Because nothing had happened. A man had gone to London and done what men in London did. A woman had read about it in the gossip sheets and felt the appropriate disappointment. Nothing had changed except the final extinguishing of a hope she should never have allowed herself to feel.
She had survived worse than this and would survive this too.
The headache faded on the fourth day. Mel took it as a sign that her body was finally accepting what her mind had known all along, that expecting anything from anyone was a recipe for disaster, and that the only person she could truly rely on was herself.
She was enough. She had always been enough. And if the house felt emptier without him, if the evenings felt longer without their conversations, if some part of her listened for footsteps that never came, well. She would adjust, she would adapt, she would survive.
It was what she did.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“His Grace has returned.”
Mrs. Kemp delivered this news like a servant trained to keep her opinions to herself about her employer’s comings and goings. She stood in the doorway of the schoolroom with her hands folded before her and her expression revealing nothing.
Mel looked up from the geography lesson she had been conducting. Anna was labelling a map of Europe with her customary precision. Viola was drawing the coastline of Italy with more artistic flair than cartographic accuracy and Thistle was supposed to be copying the names of capital cities but had become distracted by a spider that was making its way across the windowsill.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kemp.” Mel’s voice was as neutral as the housekeeper’s expression. “Please inform His Grace that the children will be available after their lessons conclude at four on the hour.”
“Very well, Miss Grace.”
Mrs. Kemp withdrew. Mel returned her attention to the lesson, her hands steady on the table, her face composed into the mask she had been wearing for a week.
He was back. He had gone to London and caused a scandal and now he was back, presumably to continue the pattern ofpresence and absence that characterised his relationship with his children and with her.
No… this would not happen with her. There was no relationship with her. There had never been a relationship with her. There had been evening conversations and a moment in a garden and the particular intimacy that developed between two people who cared for the same children, but none of that constituted a relationship.
A relationship would imply promises and expectations.
She had long learned her lesson about expectations.
The geography lesson continued and Mel corrected Anna’s placement of Vienna, praised Viola’s rendering of the Mediterranean Sea and reminded Thistle that spiders were not part of the curriculum. She was patient and encouraging and entirely professional, and if some part of her was aware of Rhys’s presence in the house like a physical weight on her consciousness, she did not allow that awareness to affect her teaching.
The lesson ended at four precisely. Mel dismissed the children to find their father, watching as they scrambled from their seats with the particular excitement that his returns always inspired.
Thistle was out the door first, shouting“Papa!”at a volume that would have been excessive in a field and was absolutely inappropriate indoors. Anna followed at a more dignified pace, though her carefully composed expression could not quite hideher eagerness. Viola lingered for a moment, looking back at Mel with those quiet, knowing eyes.
“Are you coming, Miss Grace?”
“Later, perhaps. I have matters to attend to here.”
Viola nodded, accepting this explanation, and went to join her sisters. Mel listened to the sounds of reunion drifting up from the entrance hall, Thistle’s excited chatter, Anna’s formal greeting that couldn’t quite disguise her pleasure, Viola’s soft voice saying something too quiet to hear.
And Rhys’s voice, warm and familiar, telling them he had missed them.
Mel gathered the geography materials and began organising them for tomorrow’s lesson. This was what she did, this was who she was, the governess who maintained order while the family reunited. The employee who kept her distance while others embraced.
It was perfectly fine. She had spent a week preparing for this moment, and she was prepared.
The afternoon passed in the particular way afternoons passed when there was nothing to do but wait for time to move forward. Mel retreated to her room after tidying the schoolroom, claiming a need to review lesson plans. In truth, she simply needed to be somewhere that did not require her to maintain a composed expression for an audience.
Her room was quiet and familiar, the shell still sitting on the windowsill where she had placed it after Viola gave it to her. She did not look at the shell. Looking at the shell made her think about trust and connection and all the things she had been foolish enough to hope for.
Instead, she sat at her small desk and wrote out vocabulary lists for next week’s French lessons. Anna was progressing rapidly, her systematic approach to language acquisition proving as effective as her approach to everything else. Viola was beginning to show interest as well, her artistic sensibility responding to the musicality of French pronunciation. Even Thistle had consented to learn a few phrases, though she insisted on knowing the French words for beetle, toad, and scientific investigation before anything else.
The vocabulary lists took an hour. Mel moved on to arithmetic exercises, then to reading comprehension questions, then to a detailed plan for introducing basic Latin grammar to all three children rather than just Anna. The work was familiar and soothing, the kind of task she could perform without engaging the parts of her mind that wanted to think about other things.
At six exactly on the hour she went downstairs for dinner.
