She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 13

It was in the spring of her first year at Hartfield that Eleanor discovered the school.

Not the school two villages over — that one she had known of since Mrs. Pruit had walked with her down the frosted street and told her of it. No, the discovery she made was of a different sort, and it came about entirely by accident, through the third boy, who was constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret, and who was possessed of a tongue that could not be trusted with even the smallest surprise.

It was a Thursday, and the boys had been let out of lessons early because the governess — a proper one now, engaged at last, though the boys still preferred Eleanor for the evenings — had taken a headache. Edmund had come to find her in the small sitting room she had begun to keep as her own, and he had been full of a plan that had clearly been brewing for some time.

“Tilly says,” he announced, “that there is a village where the boys have no teacher, and the school is falling down, and nobody goes to it.”

“Tilly,” Eleanor said, for she had learned that a great many of the household’s most explosive pieces of information were attributed to Tilly, a kitchen girl of fourteen with an unaccountable grasp of local politics, “has told you a great many things this week.”

“Tilly is always right,” Edmund said, with the confidence of a boy who had never once had to verify a claim. “And Papa said that it was a shame, because if a school had a teacher it could be a good school, and then a man could send his sons there and they would be able to read. And Papa said it was a waste.”

Eleanor set down her work. “When did your father say this?”

“He said it last month,” Edmund said. “When we drove past it. He said it under his breath, and he would not say it again, because he thought I was not listening. But I was listening. I always listen.”

Eleanor knew this to be true. It was, perhaps, the most important thing she knew about Edmund’s brother Tom, but Edmund also listened, in his way, within reach of everything.

She did not tell Edmund to stop speaking of it. She did not, either, run to her husband and demand to know why he had said such a thing if he did not intend to do anything about it. Eleanor had learned, by now, what kind of man she had married, and she knew that if she confronted him with it, he would become very still and very polite and would tell her, without a flicker, that the school was of no particular interest to him.

So she did the thing that a mender of linens does, which is to mend the thing quietly, in the way that needs no blessing.

She went, the following Saturday, with the boys, to the village. She took with her a basket with scones and a tin of the tea she had brought from the Amble Street house, which she had carried with her from her rooms as though it were the only thing, besides her steady hands, that had come from her old life. And when she saw the school falling down, as Edmund had said, she did not agree aloud that it was falling down. She only sat the boys in the yard and asked them to play, and she went into the school and made an assessment the way she made all assessments, which is to say, quietly, and with her hands.

The roof leaked in three places. The schoolmaster had died two years past, and no one had been found to replace him. There were twelve children in the village who could not read, and their fathers were ashamed, and would not send them to a school two villages over, because they could not pay, and because it was a humiliation.

Eleanor went back home, and she did not speak of it to the Duke. She spoke of it, instead, to Mrs. Pruit, who listened, and who sat a long moment, and who said, at last, with a dry something in her voice, “His grace has been circling that school for two years, child. He will not build it, because he is afraid that if he does, someone will thank him. And he has been taught that thanks are a kind of payment, and he will not be paid.”

“Then I will build it,” Eleanor said.

“No,” Mrs. Pruit said. “You will not build it. You will do better. You will make it possible for him to build it himself, and you will not let him know you have done it.”