She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…
Chapter 6
She did not ask him, in those weeks, why a duke walked his own sons to school gates, or why he kept a house apart from his family seat, or why Mrs. Pruit sometimes looked at Eleanor with an expression too fond for a housekeeper regarding a hired woman.
She did not ask because asking was not her way, and because the answers, when they came, would matter more for having been given freely rather than prised loose.
She did not know then that a letter had already gone out from the family seat informing certain relations that the Duke of Harwick had engaged a woman to see to his sons. And that one relation in particular — his late wife’s sister, a woman named Lady Aldous — had read that letter with an expression that curdled the tea in her own cup, and had already begun, in her fine, careful hand, to plan a visit.
Lady Aldous arrived on a Tuesday with two trunks and an opinion about everything, and she found Eleanor in the nursery with flour on her sleeves, having spent the better part of the morning teaching the third boy to roll pastry — a thing no governess of quality would have condescended to do herself.
Lady Aldous stood in the doorway a long moment, taking in the scene. The flour. The boy’s delighted face. The mender of linens with her sleeves pushed up like a scullery girl. And when she spoke, her voice carried the particular music of a woman who had practiced cruelty until it sounded like courtesy.
“How resourceful,” she said. “One does not often see a woman of such very plain talents given the run of a nursery.”
“Miss Vance is teaching Edmund to make pastry,” Tom said from the corner, where he had been quietly watching, as he watched everything.
“How charming,” Lady Aldous said, in a voice that made the words sound like an insult. “And what precisely does she teach you when there is no pastry to hide behind? I understand her people were tradesmen. Vance, was it? One wonders what such hands know of raising a duke’s sons.”
Eleanor set down the rolling pin. She wiped the flour from her fingers with the corner of her apron, unhurried, and she did not raise her voice, because raising her voice had never once won her an argument worth winning.
“My hands know how to mend a torn hem,” she said. “And how to pour milk before tea so a child does not scald his tongue. And how to sit with a boy who is frightened of thunder until the thunder passes. I do not know what your hands know, my lady. But I have not yet seen them put to any of those uses.”
The room went very still. Edmund’s mouth had fallen open in the particular delight of a child watching an adult be told the truth. Lady Aldous’s face went a shade of white that no powder could have achieved on purpose, and she left the nursery without another word — though not, Eleanor understood, because she had been beaten, but only because she intended to fight elsewhere, on ground of her own choosing.