessing it.
She wrote her sums again, careful and slow. She checked them twice. She straightened the stack of ledgers, set her cup on its saucer, and wiped the ink from her brow. Then she whispered to the empty room: “I will get this right.”
And this time, she believed it.
Nancy lasted precisely twelve minutes before the urge to see the twins overwhelmed her better judgment.
She excused herself from the endless parade of lists, left the ledger stacked with numbers as neat as her pride could muster, and bounded up the stairs. The nursery door stood ajar, admitting a buzz of small voices and a rising tide of giggles. Nancy stepped inside and was instantly hailed by a volley of throw pillows, two raucous children, and the sweet, musty perfume of the room’s afternoon sunlight.
“Did you conquer the dragon?” Clara demanded, rolling off her makeshift tower of cushions and landing at Nancy’s feet.
“I tamed it,” Nancy said, offering her hand to the girl. “And then I bribed it to do my bidding. Dragons respond very well to bribery, as it turns out.”
Henry, lurking behind a fortress of blankets, popped his head up. “Did you bring sweets?”
“Not today. Today is for stories,” Nancy announced, advancing into the territory of their blanket fort and deliberately collapsing onto the floor beside them. Her skirts ballooned out, nearly engulfing both children. “What shall it be? Wild tales of Scotland, or a new chapter in the Adventures of the Tiny Fox?”
Clara didn’t answer, simply wedged herself into Nancy’s lap and buried her face in the folds of her dress. Henry followed, burrowing in with the caution of a woodland creature, half-expecting a trap. Nancy tucked them both in, heart pulsing with an emotion she refused to label.
She opened the book—one of Peter’s old favorites, she guessed from the chewed spine—and began to read. The story was nonsense: a hedgehog who outwitted highwaymen with the power of arithmetic, and a badger who solved every problem by reciting history in reverse. The twins listened, spellbound, faces tipped up to her as if she might conjure the rest of their lives from the page.
Nancy was three chapters in, and Henry had just declared war on the neighboring village, when a shadow blocked the light from the door. Oscar stood at the threshold, arms folded, an air of skepticism radiating from him in steady waves.
He cleared his throat, but Clara only gripped Nancy tighter. “We are busy,” she said.
Henry seconded this: “We’re having a story.”
Oscar entered anyway, and, after an awkward survey of the available seating-one rocking horse, a miniature chair, and a pile of cushions already claimed- he crouched on the rug. Clara eyed him, then gestured at his legs.
“You must cross them,” she instructed. “Like this.”
Oscar regarded his own limbs as if they belonged to someone else, then—carefully, with the air of a man disarming an explosive—folded them in a parody of repose. He sat, knees jutting, hands clamped to his shins.
Nancy smirked. “Welcome to the nursery, Your Grace. Do you require a scone to complete the experience?”
Oscar’s glare was a force of nature. “I am here to observe.”
“Then observe quietly, if you please,” Nancy said, and turned a page with great ceremony.
She continued the story, giving the hedgehog an accent she had never attempted before and making the badger sound suspiciously like Mrs. Tullock. The children were enraptured, giggling and nudging each other with every silly voice or wild plot turn.
