Fergus stood looking at the worn and obviously much-loved book in his hand and wondered why he thought the key to Miss Court herself might lie inside it, as well as a solution to her latest mystery. He heard her and Lavinia’s voices fading as they went up the intricately carved oak staircase and wondered why he’d spent so long listening to a woman walk away from him of late. He tried to shrug off an uneasy feeling it would be impossible not to listen for her step long after he escaped from this ridiculous position and made sure she was employed a long way away.
‘We had best do this without her, Fergus,’ his brother said uneasily.
Because Brendan had said nothing about what had almost happened just now Fergus knew how bad it was as his heart sank into his work-worn boots. The Earl of Barberry had been about to misbehave so spectacularly even his little brother couldn’t find the words to say what a selfish fool he was. Unable to find the words to explain what was in his heart, because he didn’t understand it himself, he opened the book in his hands and froze stiff as a statue as he took in the name so proudly written on the first page he could almost imagine a tiny version of the woman claiming her book with the deep concentration of a girl who had only just learned how. Damnation take the woman; she was in danger of charming him even as his inner man was screaming at her for what she’d done—how could she have lied to him so heinously it felt like the worst betrayal he’d ever suffered to stare down at the words as if they’d been written by the devil himself?
‘This Book Belongs to Miss Eleanor Hancourt of Lambury House, Hanover Square, London, England, Great Britain’, it stated in childishly self-important capital letters.
My God, Fergus, she’s not only your equal, she could easily be your superior in both birth and fortune, his inner Earl whispered with a snarl of noble temper.
Fergus felt the pain of her deception sear through him and down to his very toes—how could she have deceived him so brazenly? She’d kissed him as if she meant it last night; left him racked with guilt and sleepless as he fantasied about promises he couldn’t make to a governess and hated himself for breaking her heart. Clearly she didn’t have one to break or she wouldn’t have let a mere Mr Moss hope for a future he could never have with her. A marriage between the impoverished younger son of a country squire and Miss Eleanor Hancourt, granddaughter of a duke on one side and the richest nabob of his generation on the other? The very idea was laughable, but oddly enough he didn’t feel like laughing. Crying and beating his breast was out for a hardened nobleman of one and thirty, so that only left him with fury, didn’t it? Good, he felt the vigour of it sweeping past the desolation of knowing he’d been taken for a fool by a woman he’d come perilously close to loving.
Even in Ireland he’d heard the fuss this last winter when her brother inherited the huge fortune everyone thought lost by his notorious father on his twenty-fifth birthday. Hancourt’s sister must have been an heiress in her own right when she wrote this inscription as a child and to think he’d been feeling sorry for her until he read that childish assertion and realised she meant something in the world.
Tempted to throw the book into the darkest and most dusty corner of the room and march away from this place without a word of explanation, he let his imagination get to work on what might happen if he did and frowned fiercely at the battered old tome instead. If Moss vanished like a thief in the night, Fergus’s young cousins would be caught up in any misadventure the lying jade stumbled into because of her determination to stay here and brazen things out. If he had to stay as he was until he got rid of the confounded woman, he didn’t dare risk seeing her right now. He might let out something crucial as he raged at her for not being humble Miss Court at all. He might even be tempted to forgive her and that would never do, would it?
Fergus scooped up the now rather battered beaver hat from where he’d flung it when he entered the room, so eager to see Miss Court again he had almost forgotten the gulf between the lord of all this and a mere governess. Sneering at himself in the watery old mirror over the fireplace, he gave a wordless shrug of apology to Brendan, then waved the inscription under his brother’s nose to explain his silent fury. With Miss Hancourt’s book under his arm he marched out of the house without another word to anyone. Never mind if it was uncivil of Moss to ignore his fellow servants as he stormed through the kitchens and out of the back door, he felt uncivil.
More than that, he discovered as he strode back to the land steward’s house as if his feet were on fire, he felt furious and hurt and outraged all at once. A terrible anger salted his regret for a life he could never have with a woman who didn’t exist. It didn’t make a grain of sense, but that didn’t matter—she’d lied to him. The fact she’d deceived everyone else here for a lot longer didn’t matter right now. Once he had unwrapped this last mystery and made sure his wards were safe he was going to make sure the whole neighbourhood knew who had really been living under his roof all these years, so they couldn’t condemn him as an arrogant beast when he sent Miss Court to the right about the moment he was his true self again. The fine Irish temper he’d got from his mother, mixed dangerously with her first husband’s English certainty he was always right, and now flared into full, fearsome life because Miss Court’s betrayal felt so very personal it hurt. With all those fierce emotions rattling in his head Fergus managed to ignore the voice of reason that whispered, even if Eleanor Hancourt neatly deceived him and everyone else at Berry Brampton, he was just as guilty of double dealing as she was. When this didn’t hurt any more he might listen. For now, being in a raging temper felt a lot better than the raw feeling underneath it that he’d been on the edge of something deep and dangerous with Miss Eleanor Hancourt, until he found out who she really was and jumped back from a precipice he hadn’t even realised he was on the edge of until Miss Court vanished into it like the wraith she truly was.
* * *
‘Mr Rivers wishes to see you, Miss Court,’ Parkins the butler informed Nell disapprovingly later in the day. ‘The gentleman is in the library.’
‘Very well, I will come down as soon as I can be sure the Misses Selford are usefully occupied.’
‘I will inform the gentleman,’ Parkins said stiffly, distancing himself from the whole sorry business.
‘What do you suppose he wants?’ Caro asked, still a little bit infatuated with her guardian’s brother, even though he treated her as the child she still was and that had taken the fervour out of her girlish crush.
‘No doubt I shall find out shortly, Caroline,’ Nell said repressively, wondering how she was to preach propriety at her charges when the Earl’s brother ordered her to meet him alone in the middle of a working day. ‘Now, Lavinia, you will read this passage out for me and the rest of you must do your best to understand it, girls. I want to hear your explanation of the ideas it contains when I return and you will do as your cousin tells you to, or I shall have to be very cross with you indeed when I get back and there will be no sweet course at dinner tonight if that happens.’
With many assurances they would be good as gold echoing in her ears, Nell went to see what Mr Rivers wanted with an odd feeling of dread deep in her belly.
‘Ah, Miss Court,’ the gentleman greeted with undue emphasis, so she wasn’t as surprised as she might have been when Mr Moss appeared out of the shadows to snap the door closed behind her and stand glaring at the floor, his face like thunder and her copy of Aesop’s Fables held out accusingly in his hand.
How stupid of her to have forgotten her real name was written all over the frontispiece. She was so proud she could write her name and address back then that she’d scrawled it anywhere she could find space until even Colm protested. All sorts of contrary emotions threatened as she tried to take in the fact Mr Moss knew who she really was and Miss Hancourt couldn’t wed a steward without making him a laughing stock. Since he was far too busy frowning into the middle distance now to even look at her, she had no intention of letting him know she cared how he felt about her true identity.
‘This meeting is rather singular, gentlemen,’ she said with a nod at the closed door to let them know it was improper as well.
‘Do you want the entire household to know your secrets?’ Moss asked as if he had every right to be furious with her.
He almost had, since she kissed him back last night as if they were equals. Six months ago they would have been on a par for poverty, if not rank, and it felt unfair that he should cast their differing fortunes at her as if it was her fault. Why should she be made to feel ashamed of being her true self again? She would have to disown her brother and the rest of her family to do that and not even the almost magic she had spun about in when locked in Moss’s arms last night could make her do that. It had only been an air dream though; he couldn’t feel anything enduring for her if he could stand there glowering at her like the sternest judge in the land and not a hint of softer emotions in his hard blue gaze.
‘I suspect they soon will, whether I like it or not,’ she replied as lightly as she could to his harsh query.
‘I’m no rattle-pate,’ he said shortly and why was the Earl’s brother letting him take the lead in this embarrassing meeting?
‘Neither am I, so your secret is as safe as you want it to be, Miss Hancourt,’ Mr Rivers said quietly, with a hard look at Moss to say he might be wondering the same thing himself.
‘Why? Why did you pretend to be Miss Court when you are a lady of high birth and fortune?’ Moss burst out, as if not even his employer’s brother had a right to silence him on the subject of her crimes.
‘I’d rather not tell you, sir,’ she said haughtily as if he had no right to question her and even good manners told her she was right as he backed away from her as if she’d turned into the Medusa. ‘I had a living to earn and a strong dislike of those who are always so curious about my late father’s exploits that I would have got very little peace here if I admitted being his daughter.’
‘You certainly don’t need to earn a living now,’ Moss muttered darkly.
‘Yet the Misses Selford still need a governess and I didn’t want to desert them. I am sorry to be blunt, but your brother did that when he refused to come here and meet them, Mr Rivers, so how could I abandon them as well when my fortunes took a sudden turn for the better?’
‘I still can’t see why you didn’t confide all this to me when I came here in his lordly lordship’s stead,’ Mr Rivers said quietly, exchanging a complicated look with Moss that Nell didn’t even want to understand right now.
‘If you or your brother only had a lady I could have told her and trusted her to find a suitable replacement,’ she said stiffly instead. ‘A single gentleman cannot ask the same questions as a lady can of a potential governess.’
‘You certainly took a wily lawyer in without much trouble,’ Moss interrupted as if he had the right to sneer at her in front of their employer’s brother.
‘If this was any of your business, Mr Moss, I could point out I never lied about my education, teaching experience or willingness to work as hard as I can to help the Misses Selford learn what they need to know to live a useful life as ladies of rank and fortune one day. Lord Barberry’s lawyers seem to have a great deal of practice at hiring his upper servants, don’t they? So I doubt they are easily deceived by those they must trust to run the household and keep his lordship’s wards happy and usefully employed in his absence after all those years of putting his wishes into place by proxy, do you?’ she countered. He must have fooled them he was a patient and calm land steward and he didn’t look anything of the sort right now.
‘I’m trying not to think them a pack of fools,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘I don’t believe you have the right when you must have fooled them you a quiet and biddable soul, sir. And it makes no difference who I am; I am here and I’m ready, willing and able to carry out my duties, just as I have been for the last two years. You are not in any position to object to my presence, Mr Moss, any more than I can have you hired or dismissed on a whim. I leave it to you, Mr Rivers, to decide what you will tell your brother about me. I doubt very much that he cares much who instructs his wards, since he’s avoided being a stand-in father to them for a decade.’
For some reason that not very tactful reminder seemed to have more effect on Moss than it did on his lordship’s half-brother. He grunted something furious under his breath and went back to pacing the book stacks again, as if he might find his lost serenity hidden down one if he looked hard enough.
‘True, if not very diplomatic, Miss Hancourt,’ Mr Rivers said mildly.
If he could seem almost amused by her forthright criticism of the absent Earl, why must Moss take it so badly when he’d never even met him? Because he felt betrayed by her lie in a way he couldn’t express in front of his employer’s brother, Nell supposed, with a sinking feeling he had some right to resent her position in society when she’d matched him kiss for kiss and never said a word about her recently returned wealth. If only Mr Rivers hadn’t interrupted them before she could get that crucial explanation out, how very differently Moss might feel about her now.
‘You’re a coward, Miss Hancourt,’ Moss accused as he paced back towards them again. ‘Instead of playing out this pantomime of a dutiful governess at Berry Brampton House you should be in London with your brother and his new wife, making a much-delayed debut in the world where you truly belong. You have no right to risk bringing trouble down on your pupils by continuing to lie about who you are. By staying here in such a guise you made yourself a target for kidnappers and fortune hunters. Either breed will exploit your ridiculous charade if they can and you set yourself up for it by refusing to re-join your family.’
Nell gasped in shock at the notion of being abducted and forced into marriage. Somehow even the thought of such wickedness tarnished her life here as the very real possibility he was right sank in and made her shiver. ‘You think that’s why someone wanted my papers?’ she asked him before she could stop herself.
‘It seems an obvious answer to me.’
‘Yet you doubt it?’ she asked as he frowned at the very plainness of it.
‘Yes, your father’s conundrum can’t be designed to make you tell the truth to your employer, since he didn’t know what a clever little liar he’d sired when he wrote it,’ Moss said, waving the old paper Nell wished he’d put away and forget, now there were more important matters to discuss.
‘How do you know my father wrote it?’
‘Who else could have done so? The current Duke of Linaire was in the Americas by the time you were born and the last one was well known to have no time for his wards. Rumour has it the late Duke actively hated you and your brother, so your father is the obvious man to be sending coded messages to his daughter.’
‘My brother might have done so,’ she said defensively. It seemed cruel of him to point out how bereft she and Colm were when Papa died in that stupid accident somehow, despite the hurt she had obviously dealt him with what he must see as her lack of trust and dishonesty in not telling him who she really was last night, when it might have been said and got around if only he loved her.
Which he obviously does not, Eleanor, her inner realist pointed out rather unhelpfully when she felt as if a chasm had opened up between them and she was swaying on the edge of it, not wanting to look down and see a bleak future as Aunt Eleanor, bluestocking spinster of the Hancourt family, stretching ahead of her.
‘This isn’t the work of a child,’ Moss pointed out implacably and why did she still long to be on his side of that divide when he was being such a steely judge of her sins?
‘It might as well be for all the sense it makes,’ she said sulkily, sounding very much like Lavinia did when she was confronted by something she didn’t want to do.
‘Then look it up yourself,’ he ordered her impatiently. ‘Find those references in your copy of the Fables, then tell me the riddle isn’t serious.’
‘Give my book back then,’ she demanded and waited for him to hand it over with what she hoped was chilly dignity, because she felt as if a part of her had been ripped away and the hurt might not heal for a very long time.
‘I wrote the solution down in my pocketbook, for all the help it is.’
‘There you are then; it is only nonsense,’ she said as he handed over her book and Papa’s scrap of paper. She drew back as if he’d burned her when he went to hand over his leather-bound notebook as well.
‘Oh, do it yourself, then,’ he said bitterly and went back to his pacing.
‘Do you mind if I join you, Miss Hancourt?’ Mr Rivers said with a polite gesture towards the map table by the window where they could see what they were reading a lot better.
‘Certainly not, your help will be very welcome, Mr Rivers,’ Nell said sweetly.
The tension in the room was almost thick enough to slice when Moss let out a curse he should keep to himself in feminine company and paced harder. Let him think she was doing her best to flirt with the handsome brother of an earl if he liked. Now her true rank and fortune were out in the open, why shouldn’t she? She couldn’t let the bad-tempered bear see he’d hurt her.
Mr Rivers calmly wrote down the series of words she read out as she found them underlined after counting her quota of pages instead of the numbers they began life with. It sounded as if the riddle made a sentence, but Moss was right, it still didn’t make much sense. Nell took the paper Mr Rivers handed her at the end of it all and frowned.
‘I don’t know what he meant,’ she told him.
‘Your father had faith in your intelligence when you were too small to know half what you do today. Not that you seem inclined to make use of the brains I suppose you must have been born with,’ Moss pointed out unhelpfully when he came to another halt beside them.
‘Now that’s going too far—in fact, it’s downright uncivil of you, Moss,’ Mr Rivers said sharply.
It sounded as if his gentlemanly soul could bear no more, even if there was a frustrated love affair to account for Moss’s fury with the unmasked heiress in their midst and almost justify him being so rude. Nell flinched at the idea their feelings were on show for even one member of the aristocracy to see. She truly hoped the Earl’s brother would keep the chance she might love his lordship’s steward to himself.
‘I apologise, Miss Hancourt,’ Moss said with a cool bow, as if that might make his bitter hostility feel better as he shot her a dark look to say they were only words.
‘Thank you, Mr Moss. Perhaps we can be a little less childish about this business from now on.’
‘Maybe that’s it,’ Mr Rivers broke in as if her words had sparked off a solution to all this in his head.
‘Maybe that’s what?’ Moss barked gruffly, obviously forgetting his faux humility the moment a chance to take over again hove into view.
‘We are looking at this through adult eyes and he was showing a child,’ Mr Rivers said, almost as if this man taking over was something he expected and Nell wondered about the younger man’s spinelessness even as she let half her mind think about his theory and wonder if he might not be right.
‘Hmm,’ Moss said thoughtfully, as if it was his secret to uncover. ‘Let’s see what he said again,’ he went on, leafing through his book to find the page she had rejected just now. ‘Through the eyes of a grandfather clock everything that is hidden will be found again,’ he read out and Nell gasped as an image of the slow-ticking clock in the smallest drawing room of Linaire House came into her mind for the first time in years. ‘You know what he means, don’t you?’ Moss asked.
‘I may have some idea, but the clock he means is in London.’
‘Then you must go there and find what he hid for you to find, must you not?’
‘I am still responsible for four girls. I cannot order a carriage, jump into it and blithely demand the horses gallop headlong for the capital on a whim, sir.’
‘Maybe not, but I could,’ Mr Rivers intervened before his brother’s steward could argue as if he had some right to dictate all their actions.
‘Even if you ordered it so, Mr Rivers, I can’t leave the girls here unprotected with this strange woman probably still in the neighbourhood,’ Nell protested. She didn’t want to leave the Selford girls—for all the trouble they gave her she was fond of them. And she was a coward, of course, so she would far rather stay here as the governess than be Lord Christopher Hancourt’s daughter again under the critical gaze of the ton.
‘You could take them with you, if you feel you cannot go unless they do. From what I could see last time I was in London, your aunt and uncle are not the sort of people who would turn them away if that’s the only way you can be convinced they are safe,’ Mr Rivers said, as if he was trying to find logical solutions to problems she wasn’t sure she wanted solved. Moss’s brooding impatience for her to leave here was too heavy a presence in the room for her to want to oblige him as well. She shot him an impatient glance and got ready to argue with Lord Barberry’s little brother as well.
‘According to Winch, you went dashing off to Brussels with your uncle a few days before your brother was injured at Waterloo. You can hardly claim the current Duke doesn’t look kindly on you both after that, Miss Hancourt,’ Moss pointed out and chopped even more ground from under her feet.
‘Do you think the Earl will want to be rid of me?’ she asked Mr Rivers, since he was more likely to know than anyone else.
Mr Rivers shot Moss a sidelong glance, as if he might offer him inspiration, but the man was staring at the Selford coat of arms at the centre of the elaborate carved over-mantel and didn’t even look their way.
‘Now an outsider knows you’re here I expect he would say you are safer in London with your family, Miss Hancourt,’ Mr Rivers said at last.
‘Aye, and you’ll be confoundedly in the way if you stay,’ Moss growled even as his employer’s brother glared at him, as if he might just dismiss him for being so rude to a lady and risk his elder brother’s displeasure at being robbed of such a perfect land agent when he needed him most.
‘And how will I get there without being waylaid?’ Nothing could make her want to stay more than being told to go by this rude barbarian.
‘Easy enough,’ Mr Rivers went on as if she and Moss weren’t still frowning darkly at each other from opposite corners of the room. ‘Winch can chaperon you and the girls, whilst Moss and I act as outriders. I’m sure we’ll terrify law-abiding citizens going about their rightful business, let alone any villains you manage to attract, Miss Hancourt.’
‘You’re determined to unmask me?’ she asked.
‘What else can he do?’ Moss barked impatiently. ‘You can hardly pitch up in Grosvenor Square and announce your identity at the last possible moment. You’re the one who claims to care so much about them, but I suppose you’d have an uncomfortable time if you were shut up in a carriage with the Selford girls once they know about your deception and you wish to avoid such a tense journey.’
The girls would indeed be shocked, but how dare he imply she had such a selfish reason for keeping them in the dark for a few more days? ‘How long have I got?’ she asked Mr Rivers, who seemed rather young and helpless in the face of Moss’s unyielding fury at her for flying under false colours.
‘You can pack tonight and be ready at dawn,’ Moss said brusquely.
‘Luckily I don’t take my orders from you, Mr Moss. Mr Rivers?’ she questioned with as much steely dignity as possible when she had to clasp her hands into fists at her sides to stop them visibly shaking.
‘It would be the best way out of this muddle,’ the Earl’s younger brother said with an apologetic shrug and Nell turned on her heel to leave the room in disgust.
‘Don’t say anything about Faith or your father’s puzzle,’ Moss ordered before she could open the door.
‘Good day, Mr Rivers,’ she said coolly and left before she lowered herself to throw something at the infuriating man and rage at him for being such a mannerless and unforgiving great oaf.