Then with a flick of just her finger, she directed them to place the papers on her desk and the books they had been using onto the bookshelf Harry had almost given himself a hernia over by dragging it into the room. The shelves now sported labels according to the subject and appeared to be filled with books that he had no hand in buying.
As the tidying took seconds, they were all chivvied out of the classroom en masse and he found himself spirited toward the dining room as little Grace dragged him by the hand, doubly suspicious as to why she was in such a hurry to see him gone.
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask but Grace squeezed his hand to command his attention instead. “We were very good today, Uncle Harry.”
“I am very pleased to hear it.” He beamed down at his youngest niece, still marveling at the astonishing transformation of the three destructive and feral miscreants at such impressive speed regardless of his niggling suspicions as to how.
Perhaps he should be chastising himself for ever doubting Miss Rowe’s abilities? He wasn’t convinced, but he was supremely grateful that he at least still had a governess and that, on the surface at least, things were going better than expected. He would keep his beady eye on her until she had convinced him. After all, as Sun Tzu quite rightly said, it was always prudent to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Whichever Miss Rowe was would soon reveal itself.
“I am very proud of you all.”
And he was.
So proud he ruffled Felix’s hair, as he had fully expected the boy to be the first to lead the rebellion today. His nephew had a stubborn streak a mile wide and, like blasted Flora, had an allergy to being kept inside. “After all these years of barbarousness, who knew you had such restraint and dedication in you?” Harry hadn’t, but suddenly, everything in his garden was rosy again now that calmness had been, at least temporarily, restored to his house.
He wasn’t really beguiled by Miss Rowe, simply in dire need of a woman’s touch. Miss Rowe could both teach and discipline children exactly as Miss Prentice had promised and Flora’s little savages could behave! How bloody marvelous was all that?
All he had to do was find the time to eat, sleep, and sow some of those well-needed and well-earned wild oats, and his garden wouldn’t just be rosy—it would be in full bloom.
That warm, reassured, and relieved feeling lasted all of five seconds until Marianne ruined it.
“Of course we did you proud, Uncle Harry.” She whispered this out of the side of her mouth so that Miss Rowe could not hear. “Only a blithering idiot would ruin the chance of unlimited ice cream at Gunther’s before Saturday and not even Felix is that stupid.”
ChapterNINE
“If I were to measure it in fractions, he is nine-tenths dislikable. He is a staid, stiff, pompous fuddy-duddy who has archaic ideas about the education of children and a tendency to lean toward the draconian in its execution.”
Georgie was still smarting about the way Captain Kincaid had criticized her that first afternoon despite him holding his counsel in the three days since. However, it was as plain as the perfectly straight nose on his disapproving face every evening at precisely five minutes to five that he was biting his tongue about her methods as hard as she was biting hers about his. Where, devil take him, he somehow managed to emerge from nine hours working at the Admiralty and a brisk horse ride home across the city without a single hair out of place while she always resembled a woman who had been dragged through a hedge backward.
Thankfully, there were no lessons to worry about on Saturday or Sunday, so this morning she had taken the children, the dog, and Felix’s cricket bat to St. James’s Park. They all had a thoroughly lovelytime whacking the ball around while Norbert assisted with the fielding, then spent the remaining hour catching tadpoles in a glass jar so they could study them properly before they released them back into the pond.
All without any threat of scrutiny or silent judgment from her impeccable stickler of an employer.
She had only been in his employ for half a week and already dreaded those brief, daily visits to her classroom more than anything. His intense brown gaze was always everywhere as he asked questions about everything the children had learned. Georgie knew he would scrutinize all their written work for the day, too, given half a chance, and not just the pages she allowed him to see. Although why she felt compelled to hide the rest was a mystery, as almost all the children’s written work was perfectly fine. If one ignored Felix’s woeful lack of any formal mathematics work—which he had a talent for avoiding until she tricked him into learning some covert sums outside during their breaks—he at least made a stab at everything else. And while his sloppy handwriting might leave a lot to be desired, the boy had a clever and mature way with the written word. Marianne loved to write irrespective of whether that was numbers or letters, and little Grace was doing perfectly fine, too, especially when one considered she was only five.
But when the captain’s annoyingly symmetrical dark brows furrowed every afternoon as he scanned each sheet of paper left on the children’s desks alongside whatever else she had left oh-so-casually lying around on hers, she panicked. Especially when he always made a point of querying why she had chosen to, again, waste at least one to two valuable hours of learning in the garden in the middle of every day where conveniently, no written work was ever done. She was already running out of ways to explain that, in her professional opinion,not all learning had to be written down and that, in fact, the best learning often stuck in the brain when no writing was done at all.
Those brief visits unsettled her so much, she was on constant tenterhooks ever since. Especially as the daily handwriting lesson was really the only one in which the children fully behaved themselves how he expected them to. Marianne had a big hand in that. A bigger and more persuasive hand than the exiled Norbert’s constant howling throughout every afternoon did to distract them all. For some reason, and despite the withering power of Georgie’s trusty schoolmistress’s stare, Marianne’s was just as potent. Whenever the other two siblings began to lose focus, she gave them a warning look that somehow held the power to bring even Felix up short.
As much as it had come in useful in the last few days, the unspoken message in Marianne’s eyes and the way Felix especially seemed to physically suppress himself while under the glare of it bothered her. Georgie could not quite put her finger on why, but the feeling that they all knew something which she didn’t refused to go away, and that unsettled her almost as much as the captain’s daily inspections did.
“And the other tenth?” Typically, Portia asked the most important question and the only one Georgie couldn’t yet answer. Three and a half days in and she still couldn’t quite work Captain Kincaid out at all. In so many ways, he reminded her of the colonel and yet in so many more ways, he didn’t.
“Hard to say.” She stared at the Saturday afternoon rowing boats bobbing on the Serpentine while she tried to find the right way to explain her conundrum. “The children plainly adore him. So does the dog, although goodness knows why as the captain seems to have even less patience with Norbert than he does with me—and that is saying something.” It was as clear as the suspicion shimmering inthe stickler’s stormy, dark eyes that he was unimpressed with everything about Georgie. Even her carrot-colored hair vexed him. She knew that for a fact because his gaze would often flick to the top of her head as if he couldn’t quite believe hair could be such an awful color either.
“Is he cruel to him?”
“No!” It was a vehement response because she would not have been able to stay employed by a man who was cruel to an innocent animal. “He moans about Norbert but…” She huffed because the truth only made the captain more likable. “He never fails to stroke his ears when the dog comes to him, and when he thinks nobody is looking, he even allows Norbert to lick his face while he kisses his nose.” She had almost choked when she had spied that from her hiding place on the landing last night when the captain had arrived home late.
“Well, that is always a good sign.” Lottie threw the last crumbs of the bread she had brought with her at the swans waiting for it at the water’s edge. Thanks to their different work commitments, that there were three of them all in the same place at the same time was almost unheard of nowadays. The only friend missing on their little jaunt through Hyde Park this sunny Saturday afternoon off was Kitty, who was traveling with her latest employers around the south coast. “Children and animals are always the best gauge of a person’s character.”
Lottie dusted the last crumbs from her hands with an unladylike slap, then threaded her arms through Georgia’s and Portia’s as the three of them set off around the Serpentine back toward Mayfair. “Dogs especially are stingy with their affections if they sense anything untoward. One of our most docile farm dogs took such a dislike to the oil seller, we had to shut her in the stables whenever the man turned up. We could not fathom why. But then it came to light thatthe oil seller was a wanted criminal. A murderer, no less! A man who had swindled an old lady in the next county and then throttled her when she threatened to report him to the authorities. But the dog knew that the scoundrel wasn’t a decent man the second she met him. Because dogsknowsuch things. They are always a better judge of character than us humans.”
“Maybe.” Georgie refused to believe that the dim-witted Norbert was a better judge of character than she was. “Except he is such a stickler. For everything, but most particularly time. Do you know he even wears two pocket watches! And constantly refers to both. What sort of a person does that?” She had certainly never witnessed the like.
“One who cannot afford to be late. Or one who is so important his time is stretched to the limit. Neither make him a bad man.” Lottie’s reasonable, rational, and cheerful acceptance of the captain’s most peculiar quirk irritated Georgie. “Perhaps if we buy Kitty two, she might actually remember to use one of them and will thus keep this new post longer than she managed the last. Just five days to get dismissed is a staggering record—even for her.”
It was, but Georgie had only been working for the captain for four days and could not shake the worry that despite the neat and tidy classroom and well-behaved children he saw every afternoon at five minutes to five sharp, he still did not trust her as far as he could throw her. Nor did he particularly seem to like her either. He most definitely did not rate her abilities as a governess, else he wouldn’t keep checking up on her. Which meant that all her hard work to change his initial poor opinion of her had failed. All in all, she was unnerved—by the apparent precariousness of her situation and more so by the man.
