“I’m her governess, Lady Charlotte. Keeping her busy, especially on rainy afternoons, is my duty after all,” Lydia replied. She offered the response matter of factly, with no heat or defensiveness.
“Indeed. You are here in service… a fact we should all endeavor to remember,” she answered with a pointed glance at Lydia and another cast in Oliver’s direction.
Stedmore announced dinner from the doorway and Lady Hartley, despite protocol, simply swept from the room, leaving them all in her wake. Gemma, while not understanding thesituation, clearly felt the tension. She slipped her hand into Lydia’s and looked up at her. “Miss Lydia?”
“Yes, Gemma?”
The expression on her small still slightly cherubic face was earnest and worried. “Please don’t go. I want you to be my governess forever… You will stay here, won’t you?”
“I have no plans to go anywhere else, Gemma. I’m perfectly content to remain here at Hartwell with you for as long as I am permitted to do so,” Lydia answered. “I will not leave you of my own accord. That is a promise.”
Gemma nodded, seeming satisfied with the answer. But she continued to hold onto Lydia’s hand, gripping it a bit more tightly than truly necessary—an indication of her anxiousness about the situation.
Dinner was, despite her best efforts, an interminable affair. Why Lady Charlotte had suddenly decided to rein in her temper enough to join them for the evening meal, she couldn’t say. But while her behavior and her words never veered into anything impolite, the overall feeling was one of hostility. It was oppressive. When the meal ended it was a relief. Lydia was also quite grateful that she had the convenient escape of readying Gemma for bed. It provided her a way out while poor Oliver was still stuck with the woman.
Oh, she hated thinking unkindly about a woman she had once admired, but it was so difficult when faced with her disdain to fight the inclination to lash back at her in defense.
Through most of it, Gemma remained quiet. Perhaps, Lydia thought, the child had found dinner as exhausting as she herself had. Then, just as she was tucking the little girl into bed, the silence was shattered with the kind of honest curiosity only a child was capable of.
“Miss Lydia, I don’t think we should dine with Grandmama tomorrow night,” Gemma said. “She doesn’t seem to like you very much.”
Succinctly put. Lydia smiled. “You're a very observant young lady, Gemma. No, your grandmother does not especially care for me. I knew her before, a very long time ago… I wasn’t always a governess. I grew up in a house not very different from this one. I had servants and pretty gowns and I went to balls and danced. Not as much as some other girls, but enough to make it fun. And then I met someone and we were supposed to marry. But in the end, I couldn’t go through with it. My father had lost everything. All his fortune was gone and mine with it, including the dowry my grandfather left for me… And the gentleman I was to marry, he needed that dowry to save his much loved home—or so I thought at the time.”
“So why are you still Miss Lydia and not Mrs. Something else?” Gemma asked.
“Because shortly before we were supposed to wed, I ran away… He was too honorable a gentleman to end the engagement despite having essentially been taken in by inadvertent fraud. So I ended it the only way I knew how and freed him to marry someone who would be able to help him save his home.” It was so simple when explaining it to a child, but how would that child’s father react if she were to attempt such an explanation to him. She understood, of course, that Oliver wanted answers, that he likely needed those answers. A dozen years was too long to be left with the gnawing agony of not knowing why one’s future had shifted so irrevocably.
“That is very sad… People should be able to marry for love. I will never marry for any other reason,” Gemma stated.
“Nor should you… and I agree. If I had it to do all over again, I might have chosen a different path. Alas, I did not and it hasn’tbeen all bad. I’m here now with you, after all, and I’m very, very glad of that.”
Gemma threw her arms around Lydia’s neck, hugging her tightly. “I’m very glad of that too.”
“Goodnight, sweet girl. Your father will be in shortly, I’m certain.” Getting to her feet, Lydia leaned down once more and pressed a kiss to Gemma’s forehead as she tucked the bedsheets in around her. As she left the room, she saw Oliver standing there, just beyond the door.
“How much did you hear?” She asked softly.
“Everything. Is that truly why you left? Out of some misguided self sacrifice?” He demanded.
Lydia sighed. “This is not the place to discuss it. I will meet you later… in the study. Gemma will be waiting for her goodnight kiss.”
Chapter
Eleven
Lydia entered her chamber feeling emotionally drained. Tired in a way that she had not been in a very long time. Because for a dozen years she’d only been going through the motions of living. There had been no depth of feeling, no emotionally charged moments, no passion or joy or fear or sadness. There had just been one endless day bleeding into the next—nothing to anticipate and nothing to dread. Just existence.
But that exhaustion vanished the moment she heard a familiar voice from the chair in the corner of the room.
“I thought it best we speak privately and I had hoped this might be the best place to do so… I’d like to think neither you nor my son have lost touch with propriety to the degree that he’d be here, as well.”
Lydia looked at her with a kind of resolve that was typically reserved for taking unpleasant remedies. It had to be done, but that did not mean she had to like it. “Lord Hartwell has been a gentleman in every regard. And contrary to your opinions about me, I have not behaved with impropriety.” Except once. One weak moment in the corridor. But they had, both of them without speaking of it, avoided such situations since.
“That is a relief, I suppose… I’m not here to belabor the point, Miss Whitby… I refuse, here in the privacy of this chamber, to use that ridiculous moniker when we both know it to be untrue?—”
“Mercer was my mother’s family name. When I left London, I did not wish to be found. And I knew he would look for me. It seemed the best option for us both to take on a new identity. There was nothing nefarious in the choice… I did what I did because I thought it best for Oliver,” Lydia protested.
“Then do what is best for him now… and leave.”
