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She slapped her bonnet over her braids, tied the ribbons tightly, and hoisted her cloth bag and umbrella.
Of course, there was the small problem that she wasn’t even remotely qualified to be governess to a duke’s privileged offspring. But this was no time for timidity.
As she left the agency, the noise and clamor of Old Bond Street assaulted her senses, reminding her that she was, most definitely, not in Derbyshire any more.
The air smelled of horse dung, coal smoke, and wet woolens.
Carriages lurched past, their occupants briefly visible—a crescent of pale cheek, a child’s nose pressed to a window, puffs of breath making a hazy cloud on the glass.
She opened her reticule, squinting at the black silk lining in the vain hope that her funds had multiplied since her last inventory. They had not. She had the grand sum of one pound ten shillings to her name.
A portly gentleman slowed his gait. “Are you, perhaps, in some difficulty, miss?” he asked, with a suggestive look that made her skin crawl.
She closed her reticule and pointedly turned away from him, hoping he would go away.
“Why don’t you come and have a nice hot meal with me?” the man persisted.
Did she have naïve country girl stamped across her forehead? Was everyone going to attempt to take advantage of her?
Lifting her umbrella handle, which was cunningly shaped like a parrot’s head, she brandished it menacingly. “I’ll thank you to move along, sir.”
The man eyed the parrot’s sharp beak and then shrugged and ambled away.
She waited for him to disappear around a corner before consulting her map and setting off toward Grosvenor Square.
Wind howled in her ears. Horses whinnied, plodding through puddles.
Something is about to begin,the raindrops pattered on the paving stones.
If you are brave enough to chase it,the wind whistled back.
A passing cart splashed muddy water onto her skirts.Botheration. Now she was even less superior.
When she reached the square, a maid carrying a market basket informed her that the duke lived at Number Seventeen.
Educating a nobleman’s privileged and pampered children shouldn’t prove too difficult, given that she was accustomed to instructing orphaned girls with troubled souls and bleak outlooks.
It wasn’t the children who worried her—it was the father. He would probably take one look at her shabby coat and muddy boots and slam yet another door in her face.
She’d read about aristocrats in the pages of her favorite novels, borrowed from a circulating library, but she had no practical experience with the nobility. On rare occasions, wealthy patronesses had visited Underwood, lifting their snow-white hems daintily to avoid touching anything to do with orphans.
The matrons had delighted in telling the cautionary tale of a girl who had returned in disgrace from a maid’s apprenticeship in a baronet’s household, already showing signs of increasing.
With her slight figure and pernicious freckles, Mari rather doubted the same fate might befall her. Only... she paused and hugged her traveling bag to her chest. What if the duke was a roving-fingered lecher who fancied anything in skirts?
Would he attempt to besiege her at the earliest opportunity?
Besieged by the devilish duke.
It sounded like the title of a lurid novel. One where the meek, doe-eyed governess shrank from the advances of her elderly employer, who walked with a limp and had a wife, or two, locked in his attic.
Provident that Mari wasn’t doe-eyed. Or meek. At least not on the inside.
She may have had to adopt a docile façade, but inside she was a seething pit of rebellion.
But a superior governess would neverseethe. Oh Heavens, no.
The moment she stepped inside his gate she must be the most prim, proper, and unassailable governess in all of London.
