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

Chapter 15

The school was opened, not with any ceremony, but in the way of the most enduring things, which is to say, slowly, and with a great deal of quiet effort.

The Duke engaged a schoolmaster, a young man with a wife and one child and an honest face, whom he had chosen himself after interviewing eleven candidates, and whom he had offered a wage that had made the young man go a little pale and then a little red, and finally accept with a great deal of trembling. The schoolmaster did not know, and would not know for some years, that the wage had been set by the Duke, and that it had been set at exactly three times the wage he would have accepted, because the Duke had, in his careful, exacting fashion, worked out what a man who had to teach twelve children to read, and who had to keep his own family fed, would need in order to do the work with a whole heart.

The children came. At first only a few, because there is always a resistance to new things, especially in a village that has been let down so often. But the schoolmaster was patient, and the rector made a point of visiting, and the mothers, who had never once sent their children to school, began, slowly, to do so, because they had heard from the schoolmaster’s wife, who had heard from Mrs. Pruit, who had heard from Eleanor, that the schoolmaster had a way with the shy ones.

And on the day that the first child read aloud, giving a halting, determined reading of the first page of a primer, the whole village heard of it, and Eleanor was there, at the back of the room, standing in the doorway.

The child who read was not a boy. She was a girl of eight, with a serious face and a head of hair that had been plaited so tightly it could have been used for rope, and she read, to the room that had gone very quiet, in a voice that trembled and did not stop.

She read, “The cat is on the mat.”

And the whole school, the whole village, seemed to draw breath.

The schoolmaster looked up, and his face was shining, and he said, “Very good, Martha. Very good indeed.”

The girl sat down, and her face was shining too, and Eleanor, from the doorway, felt her own face wet, and did not know when she had begun to cry.

She went home, and she did not tell the Duke about the girl who had read, because she wanted to keep it, in a way that she did not want to explain. But she sat in the nursery that evening, with the four boys around her, and she told them instead, and they listened, and William said, in a voice of enormous gravity, “She is very clever.”

“She is,” Eleanor said. “And all she needed was a chance.”

“The cat is on the mat,” Tom said, softly, from his corner, and there was something in his voice that Eleanor could not quite identify.

“Yes,” she said. “That is what she read.”

“I taught myself to read,” Tom said, and this was not news to Eleanor, who had long known that Tom, who was quiet, and Tom, who was watching, had read everything in the nursery before he turned five. “But no one read it aloud to me. I think it is different, to have someone read it to you.”

“It is,” Eleanor said. “It is very different.”