Grace Burrowes - [Lonely Lords 03] Read online

  Maybe Nick was right, Ethan thought as he negotiated the steps up to the bed. Maybe the boys should stay here. Ethan didn’t like the idea, but he’d accommodated ideas he hated, and survived.

  As his tired mind slowed then began to drift toward sleep, Ethan’s last thought was neither of commerce, correspondence, his feelings for his younger brother, his station in life, nor the prospect of parting from his children. His last thought as he drifted off was worthy of Nick prior to that fellow’s recent marriage.

  It would have been deuced pleasant to snuggle up to a warm, sweet-scented governess and let her spin tales of ferocious wolves and brave little porkers, rather than battle storms in the mud, rain, and dark of night.

  ***

  When the sun rose on a glorious summer morning, Ethan rode out with Nick to survey the storm damage. While the horses splashed along muddy lanes, Nick commenced the interrogation Ethan had no doubt been spared the previous night:

  What was Nick to do with their dear brother George, whose left-handed tendencies were ever a worry?

  Ethan suggested foreign service, the Continent being more enlightened in at least a few regards.

  Would Ethan attend Nick’s investiture in the autumn?

  Ethan replied in the affirmative, not feeling it necessary to add that the request touched him.

  And why wasn’t a man as good looking and wealthy as Ethan Grey remarried?

  Argus had shied spectacularly at that query, almost as if the beast perceived his master’s reaction to the question.

  Ethan was equally leery of the afternoon’s planned diversion—a picnic involving women, children, and all manner of noise, bother, and uninvited insects. Rather than subject himself to same, Ethan decided on the more familiar torment of dealing with his correspondence.

  He opened the door to the library, thinking it would almost be a relief to bury himself in commerce, when he heard an odd, muffled sound from the couch over by the hearth. A dog, perhaps, having a dream, but Nick didn’t have house dogs—he had house cats, instead, claiming they were prettier, quieter, better smelling, and capable of placating women and eradicating mice.

  Ethan closed the door behind him and crossed the room, only to find the Belmonts’ small daughter hugging a pillow, obviously in distress.

  “I beg your pardon?” Ethan wasn’t sure how one dealt with a balled-up little girl who had a death grip on a pillow. “It’s Priscilla, isn’t it?”

  Big teary brown eyes peered up at him. The child whipped her braids over her shoulder and clung to her pillow. “Go away, please.”

  “I’d like to,” Ethan said, lowering himself to the couch, “or better still, I’d like you to find somewhere else to wax lachrymose, but you are a lady, and I am a gentleman, so we’ll have to muddle through. Here.”

  She glared at him past his monogrammed handkerchief, then sat up, scrubbed at her eyes, honked into the handkerchief, and proffered it to Ethan.

  “You’re to keep it, child.”

  “Is it a token?” Priscilla looked at the damp linen. “It smells ever so lovely, like fresh trees and Christmas. I’m too young to accept tokens, except from family.”

  So young and so artlessly charming. Thank God he had only sons. “It’s a handkerchief. Now, why were you crying?”

  “My heart is breaking.” She sighed a larger sigh than one little girl ought to contain. “I will write much better stories after this.”

  “You will divulge the particulars of this tragedy, if you please. I have correspondence to tend to.”

  “Miss Portman is leaving me. She’s says I have grown too smart for her, and it’s time I had tutors, not just a governess.”

  Ethan settled in more comfortably on the couch, though the need to deal with his correspondence nagged at him. “You are suffering a consequence of growing up. These are ever more inconvenient than adults might represent.”

  “I hate it. Next I’ll have to wear a corset, curl my hair, and learn to flirt.”

  Her tone suggested a worse fate had never befallen a young lady. “Don’t panic. I think you have some time before those miseries beset you.”

  “Papa says the same thing, but he never wants me to grow up. He had only boys with his other wife, and I am his only girl.”

  “His only daughter for now.” Ethan’s eyes had told him Mrs. Reese Belmont was in anticipation of a happy event. “You will correspond with Miss Portman when she moves to her next post, will you not?”

  “I don’t know.” The girl smoothed out the linen on her lap. She had a grass stain on one bony little knee, and her pinny was hopelessly wrinkled. “I am not too smart for her, and she can be my tutor. She just wants to go, is all. I am mad at her for that.”

  Children were horrendously canny when it came to sniffing out adult prevarications. Little Priscilla’s governess might well be simply tired of the child.

  “Maybe she wants to leave while you still think she’s smart and you still like her. She doesn’t want you to be smarter than she is. Word of advice, though?”

  Priscilla nodded, apparently willing to entertain a confidence from a man who looked like her friend Wee Nick.

  “You can be angry any time you please,” Ethan said, “but it could be that you are only picking a fight because you’re hurt, and maybe a little scared—scared because you like Miss Portman and you might not like your tutors as much.”

  Priscilla kept her gaze on her lap. “I’ll miss her.”

  And a child could miss loved ones passionately. A man, thank God, knew better.

  “She’ll miss you too,” Ethan said, hoping it was true for the child’s sake. “If you’re really her friend, though, you want her to be happy. And I think you can trust your mama and papa to find you tutors you get along with.”

  Outside the door, a herd of small feet thundered past, young voices shrieking about pony carts, kites, and a race to the orchard.

  “I have to go now.” Priscilla scrambled off the couch, flung a curtsy toward Ethan, and raced to join in the happy affray.

  Ethan closed the door as a rankling notion stole into his brain: Nick would see to it Joshua and Jeremiah had the best of tutors and nannies. He’d also play with them, as Ethan most assuredly did not. Ethan shoved that thought back into whatever mental dungeon it had sprung from and turned his attention to a pile of letters, some water stained around the edges. He was halfway through a reply to the steward of his sheep farms in Dorset when the library door again opened.

  “Excuse me.” The governess—Miss Porter? no, Miss Portman—admitted herself to the room and closed the door behind her. “I’m returning one book and fetching another. My pardon for disturbing you, Mr. Grey.”

  Ethan half rose from his seat and gestured toward the shelves. “Help yourself.” He paused to rub his eyes. They’d been stinging more and more of late, and sometimes watered so badly he had to stop what he was doing altogether and rest them. He rose from the desk and came around to lean against the front of it, watching as the governess bent to put the large volume of fairy tales on the bottom shelf.

  “It’s Miss Portman, isn’t it?”

  She rose slowly, as if feeling Ethan’s gaze on her, and turned. “Alice Portman.” She bobbed a hint of a curtsy. “You are Nicholas’s brother, Mr. Ethan Grey, father to Joshua and Jeremiah.”

  “You call the earl Nicholas?” Ethan concluded she was one of those plain women who’d grown fearless in her solitary journey through life. He respected that, even as he had to concede there was something about Alice Portman’s snapping brown eyes he found… compelling. Her shape was indeterminate, owing to the loose cut of her gown, her dark brown hair was imprisoned in some kind of chignon, and her gaze had an insect-like quality as a result of the distortion of her spectacles. All in all, Ethan suspected she was a woman of substantial personal fortitude.

  She held his gaze with a steadiness grown men would envy. “When I met your brother, he was mucking stalls in Sussex and content to be known as Wee Nick. I do not u
se his title now, because he has insisted it would make him uncomfortable were I to do so.”

  This recitation was a scold. Ethan mentally saluted her for the calm with which she delivered it. “No doubt it would.”

  She turned back to the books, but rather than bend down to the lower shelf, she sat on the floor cross-legged, as she’d sat on the rug the previous night. Then, she’d been swaddled in another plain, unremarkable dress, and banked with children on either side. For all her primness, she’d looked comfortable with the informality, if a little disgruntled to be interrupted.

  Ethan’s correspondence started whining at him, but his eyes still stung too.

  “So what did you name him?” Ethan asked. “The wolf with the unfortunate predilection for onions, that is.”

  “That was a challenge,” Miss Portman said as she surveyed the children’s books on the bottom shelf. “Pris, being of a dramatic frame of mind, wanted to name him Sir Androcles of Lobo.”

  “Wasn’t Androcles a lion?”

  The governess turned her head and beamed a full-blown, pleased smile at Ethan. “Why, Mr. Grey, I am impressed, but Androcles was the young man who took the thorn from the lion’s paw. The lion never earned his own sobriquet.”

  “Lobo is Spanish for wolf,” Ethan said, his gaze straying around the room lest he betray a reaction to that smile. Ye gods, the plain, prim, buttoned-up Miss Portman had the smile of a benign goddess, so warm and charming it hurt to see.

  “Pris is learning Spanish, French, and Italian from her uncle Thomas, who is a noted polyglot.” Miss Portman chose a book, frowned at it, and put it right back.

  “What’s wrong with that one?” Ethan asked, amused at her expression.

  “No pictures,” she explained. “Who in their right mind prints a storybook for children without pictures?”

  “Somebody trying to save money on production costs. Did the wolf acquire a name?” He was asking to be polite, to make small talk with somebody who was likely not much befriended below stairs.

  “He acquired various names.” Miss Portman chose another book and opened it for perusal. “Wolfgang Wolf was John’s nomination. Ford, being our youngest, voted for Poopoo Paws Wolfbottom.”

  She said this with a straight face, which had probably made the children laugh all the harder.

  “And the winner was?” Ethan hopped off the desk and crossed the room to help the lady to her feet. She frowned delicately—a puzzlement rather than a rebuke, Ethan surmised—then put her bare hand in his and let him draw her up from the floor.

  “Lord Androcles Wolfgang Poopoo Paws Wolfbottom Wolf the fourth,” she recited. “Children like anything that makes the telling of a story longer and are ever willing to mention certain parts of the anatomy.”

  “I see.” What he saw was a flawless complexion, velvety brown eyes staring up at him in wary consternation, and a wide, full mouth that hid a gorgeous smile. He stepped back and dropped her hand accordingly.

  “I am off.” Miss Portman edged around him in the confines of the shelves, and Ethan caught a whiff of lemons. Of course she’d wear lemon verbena. This was probably a dictate in some secret manual for governesses.

  “You haven’t joined the cavalcade of pony carts making for the scene of this bacchanal?” Ethan asked, standing his ground.

  “I am not fond of equines,” Miss Portman replied. “Nor of animals in general, though I can appreciate the occasional cat. I choose to walk instead. The exercise is good for me, and I am less likely to be ridiculed by the children for my fears.”

  “Shall I provide you escort?” Ethan heard himself ask.

  Now where in the bloody, benighted hell had that come from? “It’s a pretty day,” Ethan went on, the same imp of inspiration not yet done with him. “I’ve missed my family, and I can work on correspondence any time.”

  She wanted to refuse him. From the fleeting look in her eyes, Ethan deduced that his company ranked below that of Mr. Wolfbottom Wolf after a large meal of mutton and onion sandwiches.

  And wasn’t that cheering, to find one’s company distasteful to a mere governess?

  “Don’t let me impose, Miss Portman.” Ethan offered her a polite retreat. A bastard, even a wealthy one with passable looks, learned the knack of polite retreats. “I can always saddle my gelding and join the party later.” He saw his mistake when her eyes narrowed, saw she took the reference to his horse as a personal taunt.

  “My apologies.” He was not sorry, he was behind in his correspondence. “I meant no offense, but you do not seem at a loss for company.”

  “I am not,” she replied, peering at him. “Your children need to spend time with you outside this house, and you can carry the blanket and the book. Shall we?”

  Oh, she was good, reducing him to the status of her bearer and making him work for even that privilege. An idea blossomed in the back of Ethan’s mind, borne of the realization she’d tamed the precocious Priscilla and could likely handle younger children even more easily. He let this idea unfurl in his awareness, where he could consider it from several angles at his leisure.

  “Let me tidy up the desk,” he said, “while you find us that blanket, and I’ll join you in the kitchen momentarily.”

  “As you wish.” She whisked off, her words implying Ethan had arranged matters to his own satisfaction, when in fact, he was at a loss to explain what he was doing trundling after a prim spinster to spend hours swatting flies and trying not to let the shrieks of children offend his beleaguered ears.

  When he met Miss Portman in the kitchen, she sported a wide, floppy straw hat on her head, a blanket over her arm, and the book in her hand. She wore gloves as well, which should not have surprised Ethan, but disappointed him for some reason.

  “There’s a shortcut to the orchard through the home wood,” Ethan said as they left the house. He’d rolled the book into the blanket and tucked the blanket under his right arm, leaving his left free for escort duty.

  Except the lady was striding off across the terrace like she was intent on storming the Holy Land single-handedly.

  Ethan waited by the back door. “Miss Portman?”

  “Sir?” She perfectly matched his condescending tone. His own children could not have mimicked him more precisely.

  “When one escorts a lady,” he said, “one generally offers the lady his arm.” He winged his elbow at her and waited. He was disproportionately gratified to see Alice Portman blush to the roots of her lovely dark hair. Petty of him, but there it was.

  “My apologies.” Alice strode back to his side, put her hand on his arm as if he were clothed with venomous snakes, and fixed her bespectacled gaze straight ahead. Had she started singing some stalwart old hymn, he would not have been surprised.

  “Is it really so distasteful, Miss Portman, to stroll with a gentleman on a pretty day?” Ethan asked, setting a deliberate pace.

  “I am not used to the company of gentlemen.” Gentlemen might have been “grave robbers” or “highwaymen” in the same inflection. “Most men don’t know what to do with me if they know I’m a governess. I’m considered above the maids, but certainly not family. I’m not spoken for, but I’m not fair game, rather like taking holy orders. It can be awkward.”

  She was blunt, which he liked. At the rate they were going, their progress would take some time. “I have the impression this might be awkward for the gentlemen, but not particularly so for you.”

  “I am content to be what I am,” Miss Portman said, her posture unbending a little.

  “So content”—Ethan’s tone was as mild as the breeze—“that I found little Priscilla crying into her pillow in the library this morning, for her friend Miss Portman is abandoning her.”

  Miss Portman paused minutely in her forward progress, and Ethan regretted his comment. Her feet hadn’t stumbled, but he sensed her resolve momentarily wavering.

  “Priscilla is dramatic,” she said at length. “She will learn one can survive the comings and goings of others in one’s lif
e.”

  “Not an easy lesson for a girl. Has she really outgrown you?”

  Miss Portman turned her head to glare at him. “Yes, she has, Mr. Grey. Priscilla has her uncle’s facility for languages, and while I can teach her some drawing-room French, I cannot by any means provide what she needs. She shows an equal propensity for mathematics, which I believe she sees as just another language, and she needs a teacher who cannot simply keep up with her but who can challenge and guide her. The intellect of a child must be nurtured carefully if learning is to be made a lifelong habit.”

  “Even the intellect of a girl child?” He said it to goad her, to keep the fire in her brown eyes and the animation in her expression. If his sisters could have heard him, though, he’d be minced meat. He should be minced meat, in fact.

  She would have stomped off had Ethan not caught her hand.

  “My apologies.” He bowed slightly over her hand. “The question was unworthy of me, and you are right to take umbrage.”

  “Umbrage?” Miss Portman snatched back her hand. “Umbrage is taken by vicars and duchesses, Mr. Grey. I am offended you would question the appropriateness of developing a mind as talented as little Priscilla’s. Given the unfortunate circumstances of her birth, her education might someday be all she has to fall back on.”

  “Mr. Belmont wouldn’t allow that,” Ethan said. Hell, Nick wouldn’t allow that. “I wouldn’t allow it.”

  “You barely know her,” Miss Portman shot back, but her tone had taken on an edge of curiosity.

  “I don’t know her well, personally,” Ethan said, “but I do know, personally, what it’s like to be raised with only immediate family for company, Miss Portman. I know what it’s like to have my mother’s name as my own, what it’s like to require letters and dispensations to be able to claim any tie to my titled father. Priscilla’s parents can love her—mine loved me, after their fashion—but they cannot ease her path through life once she leaves their care.”