A Bewitching Governess Read online

“You are a mad Scot with a penchant for drama.” She yanked a chemise over her bare breasts before he could reach for them again. “In a few weeks, once the randiness has worn off, you would regret your whispered nothings. You do not know me.”

  She was right about that. Whispered nothings, aye right. So, it hadn’t been the most romantic of proposals. What was between them wasn’t romance. Simon hauled on his drawers to cool his obvious ardor. “We’ll learn each other then, and I’ll ask again.”

  Gazing in dismay at her layers of petticoats and hoops, she shook her unfurled hair. “I cannot stay. If Hargreaves means to spread old wives’ tales, I might be a danger to the children, just as Letitia was. You need to be hunting for a governess. The schoolteacher might be able to make recommendations.”

  Leave? She wanted to leave? He almost panicked like an hysterical woman. “Ye’re not leaving, and there’s an end on it.” Simon yanked the sheets off the bed and rolled her underpinnings into them. “Here, you can say one of the twins wet her bed, and you didn’t want to disturb anyone. See, I am a sensible man.”

  She offered him a weary smile. They hadn’t had much sleep, and yesterday had been a long one. “You can be a sensible man,” she agreed. “And you will see our unsuitability soon enough.” She dropped her gown over her head, letting it hang loose and pooling about her feet.

  He fastened the bodice for her, then belted the acres of fabric around her waist with her shawl so she didn’t trip. “You’re too thin. You’ll waste away like the viscount.”

  “I don’t eat well when I’m worried.” She surprised him by hugging his waist. “You are a good man. You deserve a good wife. I am not her.”

  He hugged her close, not understanding at all. “You think rabbits make bad wives?” he asked in perplexity.

  “Yes, most emphatically.” She shoved away and sat down to don her shoes and stockings. “You need someone like yourself, honest and straightforward. You do not even understand when I tell you that your aura is outraged right now, but your colors are as clear as a summer sky. I cannot read my own aura, but I’m sure it is as murky as the Thames.”

  Score two for the lady. He hadn’t an inkling of what she meant. Which meant he probably shouldn’t woo another Malcolm who said things people didn’t understand. He wanted his bairns to grow up normal. He stood forewarned, and still he resisted.

  “All women are murky,” he muttered, yanking on his breeches and his own stockings. “Why can’t you let anything be simple? We’re good in bed. We love the weans. We can help each other win back the Hall. Simple.”

  She laughed and threw his shoe at him. “Simple for a man. You want that strip of land. If we marry, my success in claiming the estate increases. Sensible. But I mean to win it on my own, thank you.”

  “I was planning on moving whisky barrels for you,” he muttered, searching for his other shoe.

  She’d been reaching for the bundle of sheets but stopped to stare. “Thank you. But if Hargreaves really is ill, it might not be necessary. Jameson can merely show his guests an empty barrel or two and say more must be ordered. The leeches will flee like rats from a ship. Jameson has a murky aura these days.”

  “I don’t know what you’ll do with a houseful of unreliable servants,” he grumbled, although he took comfort that she didn’t seem to have given up on their fight for the Hall. “Are the tenants as bad?”

  “By now? Probably. When one is forced to fight to survive, right and wrong go by the wayside. I’ll have to steal Mr. Hill back from you if I win the estate.” She sailed out, carrying the sheet bundle, hair streaming down her back and shimmering in the lingering firelight.

  Muttering about women and rabbits, Simon flung the evergreen bouquet on the coals, let it turn to ashes, and banked the fire. Looking around, he noted the lady had managed to carry the box of candies away with her. At least he had guessed something right.

  When he entered the schoolroom in his shirtsleeves, Clare was sitting by the hearth in her nightgown, staring at him spookily.

  “What are you doin’ up, lass? It’s barely dawn.” He held out his arms to her, but she gazed at him sadly and didn’t move.

  Clare was the one who said little. He never knew what went on in her head. He sat on the hearth beside her. “Will it help to sit in my lap?”

  She nodded and clambered on his knee. He’d do anything for his weans, even marry a witch. He patted her hair as she curled up against him.

  “It’s chilly out here, my sweet. And you stayed up late, did ye not? You should be snuggled down between your blankets. Will ye let me take you back to bed?”

  She nodded against his chest, and he stood up, carrying her.

  “Mama is laughing and crying at you,” she whispered.

  “Aye well, I laugh and cry at me, too. Adults must muddle along just as you do.” He carried her into the nursery where the others slept soundly—including two kittens and a pup that shouldn’t be here.

  “Mama loves you,” she said, relaxing a little from the tight ball she’d made of herself. “She says you are silly.”

  Simon snorted. “Apparently I am. Do you think I’m silly?” He tucked her between her sheets.

  “Mama says you should only marry someone you love.” Clare curled up and closed her eyes.

  Out of the mouths of wee babes. . .

  Olivia wasn’t silly or foolish. She knew he didn’t love her and never would. She must believe it was possible to love again. Maybe she was young enough for that to happen.

  He wasn’t. His love was dead—and apparently a ghost.

  The idiot man had asked her to marry him! Obviously, it had been an impulse brought on by his desire for a woman at his beck and call. Even she must admit that it was nice to have a man around sometimes.

  But marriage was more than convenience. It could be extremely inconvenient too. Nursing Owen through that awful influenza one winter had been terrifying. Learning their first-born son would never be whole—it had nearly destroyed both of them. That had been a really bad spell when they’d secretly blamed each other.

  If they hadn’t loved one another, their marriage would never have survived those first years. They’d been young and passionate and had done quite a bit of shouting and crying.

  She wasn’t that young now. And Simon was a grown man accustomed to having his way. They’d most likely kill each other after the lust wore off.

  Rather than go back to bed, Olivia washed in cold water and dressed in an old riding habit. The servants had been given the morning off to sleep late and attend services. She had hours to explore.

  She took the servants’ stairs to avoid Simon or their guests. She hoped they all still slept. By the time she had a docile mare saddled and led it from the stable, she knew she’d been fooling herself. Phoebe waited in the yard, dressed in one of her eccentric split skirts.

  “You do not have as many mice in the walls as they do in the city,” Phoebe observed. “And I was very tired and slept heavily, thinking I had no reason to monitor my surroundings as I once did, so I didn’t receive much warning. But I’ve been learning the minds of horses better—they’re quite communicative.”

  Olivia petted the nose of the mare. “Go back to bed, Phoebe. You can practice your mind reading another time.”

  “I never had a horse and never learned to ride,” Phoebe continued, as if Olivia had said nothing. She glanced down at her split skirt. “I wear this for bicycling, but I didn’t bring my penny farthing with me. I’m guessing I could persuade one of the other mares to allow me on her.”

  “Phoebe, don’t be ridiculous. I am just checking on the Hall. The drunken inhabitants will all be asleep. I can come to no harm.”

  Phoebe headed into the stable. “I’d like to see the Hall. Perhaps they have squirrels.”

  She could not let her eccentric city cousin choose a horse and put a saddle on it. It would be unfair to the horse.

  “Your husband will kill me for allowing you to do this,” Olivia whispered as she sad
dled a pony.

  “Does the pony have a name? She wants an apple.” Phoebe petted the animal, deliberately ignoring all admonitions.

  “I should go back in the house,” Olivia muttered. “Then you’d have to go too.”

  “Well, yes, you probably should. But this sounds like more fun.” Phoebe followed Olivia to the apple barrel, then crowed over a sack of acorns and added them to her pockets.

  Olivia rolled her eyes and returned to the pony. “Hold your palm out flat.”

  Phoebe held out her palm as instructed and laughed as the pony snatched up the apple.

  By the time the pony had crunched the treat, Phoebe had figured out how to mount astride and watched as Olivia led out her mare.

  “This is absurd. You cannot learn to ride a horse by reading its mind,” Olivia muttered, using a block to climb on side-saddle.

  “I show the creature an image like that bush over there, and it responds without my need to use reins or whips or whatever. It’s how I drive Drew’s carriage. Don’t tell him, please.” Phoebe smiled as the pony obediently set off.

  With a sigh of exasperation, Olivia led the way across fields, going slowly so Phoebe could use her unconventional method of guiding her mount. “I have never ridden over Mr. Blair’s estate. I am not entirely certain of the direction to the Hall.”

  “Will there be a great many other houses between here and there? I’m unfamiliar with rural lanes.” Phoebe seemed to be studying the rocky hill they climbed.

  “Tenant cottages in the valley. I believe the mine and the miners are further north than we wish to go, so there shouldn’t be too many people about.”

  “Then I can assume the Hall is the largest edifice in the area and will have the largest kitchen garden and perhaps a few barrels of apples and the like about?” Phoebe inquired.

  “Most people ask about the inhabitants of the houses,” Olivia said wryly. “But yes, your assumption should be correct. If the servants at the hall are going hungry, then they probably cultivate the kitchen garden.”

  “But no chicken coop? I’ve found a fox looking for birds. The rabbits, however, know every leaf of lettuce in the countryside, even in mid-winter.” Phoebe trotted the pony toward the dawn horizon.

  With no better guide than the sun, Olivia let her insane cousin lead. Phoebe’s rabbits apparently had an excellent sense of direction, and they reached the boundaries of the Hargreaves estate without incident.

  Once there, Olivia knew which way to go. As they approached, the back of the Hall was barely visible through a forest of pines that formed a windbreak. The ivy had been allowed to cover the walls, effectively blending the old stone into the landscape. Not until they eased through the pine hedge could the three-story structure be seen in its entirety. As she’d been told, it had not weathered well, and sadness enveloped her. They’d worked so hard. . .

  It could be beautiful again someday.

  Refusing to submit to melancholy, Olivia led the way to a side entrance. “There used to be a lovely rose garden here.” Using a low wall, she dismounted and stared in dismay at the frost-blackened sticks of the bushes she’d tended so lovingly. They’d not been protected from the winter. If so much as a single root survived, it would be a miracle.

  “The mice are watching someone tending the fire in the kitchen,” Phoebe murmured, climbing down to join her. “What now?”

  Olivia gazed longingly up at the suite that she had once shared with Owen. Those hadn’t always been happy times, she supposed. After what she’d shared with Simon, they seemed distant. She could not bring back those days. Her desire now was to save her former home. “I cannot scale walls. Owen kept a strongbox behind the wardrobe in our suite. He showed it to me once. But I’d need to move furniture to reach it.”

  “So the house needs to be empty. Well, we can work on that. Anywhere else? Didn’t you mention a desk?” Phoebe studied the windows of the lower floor.

  “Yes, in Owen’s study downstairs. If Hargreaves had any sense at all, he’d have taken that desk apart by now. He knows full well he witnessed those documents.” Olivia counted windows, estimating the location of the office. The glass had not been cleaned in years.

  “I sense spiders in most of the rooms,” Phoebe offered. “But their minds are much too simple for me to use. I just know they’re there. Does the viscount visit the Hall often?”

  “From what Emma and the servants tell me, no. He prefers London. It is only my bad luck that he decided to bring a hunting party here for the holiday. Let’s do what Simon suggested and have Jameson declare the cellars empty. That should send them away.”

  “If they do not get snowed in.” Phoebe cast the low gray clouds a skeptical look.

  The wind was picking up. Shivering, Olivia led her mare around to the kitchen entrance.

  A rotund old man in an ancient trilby hat and cloak sat slumped on the ground by the kitchen gate. Even before she reached him, Olivia knew. . .

  Reverend Willingham was no more.

  Eighteen

  With a cold wind blowing in from the north, the Hall’s staff gathered around a sobbing middle-aged woman by the back gate. Simon helped Jameson load the reverend onto an old horse blanket and cover him with a sheet from the Hall. A few grooms carried the body off to the chapel, with the butler leading the way.

  Olivia and Phoebe stood respectfully to one side, near the garden wall. Drew had come with Simon and now had his arm around his wife, but Olivia stood alone. After last night’s glorious bliss in her bed, Simon wanted to comfort her, but his anger at the women’s mischief was as raw as the weather.

  The wind picked up as if in agreement. He should have brought his whisky flask to fight his fury.

  He wanted to shout What the devil were ye thinkin’? Dawn was no time for women to be about at any time of the year. But the day after Hogmanay. . . Too many people had celebrated too heavily the prior night.

  Simon assumed that was the case with Willingham. Both Mr. Napier, the village minister, and Dr. Napier, some relation, had performed their tasks in overseeing the late reverend into the next world. Dr. Napier explained Willingham had pickled his liver and could not have expected to live a long life. The weeping daughter had not wanted her father’s body desecrated to determine if that was the cause of death. Simon could have told her the old fool had frozen to death after passing out, but the how didn’t matter so much. The result was the same. The man was dead.

  Simon itched to do something, anything, but it wasn’t his place. He had only come because Olivia had sent a servant galloping to fetch him. At least she’d had that much sense. He wanted to escort her home now, but he could see that wasn’t happening soon.

  He winced in resignation as she stepped up to talk to the Hall’s servants. Hargreaves’ lies had not taken root among Olivia’s loyal staff. Had she been in residence, the reverend might not have died outside a locked gate. What fool locked gates in the middle of nowhere?

  “How is the viscount this fine morn?” Simon asked as Dr. Napier approached.

  “I cannot discuss my patients,” the young physician answered stiffly. “But he insists he is well enough to return home. He was in no hurry to leave his breakfast when we received word of Willingham’s unhappy demise.”

  The physician was too civilized to speak his opinion, but Simon heard it anyway. Even if the viscount hated Willingham and didn’t mourn his passing, he was a landowner. He had a responsibility to his estate and his tenants. People had no choice but to rely on the man who owned their homes and meted out their income. Those incomes did not allow for funerals and physicians. Hargreaves should be here talking to the family and staff, not Olivia.

  “If the viscount doesn’t fulfill his duties, the lady will want to do so,” Simon told the physician. “Come to me and I’ll see it handled.”

  Dr. Napier nodded. “It’s a sad day when a respected estate like this falls into disarray. We can all hope the viscount is young and will mature with time.”

  The vis
count could mature on someone else’s time and property—like the earl’s, in the wealthy south. The land and the residents of Greybridge were too poor to be neglected much longer.

  Simon crossed to where his cousin stood. “The viscount will be home after he finishes his breakfast. We need to remove Olivia. Any suggestions?”

  “Rope and tie?” Drew suggested, glancing over to where Olivia was ushering the servants through the kitchen garden and back to the house.

  “I don’t know how it’s done here, but at home, we’d be fixing tea to offer to people who will start bringing food for the funeral gathering,” Phoebe said. “If the weeping woman is a relation, perhaps we can send them to her home?”

  Since Simon was fairly certain the large, older woman with her arm around Willingham’s weeping daughter was the viscount’s housekeeper, he didn’t think that was the direction Olivia had in mind. “You don’t know your cousin well, do you?” he said in resignation. “She’s just found a way into the house.”

  Phoebe grinned and rattled something in her pocket. “Good. Then we should support her in her efforts. There could be drunken lords wandering around looking for their bacon. Let’s join the fun, shall we?”

  She strode off.

  Simon looked to his cousin. “Letitia was never so headstrong. Is it the city that does that to women?”

  Drew laughed. “I’m thinking your Letitia was just a little more devious in not letting you know how much she was doing behind your back. Phoebe won’t let me read the translation of your wife’s last journal, but I gather Letitia had her own coven of women who gathered news for her.”

  Coven. Simon despised that word as much as he did witch. But Drew was simply being facetious. He was a modern man without an irrational bone in his body, poking a little fun at his rural environs. It still made Simon’s shoulders itch.

  He stalked after the women. Maybe he’d look into those whisky cellars after all. And if he was really fortunate, he could fling a few young louts out the windows.

  And if the viscount arrived. . . He’d be there for the fray.