The last few days had been chaotic torture. Their lack of routine, responsibility, and structure was so reminiscent of his own shambolic childhood, before the admiral had rescued him and taught him the meaning of discipline, that he fully expected his roof to leak at any moment and the debt collectors to knock at his door to make thenightmare complete. Worrying about those things was ludicrous, he knew, as he had his roof thoroughly checked every September and he did not owe a single soul a shilling because, unlike his father and because of all his grandfather’s strict but practical tutoring, Harry never spent beyond his means and paid every bill promptly.
His mother, on the other hand, might well have been the admiral’s daughter, but she hadn’t spent her formative years being brought up by him. Instead, thanks to his wife’s rapid, tempestuous affair with a free-spirited and scandalous artist ten years her junior, she had been brought up in hedonistic and decadent disorder. Then had chosen to fall head over heels with a man much the same. Between her and his poet father, it was a wonder they ever managed to buy a house. That they managed to own it for the fourteen years it took for Harry to be able to earn his own wages to keep those debt collectors at bay was a blasted miracle. Twice, his mild-mannered papa had been taken away in irons to debtors’ prison before Harry had turned ten. He had lost count of how many debt collectors hammered on their door over the years and how many times he had to suffer the public shame of watching more of the family’s belongings get carted away. A decade and a half on and those old wounds were still deep. Deep enough that he had awoken twice this week in a cold sweat, convinced that he had traveled back in time and the bailiff was about to remove all the family silver.
“Welcome to Hanover Square, Miss Rowe.”
“Thank you, Captain Kincaid. I am delighted to be here.” The polite smile she offered was more reserved than delighted. Wary, measured, and assessing as she took it all in. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for that. Not when she really had no comprehension—yet—of the battle she had agreed to fight. With some luck and a good wind, this small and seemingly humorless woman was everything thelauded Miss Prentice had claimed she was and would swiftly implement the structure, routine, and discipline the children desperately needed. Harry loved his sister as much as he loved her feral offspring, but knew she wasn’t the best role model for them if they were going to succeed in the world as he had. Having them foisted upon him might well be a huge inconvenience, but at least he could gift them with the tools to help them learn some self-control.
He took a surreptitious glance at his new governess and almost sighed aloud.
If one ignored her much-too-pretty face, overtly feminine figure, and the striking hair that constantly drew his gaze—three things that had, worryingly, taken his breath away the first time he had set eyes upon her—Miss Rowe did not look commanding enough to be able to control the little savages for more than five minutes, let alone teach them any self-control. Frankly, it would take Joan of Arc and the better part of her crusading army to defeat his indefatigable nieces and nephew into civilized compliance.
They had certainly defeated him these past few days.
There was just too much of Flora in them, and by default, far too much of his parents. Scatterbrained, undisciplined unruliness was as ingrained in the Kincaids’ blood as the spots were on a leopard’s coat, and those spots never changed. But he was hopeful some of it could be trained out of them, at least in the short term. Enough that he could survive this ordeal with most of his hair and sanity intact until his blasted sister reclaimed them and his life returned to its usual even, albeit overworked, keel.
Which all rather hinged on the success of the unimposing yet strangely compelling woman standing before him.
God help them both.
“I have made arrangements for Mrs. Rigsby, my cook, to takeyou under her wing this morning and show you around.” Keen to get going while the going was good, Harry ushered her along the quiet hallway with a sweep of his arm as the groom dragged the first of her three enormous trunks upstairs. “The children have been told to expect their lessons to begin after luncheon today, so you have until then to settle in. I thought it only fair to ease you in gently.” As Simpkins had quite rightly pointed out, they currently needed Miss Rowe more than she needed them, so it wasn’t in Harry’s best interests to scare her with the unvarnished, ugly truth straightaway. It would be harder for her to run screaming for the hills if she were unpacked and in the thick of it. “However, I personally wanted to show you the teaching space I have organized. I hope the preparations I have made meet your particular expectations—despite the short notice.”
While still as reluctant to speak as she had been in her interview, Miss Rowe had been quite verbose in her subsequent letter to him in which she listed all the extensive paraphernalia she required to teach his unruly charges what she called “a broad and stimulating curriculum.” Some he understood and approved of—dictionaries, atlases, and abacuses all made perfect sense. Some he sort of understood, as even the most diligent students needed some respite from the necessary rigors of mathematics and good penmanship. Therefore, he had been more than happy to purchase the paints and the easels and the long list of fanciful books filled with children’s rhymes she had specified. Diversions he assumed she would use to fill the lesson-free Saturday mornings and church-free Sunday afternoons.
What she planned to do with all the magnifying glasses, scissors, string, ribbons, buttons, and colored feathers, he had no clue, but had purchased them anyway in case the absence of feathers caused an immediate change of heart that left him governess-less. Despite all his many, many,manyreservations about the diminutiveredhead beside him being up to the job he had been press-ganged into giving her, the alternative was terrifying. Four failed days of coping with them himself and he was already exhausted, and poor Simpkins could barely stand, he had been run so ragged.
“This is your classroom.” He flung open the morning room door, quietly proud of the transformation he had achieved in such a short space of time.
Where he had once read his newspapers while he watched the sun rise over his beloved garden, was now a school room that even Eton would be proud of. Three sturdy desks sat where his comfortable Chesterfield had been, all strategically turned to face the wall so that his easily distracted relatives would not be waylaid from their studies by any birds or buzzing insects beyond the French doors.
That wall, which had once displayed a whimsical Gainsborough he had inherited from his un-whimsical grandfather, now housed a substantial chalkboard. Above that, of course, was a clock. As futile as it likely was, Harry had wanted a timepiece front and center in hopes that Miss Rowe could instill upon the little savages, in their disorganized mama’s absence, the importance of time. Their inability to do anything, beyond spread carnage, in a timely manner since they had arrived had him pulling his hair out. Every single task they did apparently took them at least twice as long as what he deemed necessary to do it in. Even a simple stroll around the perimeter of St. James’s Park—which usually took him a mere seven-and-twenty minutes at his usual brisk pace—had taken them all an hour and a half yesterday. Granted, a significant chunk of that was the stupid dog’s fault—but still. Norbert’s regrettable incident with the pie seller aside, the children had turned dithering and dallying into an art form.
Harry had been a spent force by the time he had wrangled them all back to the house thirty minutes late for supper. Slightlytraumatized too by the ordeal, truth be told. Again, much of that was down to Norbert. Like their exasperating mother, Felix, Marianne, and Grace marched to their own drum irrespective of the reassuring, steady beat that the rest of the world dictated. That absence of haste, of purpose, or of any need for any rational, forward momentum, combined with their atrocious lack of self-discipline, made it easier to herd cats in fog than it did to shepherd three Pendletons on a simple lap of the park.
Everything about them was such a shambles that Harry genuinely dreaded to think what sort of adults they would turn into without this timely Flora-less intervention. Thankfully, before he had turned irreversibly into a shambolic Kincaid himself, the admiral had intervened when Harry had been around Felix’s age. His grandfather had then instilled within him all the morals which had been so deficient in his parents and put him on a path of meaning and purpose in the navy. Thanks to the admiral’s heavy guiding hand, Harry was the man he was, and if there was one silver lining to Flora’s latest debacle, it was that he now had a chance to return that favor. He would use his guiding hand and solid, sensible principles on the children in the hope that he might be able to save his nieces and nephew from becoming full-blown shambolic Kincaids too.
With that in mind, as encouragement, he had taken the liberty of noting some pertinent times down the side of the blackboard to remind them that a happy, ordered life required a schedule. Their first lesson would start each day at nine sharp. They would be granted a short break of ten minutes at eleven, then work diligently till one when Mrs. Rigby would serve their luncheon. Then, suitably rested and replenished, the little miscreants would work solidly from two till five to maximize all the best hours of the day.
Then with any luck, and if Sun Tzu was right and the line betweendisorder and order did indeed lie in the logistics, the miniature hurricanes would be too tired from a day of hard educational yards to wreak too much havoc in the two hours they had left before their bedtime.
That was the planned course he had charted, and he had everything crossed that everyone would follow it.
He glanced at Miss Rowe again, hoping that she did indeed possess the spine of steel she would need for the voyage ahead and all his justifiable misgivings about her were unfounded. However, rather than being hugely impressed at his efforts to build her a classroom from scratch in mere days, he sensed she was unimpressed. Unimpressed enough that he felt an explanation for his reasoning was in order in the hope he could prize some gratitude from her flattened lips.
“Obviously, I faced the desks away from all distractions of outside.” He gestured to the French doors. “However, please feel free to cover all this glass with paper if you feel it needs to be done. Or draw the curtains if you prefer.”
A perfectly sensible suggestion which elicited a wrinkle of her pretty, freckled nose. “Wouldn’t both of those things make the room a bit dingy, Captain? Darkness is hardly conducive to learning.”
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” He could tell she already thought him a clueless idiot, at least where education was concerned. She was right, of course, as his own education had been as ramshackle and piecemeal as the rest of his childhood had been until the navy saved him, but it still made him feel foolish and pathetically eager to correct that assumption. “Perhaps a screen is the answer to stop their limited attention from wandering?”
She went to speak, then bit her lip while she nodded with polite insincerity. It drew his eyes to that plump, pink flesh and that in turnmade him supremely aware of his own lips—which was most disconcerting.
“I am sure we will manage well enough as things are.” She bit her lip again as if she wanted to say more but had decided against it.
“Er… um…” Harry wrenched his gaze from her mouth, shocked that he had allowed his mind to be waylaid by it. “Luncheon will be served at one sharp and the children’s supper promptly at five. Mrs. Rigsby will apprise you of the staff’s mealtimes, as what goes on in the galley is nothing to do with me.”
Both Simpkins and Mrs. Rigsby would mutiny if he ever interfered downstairs again and, after he had offered one suggestion too many, he was banned from the kitchen if his formidable cook was in it. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, a solution that benefited them both. Mrs. Rigsby made the most delicious meals and kept tidy accounts, and in return, whatever happened downstairs were, by and large, blessed things he did not have to worry about.
Harry was all about delegating if he could entrust the person to do the job properly. Unfortunately, experience had taught him that most people needed managing. He hoped that Miss Rowe wasn’t one of them.
